by I. J. Parker
Provincial law enforcement was carried out by three distinct authorities: the local imperial police—present in Sadoshima since 878; a high constable, usually a local landowner with manpower at his disposal, who was appointed or confirmed by the central government; and the governor, who appointed and supervised local judges. Because of Buddhist opposition to the taking of life, the death penalty was rarely imposed. Exile, often with extreme deprivation and hard labor, was the punishment of choice for serious offenses. This was, as in the case of Haseo, commonly accompanied by confiscation of property and dispersal of the rest of the family.
In addition to the practice of Buddhism, the other state religion recognized in Heian Japan was Shinto. Shinto is native to the Japanese islands and involves Japanese gods and agricultural rituals. Buddhism, which entered Japan from China via Korea, exerted a powerful influence over the aristocracy and the government. It was common for emperors and their relatives to shave their heads and become monks and nuns in their later lives. The Buddhist prohibition against taking a life accounts for Kumo’s strange behavior. The shrines mentioned in the novel, along with the tengu sculpture, belong to the animistic Shinto faith which was more closely tied to peasant life.
Intellectual life reached a high point during the eleventh century. The sons of upper-class families (the “good people”) were trained in Chinese and Japanese studies at local schools and at the universities in the capital. Their sisters wrote generally only in Japanese, but they produced exquisite poetry, diaries, and the first novel anywhere. In the other social classes, education probably ranged from illiteracy to the partial acquisition of useful skills, especially that of writing with ink and brush not only in Chinese characters but also in Japanese script. Akitada, with his university training, would have been adept at both, in addition to having a very good knowledge of the Chinese language, while the shijo Yutaka would associate characters only with their Japanese meaning. The emphasis of education was on supporting an efficient bureaucracy run by the “good people.”
A brief reference to the Ezo (modern Ainu), a people distinct in origin and custom from the Japanese, may explain the very real danger of Okisada and Kumo’s plan. Considered barbaric by the Japanese, the Ezo had been pushed northward for centuries until, by the tenth century, they were more or less pacified in Dewa and Mutsu, the northernmost provinces of Honshu. The pacification process had been achieved by allowing Ezo chieftains to become Japanese lords, often with the title of high constable of their territory. But in 939 the Dewa Ezo rebelled and in 1056 the Nine-Years War erupted when the Abe family, who had Ezo origins, rose against the governor of Mutsu. Thus the warrior lords in the unstable northern provinces close to Echigo and Sadoshima would have been obvious allies for Kumo and Okisada.
Finally, the story of the fake silver bars was suggested by an early Chinese legal case (# 9A) in Robert van Gulik’s translation of the ‘Tang-Yin-Pi-Shi.
