CSET Practice Test History Subtest I

Ancient Japanese Civilization

The overwhelming fact that suffuses every aspect of
Japanese culture is its geography. Japan is a series of
islands-the group consists of over 3000 islands of which
600 are inhabited. The four main islands, Honshu, Kyushu,
Shikoku, and Hokkaido dominate Japanese history, however.
The largest island is Honshu, but the overall geographical
area of the inhabited islands is less than California. The
climate is pleasantly moderate, for the islands lie in the
path of the Black Current which flows north from the
tropics. All the islands are mountainous and subject to a
variety of natural disasters, especially earthquakes and
tsunamis. The mountainous terrain leaves its mark on
Japanese culture; since the mountains provide natural and
difficult barriers, political life in Japan centered
around regional rather than national governments. The
earliest flowering of Japanese history took place in the
low-lying plains on the island of Honshu, especially the
Yamato plain in the south-a region that gave its name to
the first "official" name for Japan, Yamato. There the
very first Japanese kingdom arose and provided the basis
of future Japanese civilizations.

Japan as a series of islands has always been isolated from
the mainland from about 10,000 B.C. to the present day.
For this reason, the original inhabitants managed to hold
on to stone-age life long after the regions to the west
had urbanized. This island status has also protected Japan
from foreign invasions. Only twice in Japanese history has
the island been successfully overrun by foreigners: in the
third century BC by the wave of immigrations from the
Korean peninsula, and in 1945 by the United States. 

The areas of Japan which have shown the most cultural
change are those, as you might imagine, that are closest
to the mainland of Asia. The southern island of Kyushu and
the southwestern peninsula of Honshu lie close to the
Korean peninsula. It is in this region that the Japanese
first immigrated into Japan in the third century BC, and
it is in this region that the first state in Japan was
established: the Yamato State on the Yamato peninsula (the
southwesternmost peninsula on Honshu). 

Despite the late arrival of Japan into written history,
the beginnings go back ten thousand years to a mysterious
people which would eventually produce a unique and vital
culture, the Jomon. 

Although the Japanese did not settle Japan until the third
century B.C., humans had lived in Japan from about 30,000
B.C.. For Japan was not always an island. During the Ice
Ages, it was connected to the Korean peninsula by means of
a land bridge. All four main Japanese islands were
connected, and the southern island of Kyushu was connected
to the Korean peninsula while the northern island of
Hokkaido was connected to Siberia. Stone Age humans
crossed this land bridge in much the same way they crossed
the Bering land bridge into the Americas. We can date
these humans back to around 30,000 B.C. from the flint
tools that they left behind.

Then around 10,000 B.C., these original inhabitants
developed a unique culture which lasted for several
thousand years: the Jomon culture. As with all preliterate
people, all we know of them comes from fragments of
artifacts and the imaginative guessing of anthropologists
and archaeologists. Jomon means "cord pattern," for these
people designed cord patterns on their pottery-the oldest
of its kind in human history. Pottery, however, is a
characteristic of Neolithic peoples; the Jomon, however,
were Mesolithic peoples (Middle Stone Age). All the
evidence shows that they were a hunting, gathering, and
fishing society that lived in very small tribal groups.
But in addition to making pottery, they also fashioned
mysterious figurines that appear to be female. An ancient
goddess worship? 

We divide the Jomon into six separate eras-ten thousand
years, after all, is a long time and even preliterate
cultures change dramatically over time. These eras are the
Incipient, Initial, Early, Middle, Late, and Final Jomon
periods. 

The Incipient Jomon, which is dated from about 10,500 B.C.
to 8,000 B.C. has left us only pottery fragments. These
pottery fragments were made by a people living in the
Kanto plain on the eastern side of Honshu, the plain on
which Tokyo is located. We have little idea what these
fragments looked like when they were actually in one
piece, but we believe that they were very small, rounded
pots. The Incipient Jomon pots are a major challenge to
understanding human cultures, for they represent the very
first ceramics in human history, predating Mesopotamian
ceramics by over two thousand years. The standard
anthropological line on the development of human arts
asserts that pottery-making developed after agriculture
and is characteristic of a more sedentary culture. The
Incipient Jomon, however, were hunter-gatherers who lived
in nomadic small groups. Yet they developed the art of
pottery long before agriculture was introduced into Japan-
in fact, the Incipient Jomon invented pottery-making long
before any human was introduced to agriculture. The
Incipient Jomon, then, demonstrate that pottery-making is
a human technology independent and distinct from
agriculture. 

The Initial Jomon, which lasted from 8,000 B.C. to 5,000
B.C. is distinguished by the fact that we have pretty
complete pots (isn't archaeology exciting?) that were used
to boil food. Like the fragments from the Initial Jomon,
these aren't just plain old pots, but are inticrately
decorated in the "cord-like" structure that characterizes
Jomon. 

The Early Jomon, from 5000 to 2500 B.C., corresponds to
the single most interesting couple thousand years in human
history. At the end of the last ice age, around 14,500
years ago, the world began to slowly warm. Between 5000
and 2500 B.C., the world reached its warmest in the
millenia following the ice age-during this period, the
average global temperature was about four to six degrees
farenheit higher than it is today. Never again would the
world be as warm as it was in these two centuries. Here's
the exciting thing: corresponding the steady warming of
the earth was the development of agriculture, the single
most important technological invention of human beings.
Corresponding the warmest period since the last ice age
were tremendous innovations in human habitation. It was in
this period that human beings all over the world began to
live in a more sedentary manner-at the beginning of this
period, human beings begin to live in substantially sized
villages; towards the end of this period, the very first
human cities appear. The Jomon were no exception to this
world-wide phenomenon. Completely cut off from all other
humans, the Jomon also began to live in large villages in
a settled lifestyle. These villages consisted of large
pit-houses; the floors of these houses are about a foot
below ground level. It seems they lived in extended family
groups. The Jomon also developed their pottery work even
further: they began to fashion figurines. It's not clear
what they are, animal or human, but they are the first
Japanese sculptural art. 

In the Middle Jomon, from 2500-1500 B.C., the Jomon
migrated from the Kanto plain into the surrounding
mountainside. While the Old Kingdom Egyptians were
building pyramids, the Yellow River kings developing the
first centralized states in China, and the Sumerians
building the very first urban centers, the Jomon, who had
no awareness of people off their island, began to live in
very large villages and developed very simple agriculture
or proto-agriculture. They were no longer hunter-
gatherers, but rather a skilled and settled people that
developed increasingly sophisticated artwork with
magnificent decorations. Their figurines now distinguish
between animals and humans, and their human figurines have
tantalizing but perplexing gestures whose meaning is now
lost to us. 

The Late (1500-1000) and Final (1000-300) Jomon
corresponded to the neoglaciation stage in modern
climactic history. The world cooled noticeably (colder
than today), and the Jomon migrated back down to the Kanto
plain. At this point, the Jomon developed an identifiable
religion-they produce a remarkable number of figurines and
stone circles constructed outside the main villages begin
to appear. The figurines they produce are largely heavy
female figurines which suggests that the Jomon religion
was a goddess religion.

The Jomon culture, in essence a Mesolithic culture
(although they display Neolithic traits, such as pottery-
making), thrived in Japan from the eleventh century to the
third century B.C., when it was displaced by a wave of
immigrants from the mainland. These were the Yayoi, and
their origins lay in the north of China. Northern China
was originally a temperate and lush place full of forests,
streams, and rainfall. It began to dry out, however, a few
thousand years before the common era. This dessication,
which eventually produced one of the largest deserts in
the world, the Gobi, drove the original inhabitants south
and east. These peoples pushed into Korea and displaced
indigenous populations. Eventually, these new settlers
were displaced by a new wave of immigrations from northern
China and a large number of them crossed over into the
Japanese islands. For this reason, the languages of the
area north of China, the language of Korea, and Japanese
are all in the same family of languages according to most
linguists. Because Mongolian (spoken in the area north of
China) is also part of this language family and because
the Mongolians conquered the world far to the west, this
means that the language family to which Japanese belongs
is spoken across a geographical region from Japan to
Europe. The westernmost language in this family is Magyar,
spoken in Hungary, and the easternmost language in this
family is Japanese. 

The Yayoi brought with them agriculture, the working of
bronze and iron, and a new religion which would eventually
develop into Shinto (which wasn't given this name until
much, much later). While we don't know what these
immigrations did to the indigenous peoples, there are
several possibilities. According to one theory, which is
widely accepted in Japan, the waves of Yayoi immigrants
were very small. While they brought new technologies with
them, they were nevertheless assimilated into the native
Jomon culture. By this account, Japanese culture,
particularly as it is represented by the Shinto religion,
is very ancient and indigenous Japan. Some Japanese
believe that the Jomon spoke an Austronesian language,
that is, that the Jomon were more closely related to south
Pacific islanders and that Japanese is still largely a
Pacific island language. In the West, historians believe
that the Yayoi displaced the indigenous Jomon and thus
ended their culture permanently. The Yayoi displaced the
indigenous language, social patterns, and religion of the
original inhabitants. In this view, Japanese culture is a
foreign import deriving ultimately from the north of China
and ancient Korea, a view that is not popular among the
modern Japanese. 

Whatever the origins of Japanese culture, it is clear that
the Japanese language, social structure, and religion can
be dated no farther back in Japan than the Yayoi
immigrants. So for all practical purposes, the Yayoi are a
new beginning in Japanese culture. The transition was
dramatic, far surpassing even the transition represented
by the industrial revolution. Japanese culture changed
overnight with these new immigrants; eight thousand years
of cultural placidity was dramatically hoisted into the
agricultural age. 

The Yayoi lived in clans called uji. The clans were headed
by a single patriarchal figure who served as both a war-
chief and as a priest. Each clan was associated with a
single god which the head of the clan was responsible for;
all the ceremonies associated with that god were headed or
performed by the head of the clan. These gods, called kami
, represented forces of nature or any other wondrous
aspect of the world; the Yayoi, we believe, also had
accounts of the creation of the world by gods. When one
uji conquered another, it absorbed its god into its own
religious practices. In this way, the Yayoi slowly
developed a complex pantheon of kami that represented in
their hierarchy the hierarchy of the uji. 

The Yayoi lived primitively. They had no system of writing
or money; they dressed largely in clothes made from hemp
or bark. Marriages were frequently polygamous, but women
held a fairly prominent place in the society of the uji .
It is probable that women even served as clan-heads or
priests; support for this possibility comes from the
Chinese histories that first discuss the Japanese. 

The relationships between the uji were complex; slowly,
territorial conflict gradually produced what came close to
small states. The first Japanese state, however, would be
built on the Yamato peninsula, the area into which Chinese
influence began to flow in 200 AD. 

The Yamato State

The Yamato peninsula, on the southwesternmost portion of
the island of Honshu, has historically been the region
through which cultural influence from the mainland has
passed into Japan. Beginning in 300 A.D., a new culture
distinguished itself from Yayoi culture in the area around
Nara and Osaka in the south of Honshu. This culture built
giant tomb mounds, called kofun , many of which still
exist; these tomb mounds were patterned after a similar
practice in Korea. It is from these tomb mounds that these
people derive their name: the Kofun. For two hundred
years, these tombs were filled with objects that normally
filled Yayoi tombs, such as mirrors and jewels. But
beginning in 500 A.D., these tombs were filled with armor
and weapons. So we know that around this time, a new wave
of cultural influence had passed over from Korea into
Japan.  

The earliest Japanese state we know of was ruled over by
Yamato "great kings"; the Yamato state, which the Japanese
chronicles date to 500 A.D., that is, the time when a new
wave of Korean cultural influence passed through southern
Japan, was really a loose hegemony. Yamato is the plain
around Osaka; it is the richest agricultural region in
Japan. The Yamato kings located their capital at Naniwa
(modern day Osaka) and enjoyed a hegemony over the
surrounding aristocracies that made them powerful and
wealthy. They built for themselves magnificent tomb-
mounds; like all monumental architecture, these tombs
represented the wealth and power of the Yamato king. The
keyhole-shaped tomb-mound of Nintoku is longer than five
football fields and has twice the volume of the Great
Pyramid of Cheops.  

According to the Japanese chronicles, the court of the
Yamato kings was based on Korean models for the titles
given to the court and regional aristocrats were drawn
from Korean titles. As in Yayoi Japan, the basic social
unit was the uji ; what had been added was an aristocracy
based on military readiness. This military aristocracy
would remain the single most powerful group in Japanese
history until the Meiji restoration in 1868. The various
aristocratic families did not live peacefully together;
the Yamato court witnessed constant struggles among the
aristocratic families for power. 

During this period, Japan had a presence on the Korean
peninsula itself. Korea was in its most dynamic cultural
and political period; the peninsula itself was divided
into three great kingdoms: Koguryo in the north, Paekche
in the east, and Silla in the west. Paekche understood the
strategic importance of Japan and so entered into alliance
with the Yamato state. This connection between the Yamato
court and Paekche is culturally one of the most important
events of early Japanese history. For the Paekche court
sent to Japan Korean craftspeople: potters, metal workers,
artists, and so on. But they also imported Chinese
culture. In the fifth or sixth century, the Koreans
imported Chinese writing in order to record Japanese
names. In 513, the Paekche court sent a Confucian scholar
to the Yamato court. In 552, the Paekche sent an image of
Buddha, some Buddhist scriptures, and a Buddhist
representative. These three imports-writing, Confucianism,
and Buddhism-would transform Japanese culture as
profoundly as the Yayoi immigrations had done.  

The most important period in early Japan occurs during the
reign of Empress Suiko, who ruled from 592 to 628 A.D.. In
the latter years of the 500's, the alliance between
Paekche and the Yamato state broke down; this eventually
led to the loss of Japanese holdings on the Korean
peninsula. Waves of Koreans migrated to Japan, and, to
make matters worse, the powerful military aristocracies of
the Yamato state began to resist the Yamato hegemony.  

The Yamato court responded to these problems by adopting a
Chinese-style government. In the early years of the
seventh century, they sent envoys to China in order to
study Chinese government, society, and philosophy. At
home, they reorganized the court along the Chinese model,
sponsored Buddhism, and adopted the Chinese calendar. All
of these changes were adminstered by Prince Shotoku (in
Japanese, Shotoku Taishi, 573-621) who was the regent of
the Yamato court during the reign of Empress Suiko. His
most important contribution, however, was the writing and
adoption of a Chinese-style constitution in 604 A.D.. The
Seventeen Article Constitution (in Japanese, Kenpo
Jushichijo) was the earliest piece of Japanese writing and
formed the overall philosophic basis of Japanese
government through much of Japanese history. This
constitution is firmly based on Confucian principles
(although it has a number of Buddhist elements). It states
the Confucian belief that the universe is composed of
three realms, Heaven, Man, and Earth, and that the Emperor
is placed in authority by the will of Heaven in order to
guarantee the welfare of his subjects. The "great king" of
earlier Japanese history would be replaced by the Tenno,
or "Heavenly Emperor." The Seventeen Article Constitution
stressed the Confucian virtues of harmony, regularity, and
the importance of the moral development of government
officials. 

Shotoku, however, was also a devout Buddhist. The second
article of the constitution specifically enjoins the ruler
to value the Three Treasures of Buddhism. The overall
Constitution, however, is overwhelmingly Confucian.

The constitution was followed by a coup against the ruling
Soga clan, from which Shotoku was derived. The new
emperor, Kotoku Tenno (645-655), began an energetic reform
movement that culminated in the Taika Reform Edicts in 645
A.D.. These edicts were written and sponsored by Confucian
scholars in the Yamato court and essentially founded the
Japanese imperial system. The ruler was no longer a clan
leader, but Emperor that ruled by the Decree of Heaven and
exercised absolute authority. Japan would no longer be a
set of separate states, but provinces of the Emperor to be
ruled by a centralized bureaucracy. The Reform Edicts
demanded that all government officials undergo stringent
reform and demonstrate some level of moral and
bureaucratic competency. Japan, however, was still largely
a Neolithic culture; it would take centuries for the ideal
of the Chinese style emperor to take root. 

Because of the thought and philosophy of the Tokugawa
period in Japan (1600-1868), nothing says "Japan" like the
Shinto religion. The Tokugawa "Enlightenment" inspired a
group of thinkers who studied what they called kokugaku ,
which can be roughly translated "nativism," "Japanese
Studies," or "Native Studies." Kokugaku was no dry-as-dust
academic discipline as the term "Japanese Studies" seems
to imply; it was a concerted philosophical, literary and
academic effort to recover the essential "Japanese
character" as it existed before the early influences of
foreigners, especially the Chinese, "corrupted" Japanese
culture. Recovering the essential Japanese character meant
in the end distinguishing what was Japanese from what is
not and purging from the Japanese culture various foreign
influences including Confucianism (Chinese), Taoism
(Chinese), Buddhism (Indian and Chinese), and Christianity
(Western European). The kokugakushu ("nativists") focussed
most of their efforts on recovering the Shinto religion,
the native Japanese religion, from fragmentary texts and
isolated and unrelated popular religious practices. 

Despite this optimism, Shinto is probably not a native
religion of Japan (since the Japanese were not the
original "natives" of Japan), and seems to be an
agglomeration of a multitude of diverse and unrelated
religions and mythologies. There really is no one thing
that can be called "Shinto," since there are a multitude
of religious cults that gather beneath this category. The
name itself is a bit misleading, for "Shinto" is a
combination of two Chinese words meaning "the way of the
gods" (shen : "spiritual power, divinity"; tao : "the way
or path") and was first used at the beginning of the early
modern period. The Japanese word is kannagara: "the way of
the kami ." Calling the religion of the early Japanese
"Shinto" is a gross and unsupportable anachronism. 

Despite the difficulty in pinning down the form and nature
of early Shinto, several general assertions can be drawn
about it. First, early Shinto was a tribal religion, not a
state one. Individual tribes or clans, which originally
crossed over to Japan from Korea, generally held onto
their Shinto beliefs even after they were organized into
coherent and centralized states.  

Second, all Shinto cults believe in kami , which generally
refers to the "divine." Individual clans (uji ), which
were simultaneously political, military, and religious
units, worshipped a single kami in particular which was
regarded as the founder or principal ancestor of the clan.
As a clan spread out, it took its worship of a particular
kami with it; should a clan conquer another clan, the
defeated clan was subsumed into the worship of the
victorious clan's kami . What the kami consists of is hard
to pin down. Kami first of all refers to the gods of
heaven, earth, and the underworld, of whom the most
important are creator gods-all Shinto cults, even the
earliest, seem to have had an extremely developed creation
mythology. But kami also are all those things that have
divinity in them to some degree: the ghosts of ancestors,
living human beings, particular regions or villages,
animals, plants, landscape-in fact, most of creation,
anything that might be considered wondrous, magnificent,
or affecting human life. This meant that the early
Japanese felt themselves to be under the control not only
of the clan's principal kami , but by an innumerable crowd
of ancestors, spiritual beings, and divine natural forces.
As an example of the potential for divinity: there is a
story of an emperor who, while travelling in a rainstorm
encountered a cat on a porch that waved a greeting to him.
Intrigued by this extraordinary phenomenon, the emperor
dismounted and approached the porch. As soon as he reached
the porch, a bolt of lightning crashed down on the spot
his horse was standing and killed it instantly. From that
point on, cats were, in Shinto, worshipped as beneficent
and protective kami ; if you walk into a Japanese
restaurant, you are sure to find a porcelain statue of the
waving cat which protects the establishment from harm.  

Third, all Shinto involves some sort of shrine worship,
the most important was the Izumo Shrine on the coast of
the Japan Sea. Originally, these shrines were either a
piece of unpolluted land surrounded by trees (himorogi )
or a piece of unpolluted ground surrounded by stones
(iwasaka ). Shinto shrines are usually a single room (or
miniature room), raised from the ground, with objects
placed inside. One worshipped the kami inside the shrine.
Outside the shrine was placed a wash-basin, called a torii
, where one cleaned one's hands and sometimes one's face
before entering the shrine. This procedure of washing,
called the misogi , is one of the principal rituals of
Shinto, which also included prayer and spells. One
worships a Shinto shrine by "attending" it, that is,
devoting oneself to the object worshipped, and by giving
offerings to it: anything from vegetables to great riches.
Shinto prayer (Norito ) is based on koto-dama , the belief
that spoken words have a spiritual power; if spoken
correctly, the Norito would bring about favorable results.


Unfortunately, we know almost nothing at all about early
Shinto, since nobody wrote about it. Early Shinto may, in
fact, be a myth; what is called early Shinto may simply be
a large number of unrelated local religions that began to
combine with the advent of centralized states. History has
accreted an enormous amount of non-Shinto ideas into this
original religion: Buddhism, Confucianism, Neo-
Confucianism have all significantly changed the religion. 

The two great texts of Shinto belief and mythology, the
Kojiki (The Records of Ancient Matters ) and the Nihongi
(Chronicles of Japan ), were written down around 700 A.D.,
two centuries after Buddhism had been declared the state
religion of Japan. Although these texts contain the only
versions of Shinto mythology, including Shinto creation
stories, both of these texts are heavily influenced by
both Buddhism and Confucianism and the stories of the kami
had been deeply corrupted by Chinese and Korean thought
long before. 

The most profound change in Japanese government was the
adoption of Chinese, particularly Confucian, models of
government in Prince Shotoku's Seventeen Article
Constitution . The reforms undertaken by Shotoku not only
addressed the internal problems the Yamato court was faced
with, they also dramatically changed Japanese history. 

The various Japanese states are named for the regions in
which the capital was located. In 710, the capital was
moved north to Nara. It was a carefully planned city laid
out on a rigorous grid after the Chinese capital of Chang-
an. Meant to be a permanent capital, it was moved again
only eighty years later. 

Japan during the Nara period, however, was primarily an
agricultural and village-based society. Most Japanese
lived in pit houses and worshipped the kami of natural
forces and ancestors. Building a capital city on the model
of a Chinese capital produced a dramatic alienation of
Japanese aristocracy from the Japanese population. In this
region of villages, pit-houses, and kami -worship, grew up
a city of palaces, silks, wealth, Chinese writing and
Chinese thought, and Buddhism. The Nara capital represents
the definitive break of the Japanese aristocracy from
their roots in the uji . 

The most influential cultural development in the Nara was
the flowering of Buddhism. Several schools of Buddhist
thought imported from T'ang China made their way to the
capital city. For the most part, Buddhism was a phenomenon
of the capital city well into the Heian period. However,
the vitality of Buddhism at this time led to a closer
integration of Buddhism with Japanese government. The Nara
emperors in particular deeply reverenced a Buddhist
teaching called the Sutra of Golden Light ; in it, Buddha
is established not only as a historical human being but
also as the Law or Truth of the universe. Each human has
reason, prajna , with which to distinguish good from bad.
The life of reason, then, is the beginning of a proper
Buddhist life. Politically, the sutra claimed that all
human law must reflect the Ultimate Law of the universe;
however, since law was a phenomenon of the material world,
it was subject to change. This gave Japanese monarchs a
moral basis for their rule and a justification for
adapting rules and laws to changing circumstances.  

The devoutness that the Nara emperors held for Buddhism
guaranteed its rapid and dramatic expansion into Japanese
culture. Although Buddhism entered Japan in 518, it was
during the Nara period that it became a solid presence in
Japanese culture. 

The Heian period (794-1192) was one of those amazing
periods in Japanese history, equaled only by the later
Tokugawa period in pre-modern Japan, in which an
unprecedented peace and security passed over the land
under the powerful rule of the Heian dynasty. Japanese
culture during the Heian flourished as it never had
before; such a cultural efflorescence would only occur
again during the long Tokugawa peace. For this reason,
Heian Japan along with Nara Japan (710-794) is called
"Classical" Japan. 

The Nara period was marked by struggles over the throne
and which of the clans would control that throne. In order
to quiet these disturbances, the capital was moved in 795
to modern-day Kyoto, which at that time was give the name
"Heian-kyo," or city of peace and tranquility. The
struggles for the throne ceased, but Japan still did not
completely unite under a central government. What happened
instead was that power accumulated under a single family,
the Fujiwara, who managed to skillfully manipulate and
hold onto their power in the face of changes and rivalry
for over three centuries. With such stability, the Heian
imperial court at thrived.  

The Japanese at the Heian court began to develop a culture
independent of the Chinese culture that had formed the
cultural life of imperial Japan up until that point.
First, they began to develop their own system of writing,
since Chinese writing was adopted to an entirely different
language and world view. Second, they developed a court
culture with values and concepts uniquely Japanese rather
than derived from imperial China, values such as miyabi,
"courtliness," makoto , or "simplicity," and aware, or
"sensitivity, sorrow." This culture was forged largely
among the women's communities at court and reached their
pinnacle in the book considered to be the greatest classic
of Japanese literature, the Genji monogatari (Tales of the
Genji) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu. 

Heian government solidified the reforms of the late Yamoto
and Nara periods. At the top of the official hierarchy was
the Tenno, or "Divine Emperor." The Emperor was both
Confucian and Shinto; he ruled by virtue of the Mandate of
Heaven and by legitimate descent from the Shinto Sun
Goddess, Amaterasu. Because of this, the imperial line of
descent has remained unbroken in Japanese history from the
late Yamato period.  

The government hierarchy beneath the Emperor was built
along Chinese lines. The Japanese borrowed the T'ang
Council of the State, which held most of the power in
Japan. The most powerful clans vied for the position as
Council of State, for from that seat they could control
the emperor and the entire government itself. Like T'ang
government, there were several ministries (eight instead
of six). There was, however, a profound difference between
T'ang China and Heian Japan. China was a country of some
sixty-five million people; Japan was a loose confederacy
of some five million people. The Chinese lived relatively
prosperously, and T'ang China had by and large become an
urban and an industrial culture. Japan, on the other hand,
was still very backward when one left the capital city of
Heian-kyo. Uji bonds were still felt, and outlying areas
still exercised a degree of autonomy. The result for court
government was very simple: most of court government
concerned the court alone. There were six thousand
employees of the imperial government; four thousand
administered the imperial house. So the Heian court was
not overly involved in the day to day governing of
outlying provinces, which numbered sixty-six.  

In both the Nara period and the Heian period, regional
chiefs were replaced by court-appointed governors of the
provinces. This was a demotion for the traditional
aristocracy; it did not mean, however, that Heian
government exercised a great deal of control over these
regional governors who ran their provinces more or less
autonomously. 

The Heian period, though, was one of remarkable stability.
There was little dissension or disagreement in the
government itself or between the government and provincial
governors. The only problems were conflicts between uji
either vying for territory or for influence at the court. 


Samurai

In the earliest periods in Japan, warfare was largely
confined to battles between separate uji , or clans. The
clans would go into battle under a war-chief; there was no
separate class of soldiers. At the emergence of the Yamato
state, new techniques of larger scale warfare seem to have
been adopted including new technologies such as swords and
armor. The Nara government, faced with a country of sixty-
six provinces of competing clans, tried to change the
Japanese military system by conscripting soldiers. By the
end of the Nara period, in 792, the idea was given up as a
failure.  

Instead, the Heian government established a military
system based on local militias composed of mounted
horsemen. These professional soldiers were spread
throughout the country and owed their loyalty to the
emperor. They were "servants," or samurai. An important
change occurred, however, in the middle of the Heian
period. Originally the samurai were servants of the
Emperor; they gradually became private armies attached to
local aristocracy. From the middle Heian period onwards,
for almost a thousand years, the Japanese military would
consist of professional soldiers in numberless private
armies owing their loyalty to local aristocracy and
warlords. The early samurai were not the noble or
acculturated soldiers of Japanese bushido , or "way of the
warrior." Bushido was an invention of the Tokugawa period
(1601-1868) when the samurai had nothing to do because of
the Tokugawa enforced peace. The samurai of early and
medieval Japan were drawn from the lower classes. They
made their living primarily as farmers; their only
function as samurai was to kill the samurai of opposing
armies. They were generally illiterate and held in
contempt by the aristocracy. 

Buddhism developed profoundly during the Heian period as
well. Situated near the capital on Mt. Hiei, the monks of
the Hiei monastery developed new forms of esoteric
Buddhism. The great genius of Japanese Buddhism of the
time, however, was Kukai (774-835), who established in
Japan a form of Buddhism called the True Words (in
Japanese: Shingon) at his monastery at Mount Koya. The
three mysteries of Buddhism are body, speech, and mind;
each and every human being possesses each of these three
faculties. Each of these faculties contain all the secrets
of the universe, so that one can attain Buddhahood through
any one of these three. Mysteries of the body apply to
various ways of positioning the body in meditation;
mysteries of the mind apply to ways of perceiving truth;
mysteries of speech are the true words. In Shingon, these
mysteries are passed on in the form of speech (true words)
from teacher to student; none of these true words are
written down or available to anyone outside this line of
transmission (hence the term Esoteric Buddhism). Despite
this extraordinarily rigid esotericism, the Shingon
Buddhism of Mt. Hiei became a vital force in Japanese
culture. Kukai believed that the True Words transcended
speech, so he encouraged the cultivation of artistic
skills: painting, music, and gesture. Anything that had
beauty revealed the truth of the Buddha; as a result, the
art of the Hiei monks made the religion profoundly popular
at the Heian court and deeply influenced the development
of Japanese culture that was being forged at that court.
It is not unfair to say that Japanese poetic and visual
art begin with the Buddhist monks of Mount Hiei and Mount
Koya.

In the late Heian period, private families began to accrue
vast amounts of property (shoen ) and began to support
large standing armies, mainly because the Heian government
began to rely more on these private armies than on their
own weak forces. The result was an exponential growth in
the power of the two greatest warrior clans, the Taira (or
the Heike) and the Minamoto (or the Genji). The Genji
controlled most of eastern Japan; the Heike had power in
both eastern and western Japan. 

As the powers of these two increased, the clan of the
Fujiwara began to control the Emperor closely-a shrewd
move since the Taika reform theoretically gave all final
power to the emperor. From 856 until 1086, the Fujiwara
were, for all practical purposes, the government of Japan.
In 1155, however, the succession to the throne fell
vacant, and the naming of Go-Shirakawa as Emperor set off
a small revolution, called the Hogen Disturbance, which
was quelled by the clans of the Taira and the Minamoto.
This was a turning point in Japanese history, for the
power to determine the affairs of the state had clearly
passed to the warrior clans and their massive private
armies. 

After the accession of Go-Shirakawa and later his
successor Nijo, a lesser lord of the Taira, a dissolute,
ambitious and shrewd man named Kiyimori, began to slowly
accrue massive power for himself in the Emperor's court.
Seeing this, it became apparent that the power of the
Taira had to be diminished in some way, so the retired
Emperor Go-Shirakawa attempted to lay a military trap for
Kiyimori with the aid of a minor Genji lord, Yukitsuna.
The plot failed and opened an irreparable breach between
the Heike and the retired Emperor and the Genji. In 1179,
the head of the Taira, Shigemori, died; his forceful and
ruthless leadership had propelled the Taira into the
forefront. He was replaced by his brother Munemori, a
coward and poor strategist. Go-Shirakawa, seeing he now
had an advantage, began to dismiss Taira in the capital,
and Kiyimori fired several court officials and marched on
the capital, forcing the new Emperor Takakura off the
throne by installing his own one-year old grandson,
Antoku, as the Emperor. Takakura enlisted the aid of the
Genji and the great civil war began, ushering in the
feudal age of Japan.

Mexican American War 

The United States in 1846 declared war on Mexico, and
during the course of that war American military forces
seized California. The war was fueled in part by feelings
of Manifest Destiny, a popular sentiment in the United
States that viewed the expansion of the nation as an
inevitability. 

The arrival in Mexican California of John C. Frémont, a
loose cannon, sparked a rebellion by Anglo-Americans in
the province. Their uprising became known as the Bear Flag
Revolt, although the image on their banner resembled more
a pig than a bear. 

Military forces from the United States soon landed along
the coast and marched into the interior. The Californios
fought well against the Americans, scoring a victory with
their long lances at San Pascual. Ultimately, however, the
Mexican forces were defeated in far larger engagements
elsewhere. The war ended with the signing of the Treaty of
Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the cession of vast lands
from Mexico to the United States. This treaty and transfer
marked the end of Mexican sovereignty in California.

A Loose Cannon A "loose cannon" is someone whose actions
often are unrestrained and impulsive. Lieutenant John C.
Frémont, an officer in the Army Corps of Topographical
Engineers, fit this definition perfectly. He arrived in
Mexican California in 1846 with sixty armed men, all
expert marksmen. 

Mexican officials ordered Frémont and his armed force out
of California. Frémont at first defied the order, but then
relented and moved slowly northward to Oregon–"slowly and
growlingly" as he later put it. After receiving dispatches
from a Marine Corps courier, Frémont returned to
California and helped instigate what came to be called the
Bear Flag Revolt. 

Encouraged by Frémont's return, a party of Anglo-American
settlers in northern California seized Colonel Mariano
Guadalupe Vallejo and other Mexican citizens in Sonoma on
June 14, 1846. The Bear Flaggers declared California to be
an independent republic. Frémont later assumed command of
the insurgents and joined his forces with them in what he
called the "California Battalion." 

Frémont was a rash, unstable, and high-spirited young man.
There is no evidence that he received any official
authorization for military operations in Mexican
California. His own ambitions and impulses appear to have
had free rein. He was, indeed, a loose cannon.

The Bear Flag Revolt The California state flag
commemorates an event that occurred in the little town of
Sonoma on Sunday morning, June 14, 1846. 

A band of some thirty rough-hewn American settlers seized
Colonel Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and informed him that he
was a prisoner of war. The Americans proudly proclaimed
that theirs was a war for the independence of California.
In front of Vallejo's casa grande, the rebels hoisted a
flag emblazoned with a crude drawing of a bear, a lone
star, and the words "CALIFORNIA REPUBLIC."

The original bear flag was made by William Todd, nephew of
an up-and-coming Illinois attorney named Abraham Lincoln.
Todd used a three-by-five piece of white cotton cloth.
Along the bottom he sewed several strips of red flannel
taken from either a man's shirt of a woman's petticoat. He
then painted a five-pointed red star in the upper left-
hand corner and drew a picture of a California grizzly
bear. But William Todd clearly was no artist. His grizzly
looked more like a pig than a bear.

Shortly after the arrival of United States naval forces
along the California coast, the Stars and Stripes replaced
the Bear Flag over Sonoma. The life of the "California
Republic" thus ended on July 9, less than a month after it
had begun. The main result of the Bear Flag Revolt–an
event that would later be fantastically romanticized–was
an unnecessary embitterment of feelings between Anglo-
Americans and the Spanish-speaking Californios.

Lances at San Pascual Following the outbreak of the
Mexican American War in 1846, military forces from the
United States invaded Mexico. Naval forces landed along
the coast of California in July and proclaimed that
"henceforward California will be a portion of the United
States." 

California's Mexican leaders denounced the invasion and
mobilized their forces against the Americans. On August 9,
1846, Colonel José Castro called upon his fellow
Californios "to give to the entire world an example of
loyalty and firmness, maintaining in your breasts the
unfailing love of liberty, and eternal hatred toward your
invaders! Long live the Mexican Republic! Death to the
invaders!" 

The Californios scored an impressive victory against a
force of American dragoons under the command of General
Stephen Watts Kearny. The engagement took place near the
Indian village of San Pascual, northeast of San Diego, on
the morning of December 6, 1846. The Californios, led by
Andrés Pico, lured the Americans into pursuit until they
were widely strung out, then suddenly turned to attack.
The American sabers were hopelessly ineffective against
the Californian's long lances. Practically all the
casualties were on the American side–twenty-two killed,
including several officers, and sixteen wounded, including
Kearny himself.

Treaty and Transfer Fighting in California during the
Mexican American War ended with the surrender of Andrés
Pico to John C. Frémont on January 13, 1847, at Cahuenga
Pass in present-day Los Angeles County. The meeting was
arranged by Bernarda Ruiz, a woman in Santa Barbara who
was saddened by all the bloodshed in her country. Fighting
elsewhere in Mexico continued for another year.  

The war formally ended on February 2, 1848, with the
signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In the treaty,
the United States agreed to pay Mexico $15 million and to
assume unpaid claims against Mexico. For its part, Mexico
agreed to transfer to the United States more than 525,000
square miles of land. From this vast area would come the
future states of California, Nevada, and Utah, most of
Arizona and New Mexico, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming.

The Mexican American War was a great tragedy for Mexico.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, Mexico
transferred half of its land to the United States. For the
American people, the war was a great victory. Many
Americans believed that their nation at last had achieved
its Manifest Destiny.