Heian Japan - Centers And Peripheries (History Ebook).pdf

Heian Japan, Centers And Peripheries by Mikael Adolphson, Kames Edward, Stacie Matsumoto and Edward Kamens
English | 2007 | PDF | 450 pages | 21,4 MB

The first three centuries of the Heian period (794–1086) saw some of its most fertile innovations and epochal achievements in Japanese literature and the arts. It was also a time of important transitions in the spheres of religion and politics, as aristocratic authority was consolidated in Kyoto, powerful court factions and religious institutions emerged, and adjustments were made in the Chinese-style system of rulership.

At the same time, the era’s leaders faced serious challenges from the provinces that called into question the primacy and efficiency of the governmental system and tested the social/cultural status quo. Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first book of its kind to examine the early Heian from a wide variety of multidisciplinary perspectives, offers a fresh look at these seemingly contradictory trends.

Essays by fourteen leading American, European, and Japanese scholars of art history, history, literature, and religions take up core texts and iconic images, cultural achievements and social crises, and the ever-fascinating patterns and puzzles of the time. The authors tackle some of Heian Japan’s most enduring paradigms as well as hitherto unexplored problems in search of new ways of understanding the currents of change as well as the processes of institutionalization that shaped the Heian scene, defined the contours of its legacies, and make it one of the most intensely studied periods of the Japanese past. Throughout, the widely deployed model of "centers and peripheries" is tested as a guiding concept: It serves here as a point of departure for a reexamination of the dynamic tensions among and between literary languages, administrative structures, urban centers and rural regions, orthodoxies and heterodoxies, the status quo and the pressures for adaptation and change, and many other powerful entities and socio-cultural forces.

An introductory chapter lays out the volume’s four main points. The first emphasizes the importance of the early tenth century as a watershed that highlights the institutional and political transformations at court whereby provincial governors were allowed more freedom and, by extension, greater financial benefits. The second point problematizes the notion of a singular dichotomy between center and periphery in Heian Japan. The various essays suggest instead that the nexuses of power were in fact plural, and the periphery was not as peripheral as had been imagined. Thus, rather than conceiving Heian society as a static and one-dimensional formation centering on Kyoto alone, it might better be understood as a society of multiple centers and peripheries. The third point challenges the long-held view that the central government’s lessening of administrative control of the provinces meant an increasing loss of power. Rather, the abandonment of a strict administrative approach in favor of a more effective one allowed elites in the capital to strengthen their hold on the provinces, reflecting an improved integration of centers and peripheries. Fourth, the methods and means of exercising power shifted from one relying solely on official titles and procedures to one that was increasingly based on extra-governmental means, a process of "privatization" that reflected the development of multiple centers of social, political, and economic practice outside the official structures of the state.
Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries presents not only a set of new interpretations of this epochal moment in the Japanese past, but also offers a host of new questions to be addressed in future international and interdisciplinary research modeled on this exemplary volume.