China's Twelfth-Century Intellectual Influence on Ja...

Although Japan's official relations with China's Tang dynasty ended in the late ninth century, contacts with the continent were never completely severed, and throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, private traders continued to operate out of Kyushu (western Japan), particularly the ancient port of Hakata. Moreover, the imperial court, even though it steadfastly refused to dispatch its own missions again to China, kept officials permanently stationed at a command post near Hakata to oversee the import trade and to requisition choice luxury goods for sale and distribution among aristocrats. And when the Taira warrior clan became influential in the western provinces in the twelfth century, they naturally took a keen interest in-and eventually monopolized-the highly profitable maritime trade with China. This trade would lead to a renewed influence of China on the intellectual life of Japan.

China of the Sung dynasty (960-1279) was a changed country from the expansionist, cosmopolitan land of Tang times that the Japanese had so assiduously copied several centuries earlier. Yet despite political difficulties and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. No doubt most of the developments of the Sung in art, religion, and philosophy would in time have been transmitted to Japan. But the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira clan greatly speeded the process of transmission.

One of the earliest and most important results of this new wave of cultural transmission from the continent was a revival of interest in Japan of pure scholarship. The imperial court at Nara, following the Chinese model, had founded a central college in the capital and directed that branch colleges be established in the various provinces. The ostensible purpose of this system of colleges, which by the mid-Nara period (710-784) had evolved a fourfold curriculum of Confucian classics, literature, law, and mathematics, was to provide a channel of advancement in the court bureaucracy for the sons of the lower (including the provincial) aristocracy. But in actual practice very little opportunity to advance was provided, and bestowal of courtier ranks and offices continued to be made almost entirely on grounds of birth. Before long, the college system languished, and the great courtier families assumed responsibility through private academies for the education of their own children. Moreover, as the courtiers of the early Heian period (794-1185) became increasingly infatuated with literature, they almost totally neglected the other fields of academic or scholarly pursuit. Courtier society offered little reward to the individual who, say, patiently acquired a profound knowledge of the works of Confucius; yet it liberally heaped laurels upon and promised literary immortality to the author of superior poems.

The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of artworks. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier. Indeed, Japanese visitors to Sung China were much impressed by the general availability of printed books on a great variety of subjects, including history, Buddhism, Confucianism, literature, medicine, and geography, and carried them in ever greater numbers back to Japan. By the time of the Taira supremacy, collections of Chinese books had become important status symbols among upper-class Japanese. The great Taira leader Kiyomori is said, for example, to have gone to extravagant lengths to obtain a 1,000-volume encyclopedia whose export was prohibited by the Sung. Some courtiers confided in their diaries that they had little or no personal interest in these books but nevertheless felt constrained to acquire them for the sake of appearances. Yet the Chinese books brought to Japan at this time, in the thousands and even in the tens of thousands, not only provided the basis for many new libraries but also motivated the Japanese to print their own books and to a great extent stimulated the varied and energetic scholarly activities of the coming medieval age.