ABSTRACT
Japan has been called a “moonlight civilization” because of extensive borrowing from the Chinese “sun” of art, ideas, and institutions between the sixth and the ninth centuries. The characterization is misleading, because China’s gifts underwent substantial modification by the eighth century and became uniquely Japanese by the eleventh. It is useful to view this historical development as occurring in several stages:
• A late-Neolithic phase of decentralized clans headed by chieftains up to the sixth century C.E. in the region around modern Kyoto and the northern end of the Inland Sea
• A centralized civic monarchy on the Chinese model from the seventh to the tenth centuries C.E., heavily influenced by Buddhism, that unified much of the southern part of the country and provided a foundation of ideas about the nature of the material world and man’s fate within it
• A decline of civic monarchy from the ninth to the twelfth centuries as numerous power centers emerged in rural areas when Heian functions of central government atrophied and aristocrats lost control of their estates to local warrior-chieftains
• The first stage of feudalism, from the late twelfth to the early fourteenth centuries, when the country was ruled by a Kamakura-based military shogun whose retainers swore allegiance to him personally rather than to the emperor. When the shogunate was established without allegiance to the throne, the emperor and his court were retained, supported by a stipend, and confined to ceremonial status in Kyoto
• The second stage of feudalism, from the late fourteenth to the late sixteenth centuries when the shogun’s control of the country faltered, and civil strife prevailed as local lords, called daimyo, competed for power, with retainers swearing loyalty to them instead of the emperor or the shogun
• The third and last phase of feudalism, between 1603 and 1868, when the country was unified by violence and central control was restored under one shogun, to whom all daimyo and their retainers owed loyalty.
