The Emperor and the state never ceased being the ultimate sources of legitimacy. Moving toward the medieval era, however, power—real power—shifted from the Imperial Palace to the homes of court aristocrats, religious institutions, and, in time, the palace-headquarters of retired emperors and warriors. Appearing in documents as ken-mon, a word literally meaning “great gate,” each of these entities of private influence drew to itself substantial human and material resources. Many of them became the nuclei of dense nodes of development located in and around the capital. The formation of these kenmon-centered nodes constituted a profound spatial transformation whereby the master-planned capital became a composite of urban islands, each with a unique identity and distinct set of occupants enjoying a high degree of political and economic autonomy.1 Most significant about the phenomenon of nodal urban development is how it so vividly reflected a divergence from the classical ideal of a mononuclear political, economic, and social universe. Indeed, the fragmentation of urban space was a stark indicator that, by about the eleventh century, the capital had departed its classical era to become a medieval city. It had made the transition from “Heian-kyo,” the “capital of peace and tranquility,” to “Kyoto,” a fractured, privatized, and pluralistic metropolis.2
This chapter focuses on the phenomenon of nodal urban development as it occurred in three separate areas in and around early medieval Kyoto. The first is the city’s northeast, a district that came to be called Kamigyo, meaning the “upper capital.” There, the palaces of
The aristocracy, emperors, and retired emperors clustered with greater density than anywhere else. Earlier research has treated Kamigyo as a single unit, focusing on its character as an aristocratic enclave. Here, greater attention is given to individual complexes, their owners, and the people who condensed around them. The history of elite palaces in medieval Kyoto is important not merely because their sizes and opulent styles symbolized vast wealth and influence. The physical compounds themselves—as government offices, the headquarters of rich family enterprises, and the birthplaces of future emperors—played material roles in the process by which power became privatized and state institutions were weakened.
Kamigyo’s geographic and social antipode was the dynamic commercial area that grew up in the shadow of Heian-kyo’s Eastern Market: the southern district of Shimogyo, or the “lower capital.” As regulatory state institutions waned and expendable wealth increased, commercial activity in Kyoto expanded. As the official markets disintegrated, their functions were replaced by countless stalls and workshops that lined the roads. The nodal development that took place in Shimogyo was different from that of Kamigyo in that it was based mainly around commoners rather than kenmon (plural). Nevertheless, there was a fundamental similarity: the clustering of people and institutions was related to the pooling of wealth and influence almost entirely outside the purview of the statutory state.
The next section of this chapter explores the fields and hills surrounding the capital, a place where countless religious institutions built large bases of worship, wealth, and political influence. The most prominent of these exurban temples and shrines exhibited the same kind of basic nodal development patterns seen in Kamigyo: a central kenmon surrounded by affiliated administrators, craftsmen, merchants, and others, all drawn together by their sponsor’s wealth and ability to shelter them legally and economically.
The final section examines several large temple-palace complexes built on Kyoto’s outskirts by retired emperors during the century after about 1075. These complexes empowered members of the imperial family to freely accumulate massive private wealth and political influence rivaling that of even the most powerful aristocratic families and religious institutions. Retired from office, these ex-sovereigns operated outside the frameworks of traditional state apparatuses and, not coincidentally, did so from bases located outside the boundaries of the capital.
Readers familiar with medieval Japanese history will notice a glaring omission from this chapter. There is only passing mention of the rise of warriors and the tremendous impact fighting men began having on the capital from about the twelfth century. They receive much greater attention in the next chapter. While warrior interaction with Kyoto coincided with the trend toward nodal urban development highlighted here, their long-term impact was much more complicated and deserves the sustained examination given later in this book.
World History
