The previous chapter described how shinden-style palaces proliferated from the eighth century as members of the aristocracy began engaging in various ceremonial activities as a means of demonstrating their membership in the Ritsuryo hierarchy. Serving as the prescribed venue of a highly scripted form of performative statecraft was, after all, shinden style’s first and foremost function. From the outset, however, there was a yawning gulf separating the style’s idealized role and the way it was used in practice. To be sure, elite palaces, including the Imperial Palace itself, were much more than sterile venues of ritual and ceremony. They were also fully functioning personal and family residences. Circumstances necessitated their accommodation of entertainment, household businesses, and private worship, as well as the more mundane acts of everyday life such as sleeping, eating, washing, and procreating. Modification of the original and largely impractical model was as inevitable as it was immediate.
The practice of temporarily partitioning interior shinden space through the use of folding screens, curtains, and bamboo shades began concurrently with the adoption of the style.31 The rooms created in this
Way were customarily outfitted (shitsurai) to accommodate specific non-Ritsuryo functions. Early on, the practice of temporarily accoutering interior space was limited to secondary structures such as corridors (ro) or fountain pavilions (izumi-dono). Before long, however, the impulse to better accommodate non-Ritsuryo activities, as well the desire to expand dedicated living space, contributed to the creation of permanent interior rooms. When in about the twelfth century the importance placed on Ritsuryo customs began to wane, even central shinden (plural) began to be partitioned with stationary walls and sliding doors. Creating these rooms—which appeared in documents as tsune-gosho, or “everyday palaces”—on the northern faces of their shinden enabled the elite to hold, for example, poetry contests, drinking parties, and any number of other private functions in ways that minimized the impacts of those activities upon the south-facing parts of their compound, parts that remained reserved for traditional rituals.32
Yet another departure from the shinden ideal that appeared soon after adoption was the construction of small religious facilities on the grounds of elite palaces. Used to accommodate private religious observances, these oratories, called jibutsudo or bodaiji, were usually quite modest. They generally possessed no sectarian affiliation, housed no permanent clergy, and were always sequestered behind private palace walls. Their existence, nevertheless, was an early modification of the shinden grounds plan as well as a subversion, though a restrained one, of the taboo against temples within the city.33 As we shall see in later chapters, while architectural prescriptions and proscription remained broadly valid, adaptations to elite palaces continued to challenge capital norms.
World History
