The H(5gen and Heiji disturbances of the mid-twelfth century, followed by the Genpei Wars (1180-1185) a few decades later, were only the most violent and well documented of numerous upheavals that wreaked havoc on Kyoto’s urban landscape at the dawn of the medieval era. Together, they accelerated the urban disintegration described in the previous chapter and aggravated a general sense of crisis among capital dwellers. The underlying cause of upheaval was the progressive weakening of the state and the inversely proportional rise of private power.
Despite profound political and physical changes, the capital elite throughout the medieval era continued to reinforce the notion that Kyoto was an exclusive domain where public authority reigned supreme. The impulse for such an anachronistic and ultimately unrealistic view was the same as that which motivated the almost universal coveting of imperial ranks and posts: Reinforcing and respecting the classical state in both its abstract and material forms remained elemental to claims of legitimacy. The state’s traditional hierarchy continued to be the universal benchmark of elite status, and the capital city continued to be the formal venue of imperial ritual and statecraft. Working to maintain the integrity of both, however imperfect (or at times disingenuous), was an indicator of membership in the traditional order, a membership that medieval power holders of all stripes sought to attain and maintain with no less enthusiasm than their classical counterparts.
A discourse about the capital being an exclusive realm was as old as the city itself. After all,
Heian-kyo was envisioned as an inert venue of imperial government and ritual, a place meant to accommodate the emperor, state institutions, the lives of its officials, and little else. As discussed in the first chapter, notions about functional purity informed taboos proscribing religious institutions, violence, killing, and burial. Rarefied and wholly impractical ideas such as these remained part of elite discourse despite the dramatic changes the city underwent in terms of its form, functions, and demographic composition. The turmoil that characterized the dawn of the medieval era, however, seems to have catalyzed a renewed, more energetic discourse about exclusivity. The impulse was, perhaps, a reaction to what Amino Yoshihiko called a “crisis of kingship,” a sense that the efficacy of classical institutions was being dangerously eroded or even swept away by the rising tide of kenmon influence.1 Attempting to physically insulate the capital from the intrusions of temples, warriors, and others whom the traditional elite deemed to be outsiders and threats to their primacy sent an unambiguous message that the capital and the institutions it housed were still relevant and viable.
This chapter explores the medieval discourse on capital space, which conveys an unmistakable impulse to insulate Kyoto, quite physically, from the growing influence of certain kenmon. From the late eleventh century, court documents and noble diaries began referring, with increasing frequency and vehemence, to the capital’s formal boundaries, usually within the context of a violation perpetrated by temples or warriors. Using language that frequently suggests an appeal to “propriety” and a respect for “age-old customs,” the capital elite appear to have begun caring a great deal more about what should and should not take place within the city, who should be allowed to enter, and what they should and should not bring with them. As we shall see, a general spirit of compliance on the part of would-be perpetrators suggests that they remained beholden to the state for their own legitimacy. This circumstance is on particularly stunning display in the context of the Kamakura shogunate’s activities in Kyoto. Even at the height of its power, the military regime frequently deferred to the emperor, the imperial police, or the court on matters of capital administration. They even went so far as to limit the activities of their own vassals within the capital’s formal boundaries.
Within this context, precisely where Kyoto’s formal boundaries were drawn became an important question, and a difficult one to answer due to the erosion of Heian-kyo’s urban grid and the advancement of urban
Sprawl. The need for a clear geographic border, one that unambiguously defined capital space and separated it from its surroundings, became acute after 1221, when a failed attempt to overthrow the Kamakura shogunate led to a substantial increase in the presence of warriors in and around the city. Such circumstances help explain why, from about the second quarter of the thirteenth century, the authors of documents began using an alternative name to signify the physical space of the capital: “Rakuchu.” The eventual mainstreaming of “Rakuchu” during this period, along with its binary opposite, “Rakugai” (meaning “surroundings” or “environs”), was indicative of an impulse to redefine Kyoto’s medieval geopolitical area and, in so doing, reinforce notions of an inviolable realm, however small, where traditional state authority remained valid. As we shall see, the choice of this particular word to achieve this objective entailed a compromise. Replacing more traditional names for Kyoto with a word that signified a much smaller area suggests an admission that the classical city was well and truly gone.
“Rakuchu-Rakugai,” an ideographic compound that was later to become the most common term used to refer to Kyoto, gave linguistic form to an idea that the capital basin was composed of two discrete and concentric spatial components, an “inside” and an “outside.” In the last section of this chapter, it is argued that this articulation was new in the thirteenth century but that the underlying idea was not. For centuries, the Kyoto basin had exhibited a two-tiered spatial structure that split the city into a well-defined core—the capital proper—and a surrounding buffer zone. The elite engaged in a concentric building pattern that mapped neatly onto this layered structure, dividing their lives along the distinction with striking consistency. Simply noticing and then examining this pattern sheds light on the dichotomy of elite power in premodern Japan. Influential aristocrats, clergymen, and, in their time, elite warriors all enjoyed a sort of dual identity: one as officers of the state, endowed with public ranks and posts, and another as private individuals, commanding landed wealth and influence through their control of family enterprises and institutions. The land within the capital’s formal boundaries continued, well into the medieval era, to be imagined as a rarefied realm of sustained public authority. The people who sought to claim legitimacy through their formal membership in the imperial hierarchy maintained official residences there that generally adhered to status-based codes of comportment. At the same time, however, they sought out areas, usually on the city’s outskirts, where
They could escape the performative mandates of public status to enjoy lifestyles more in line with their identities as private power holders. As we shall see, the geographic dichotomy of Rakuchu and Rakugai was a material manifestation of the dichotomy of public authority and private power.
World History
