Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries

✍ Scribed by Mikael S. Adolphson (editor); Edward Kamens (editor); Stacie Matsumoto (editor)

• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 464
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

"This exceptionally rich set of essays substantially advances our understanding of the Heian era, presenting the period as more fascinating, multi-faceted, and integrated than it has ever been before. This volume marks a turning point in the study of early Japanese culture and will be indispensable for future explorations of the era." —Andrew Edmund Goble, University of Oregon

"As a Japanese historian, I enthusiastically recommend Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first multi-author English-language academic work to offer a synthetic treatment of the Heian period. Japan’s emperor system is the last remaining sovereignty of its kind in human history, and this volume is indispensable when considering what sovereignty itself means in the present. To that end, the classical patterns established in the Heian period are superbly analyzed in this volume through the dual approach of ‘centers and peripheries.’" —Hotate Michihisa, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo

The first three centuries of the Heian period (794–1086) saw some of its most fertile innovations and epochal achievements in Japanese literature and the arts. It was also a time of important transitions in the spheres of religion and politics, as aristocratic authority was consolidated in Kyoto, powerful court factions and religious institutions emerged, and adjustments were made in the Chinese-style system of ruler-ship. At the same time, the era’s leaders faced serious challenges from the provinces that called into question the primacy and efficiency of the governmental system and tested the social/cultural status quo. Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first book of its kind to examine the early Heian from a wide variety of multidisciplinary perspectives, offers a fresh look at these seemingly contradictory trends.

Essays by fourteen leading American, European, and Japanese scholars of art history, history, literature, and religions take up core texts and iconic images, cultural achievements and social crises, and the ever-fascinating patterns and puzzles of the time. The authors tackle some of Heian Japan’s most enduring paradigms as well as hitherto unexplored problems in search of new ways of understanding the currents of change as well as the processes of institutionalization that shaped the Heian scene, defined the contours of its legacies, and make it one of the most intensely studied periods of the Japanese past.

Contributors: Ryûichi Abé, Mikael Adolphson, Bruce Batten, Robert Borgen, Wayne Farris, Karl Friday, G. Cameron Hurst III, Edward Kamens, D. Max Moerman, Samuel Morse, Joan R. Piggott, Fukutò Sanae, Ivo Smits, Charlotte von Verschuer.

✦ Table of Contents

contents
maps, figures, and tables
Acknowledgments
1. Between and Beyond Centers and Peripheries
part I: Locating Political Centers and Peripheries
21 From Female Sovereign to Mother of the Nation: Women and Government in the Heian Period
3. Court and Provinces under Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira
41 Kugyō and Zuryō: Center and Periphery in the Era of Fujiwara no Michinaga
part II: Shifting Categories in Literature and the Arts
5. The Way of the Literati: Chinese Learning and Literary Practice in Mid-Heian Japan
6. Terrains of Text in Mid-Heian Court Culture
7. The Buddhist Transformation of Japan in the Ninth Century: The Case of Eleven-Headed Kannon
part III: Establishing New Religious Spheres
8. Scholasticism, Exegesis, and Ritual Practice: On Renovation in the History of Buddhist Writing in the Early Heian Period
9. Institutional Diversity and Religious Integration: The Establishment of Temple Networks in the Heian Age
10. The Archeology of Anxiety: An Underground History of Heian Religion
part IV: Negotiating Domestic Peripheries
11. Famine, Climate, and Farming in Japan, 670 – 1100
12. Life of Commoners in the Provinces: The Owari no gebumi of 988
13. Lordship Interdicted: Taira no Tadatsune and the Limited Horizons of Warrior Ambition
part V: Placing Heian Japan in the Asian World
14. Cross-border Traffic on the Kyushu Coast, 794 – 1086
15. Jōjin’s Travels from Center to Center (with Some Periphery in between)
References
Glossary-index
Contributors