Reading 5

The following passage is adapted from a book titled A History of Japan by J.C. Caiger and R.H.P. Mason (© 1997 by J.C. Caiger and R.H.P. Mason).

1. Literature was taken very seriously
2. by the Heian Court. In those early
3. days, anyone interested in fine
4. writing needed a knowledge of
5. Chinese and – to a lesser extent –
6. Buddhism, as Japanese culture was
7. still very much subject to direct
8. influences from the mainland.
9. Therefore, there was a close
10. association between literature
11. and learning.
12. This association led, in turn, to
13. literature being closely connected
14. with public administration on the
15. one hand and private conduct on
16. the other. The Confucian and
17. Buddhist texts were the courtier’s
18. manuals for good government,
19. and knowledge of them opened
20. the way to official advancement.
21. At the same time, these books
22. gave their readers guidance on
23. matters of general behavior. They
24. were the basis of personal and
25. family, as well as political morality.
26. Thus scholarship, public
27. promotion and private ethics were
28. all involved in literary studies,
29. and it is not surprising that
30. literature should have been
31. so highly regarded.
32. As in the Nara period, writing was
33. overwhelmingly upper-class and
34. aristocratic and metropolitan in
35. tone, because only aristocrats and
36. priests were literate, and for a time
37. it remained largely Chinese in
38. language as well as inspiration,
39. owing to the continuing difficulty of
40. writing Japanese when using only
41. Chinese characters. This situation
42. altered radically about the year 900
43. with the development of a phonetic
44. system which made it possible to
45. write readily intelligible Japanese.
46. The invention of phonetic letters
47. allowed the composition of
48. enduring Japanese language prose
49. works from the tenth century.
50. Nevertheless, Chinese continued
51. for some time as the main
52. language for business and official
53. documents, philosophical treatises,
54. partly because of tradition but also
55. because it had a fuller and more
56. precise vocabulary suited to
57. such purposes.
58. Heian literature therefore has two
59. very different streams. One
60. consists of writings in the Chinese
61. language and ideographic script,
62. and is associated with men. The
63. other is made up of works written
64. in Japanese with considerable
65. recourse to the native phonetic
66. script, and is associated with
67. women. The latter is more
68. important in terms of literary
69. merit, although it should be noted
70. in passing that the Heian-period
71. Chinese writings are a rich and
72. largely unexplored source of
73. historical information and do
74. indeed have some artistic worth.
75. Why did men tend to use Chinese
76. and women Japanese? And how did
77. Japanese women come to write
78. so superbly?
79. It is often argued that men
80. considered it beneath them to
81. write in Japanese. Questions of
82. dignity and education may have had
83. some significance, but this
84. explanation is not satisfactory since
85. some men did write Japanese,
86. especially some verse, and some
87. women studied Chinese. The
88. divergence can perhaps best be
89. explained by differences in the
90. occupations of men and women and
91. by the suitability of the two
92. languages for different purposes.
93. Men, accustomed to coping with the
94. everyday affairs of government,
95. their estates, and their households
96. in comparatively concise and
97. concrete Chinese, doubtless found
98. it easier to compose memoirs,
99. family testaments, and private
100. records of public events in that
101. tongue. By contrast, the life of
102. introspection and sociable leisure
103. led by women at court and at home
104. encouraged them to write and
105. circulate among themselves
106. compositions in Japanese.
107. Japanese, after all, was their mother
108. tongue, and its tenth-century form,
109. however vague and limited it might
110. have been in some respects, had
111. a marvelous potential for
112. communicating subtle emotions.
113. This potential the court ladies
114. taught themselves to exploit.
115. Last, but not least, the splendid
116. flowering of feminine literary
117. talent in the Heian period was
118. made possible by a degree of social
119. and intellectual freedom enjoyed
120. by women of the upper class.