Sowing Ghosts: Japan in the Sengoku Jidai Pt. II

During the sengoku jidai, life in Kyoto (the inhabitants seldom called the city anything other than “the capital”), was uncertain for most people, whether they were members of the imperial family, the aristocracy, artisans, merchants or day-labourers. There was no law enforcement because there were no laws. (There were codes of conduct within samurai clans, but in the capital none was being enforced.)

The population had crowded together into neighbourhoods enclosed by walls, or moated walls, such that as many as 150,000 people (or 75,000 or 100,000; sources differ) were crammed into space occupied in peacetime by fewer than half as many. Many streets in the occupied sections of the city were barricaded or gated, and the population, no matter how lowly their status, were more than prepared to defend themselves against warrior incursions.

The Lotus Sect

In this determination they were increasingly aided by the numerous temples of the Lotus sect (the Nichiren school) of Buddhism. Nichiren, or Hokke (”Lotus” in Japanese) was a populist form of Buddhism. Nichiren had taught that anyone could attain enlightenment by chanting the Lotus Sutra as a means of unleashing their individual Buddha essence. There were at least three separate branches of Nichiren in the Sengoku Jidai, with dozens of temples in the capital. Hokke people tended to be very intolerant of other forms of Buddhism, an intolerance that did not bode well for the future.

(In fact, about a decade after the period in which Sowing Ghosts is set, the adherents of the Lotus Sect in Kyoto rose up against a variety of oppressors, and the city was once again convulsed with violence. It did not end well.)

Somehow, despite the chaos and the violence, life went on. Food was brought into the city, goods were manufactured for sale, sake-brewers and rice-merchants operated as moneylender-pawnbrokers, and people dreamed of a day to come, when the world would no longer be in a state of constant upheaval.

Further Reading

Most of what has come down to us from this period was written by aristocratic diarists and so is somewhat skewed in its focus. Until recently there has been very little written in English (and what there is is mostly academic) about this particular portion of the Sengoku Jidai, and much of what I have written about the “civilian” population of the city (and certainly of its female half) is based on conjecture. In many respects, though, I believe that people are people and their basic desires don’t change much over time.

If I could recommend one book to readers interested in this period, it would be Mary Elizabeth Berry’s The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. She does a far better job than I could of making sense of the convoluted personal and political conflicts of the period.