Island of Exiles

HISTORICAL NOTE

During the Heian Period (794-1185) the Japanese government loosely followed the Tang China pattern of an elaborate and powerful bureaucracy. The junior official Sugawara Akitada is a fictional character, but his ancestor, Sugawara Michizane (845-903), was very real. His life exemplified the dangers faced by even the most brilliant and dedicated officials who made enemies at court. Michizane, a superb administrator and great poet, rose to preside over the sovereign’s private office but ended his life in miserable exile.

By the time of the present novel, two hundred years after Michizane, the administrative power is almost exclusively in the hands of the Fujiwara family, whose daughters had consistently been empresses. The Fujiwara women had borne emperors who tried to rule briefly before resigning under pressure from their in-laws in favor of sons who were often too young to interfere in Fujiwara policy. The tale of the Second Prince illustrates the political uncertainties inherent in the imperial succession and the numerous incidents of rebellion by claimants to the throne or to the position of prime minister. The real power, the prime minister, was almost always a senior Fujiwara and he headed, assisted by brothers, cousins, and uncles, an enormous central government located in Heian-kyo (Kyoto). They controlled more or less successfully the rest of the country through provincial governors, men of rank and birth with university training and Fujiwara support. A governor’s duties encompassed overseeing tax collection, law enforcement, and civic improvements in his province. He normally served four years but might choose to serve longer or absent himself altogether while his duties were carried out by a junior official. Akitada is such a substitute, while Mutobe has taken permanent residence. Their provinces, Echigo and Sadoshima, are so remote from the capital, and life there is so dangerous for officials that more favored individuals considered such assignments not only undesirable but punitive.

Sadoshima, or Sado Island, is located in the Sea of Japan, about thirty-five kilometers from Echigo (modern Niigata) Province. In the eleventh century, it was an independent province with provincial headquarters, several towns, and Buddhist temples. It was also a place where people were sent into exile for serious offenses, and where gold was discovered fairly early. Though there was no government mining of gold until 1601, panning for gold in rivers and streams had been known for centuries. Kumo’s secret mining operation described in the novel is fictional. The descriptions are based on other early gold mining practices and on the pictures of the Sado mine in a contemporary scroll ( Sado Kozan Emaki). According to the scroll, both silver and gold were taken from the same mine. In the absence of Japanese historical sources, I am indebted to Angus Waycott’s Sado: Japan’s Island in Exile, a charming journal of his eight-day hike around the island, in which he describes the local geography, flora, and fauna, and gives brief accounts of the island’s history.

Provincial law enforcement was carried out by three distinct authorities: the local imperial police-present in Sadoshima since 878; a high constable, usually a local landowner with man-power at his disposal, who was appointed or confirmed by the central government; and the governor, who appointed and supervised local judges. Because of Buddhist opposition to the taking of life, the death penalty was rarely imposed. Exile, often with extreme deprivation and hard labor, was the punishment of choice for serious offenses. This was, as in the case of Haseo, commonly accompanied by confiscation of property and dispersal of the rest of the family.

In addition to the practice of Buddhism, the other state religion recognized in Heian Japan was Shinto. Shinto is native to the Japanese islands and involves Japanese gods and agricul-tural rituals. Buddhism, which entered Japan from China via Korea, exerted a powerful influence over the aristocracy and the government. It was common for emperors and their relatives to shave their heads and become monks and nuns in their later lives. The Buddhist prohibition against taking a life accounts for Kumo’s strange behavior. The shrines mentioned in the novel, along with the tengu sculpture, belong to the animistic Shinto faith which was more closely tied to peasant life.

Intellectual life reached a high point during the eleventh century. The sons of upper-class families (the “good people”) were trained in Chinese and Japanese studies at local schools and at the universities in the capital. Their sisters wrote generally only in Japanese, but they produced exquisite poetry, di-aries, and the first novel anywhere. In the other social classes, education probably ranged from illiteracy to the partial acquisi-tion of useful skills, especially that of writing with ink and brush not only in Chinese characters but also in Japanese script.

Akitada, with his university training, would have been adept at both, in addition to having a very good knowledge of the Chinese language, while the shijo Yutaka would associate characters only with their Japanese meaning. The emphasis of education was on supporting an efficient bureaucracy run by the “good people.”

A brief reference to the Ezo (modern Ainu), a people distinct in origin and custom from the Japanese, may explain the very real danger of Okisada and Kumo’s plan. Considered barbaric by the Japanese, the Ezo had been pushed northward for centuries until, by the tenth century, they were more or less pacified in Dewa and Mutsu, the northernmost provinces of Honshu. The pacification process had been achieved by allowing Ezo chieftains to become Japanese lords, often with the title of high constable of their territory. But in 939 the Dewa Ezo rebelled and in 1056 the Nine-Years War erupted when the Abe family, who had Ezo origins, rose against the governor of Mutsu. Thus the warrior lords in the unstable northern provinces close to Echigo and Sadoshima would have been obvious allies for Kumo and Okisada.

Finally, the story of the fake silver bars was suggested by an early Chinese legal case (# 9A) in Robert van Gulik’s translation of the ‘Tang-Yin-Pi-Shi.