Welcome, faithful Voice readers, to my first surfari. In this series, I will get into it with my favorite subject: the History of Japanese Feudalism! To begin I will compare the aristocratic and warrior classes, known respectively as the kuge and the buke.

The society of Feudal Japan was split into many sub-categories. In this surfari, the classes I'm primarily concerned with are the warriors and aristocrats of the Imperial court, otherwise known as the buke and kuge.

There are two fundamental ways of comparing their art, culture, and lifestyles. One is observing differences in detail, and the other is noting how precisely both exist within their social structure. In feudal Japan all were aware, at all times, of who was below them and who was above. Using these two fundamental approaches, I will contrast the aforementioned characteristics of kuge and buke life.

The kuge were known as the ‘cloud-dwellers’ of Kyoto, going about their ceremonial activities within the court and when necessary, among commoners. One thing they had in abundance was time, which was filled with elaborately divined rituals governing all aspects of behavior. Take for example the kataimi or directional taboos; they would choose a cardinal direction (west, for example) and decide that they could not move in or face that way.

As could be considered typical for the idle rich, love became their pastime. Within the ‘pacified capital’(Heian-Kyo), an otherwise boring court life led to the search for distractions, with flirting becoming the top sport. Pillow-tales of the day report how anonymous lovers would exchange poetry or handwriting to identify each other after a rendezvous.

Polygamy (and kinky, at that) presented itself as an interesting diversion, but only for the men. The need for rules of behavior also applied in this context, and methods were codified for lyrical correspondence and flirtation. Within the Heian Court microcosm, the typical wait for a desired encounter was reduced to days.

Therefore, sneaking around while the others pretend not to notice became the real kuge challenge; this in turn led to the establishment of voyeurism as a spectator sport. This of course could only take place if the kuge existed in a place separate from the population at large. For example, it was one of the highest offenses for another man to enter the Shogun’s sexual dominion.

Overall, however, life was little more than an elaborate ritual featuring a myriad of religious demands and rules of etiquette. Of course, kuge women were exploited like women were in general in this highly stratified social order. They were regarded as property as opposed to thinking beings, and polygamy was only allowed for the husbands.

This of course led to women being largely unhappy; jealousy kept them secretive and constantly on alert. They found that their men were far more loyal to their lord than to their wives, who did all the books and educated the children. The man made all the decisions, and the wife walked three steps behind; she lived a life of emptiness and boredom amidst opulence.

This social remoteness began from childhood, since the boys got a wide education including Chinese writing, literature, and arts combined with martial training. Girls, meanwhile, were told that they were to be subservient to men in all things, and were only allowed to learn from the women around them.

Kuge were above all other social classes because of their heritage, and this led to a ‘superior’ attitude in all things. One example of this would be the artistic pursuits they employed to pass time - court dancing, the incense-discrimination game, poetry, flower-viewing, and hiring outside entertainers where they could be enjoyed aloof of the gritty merchant culture.

When it came to food, kuge were amazed at how the lower classes ate since they (and the buke, for that matter) didn’t abide by the same Buddhist food taboos. They rarely ate meat, but did eat fish. They also overindulged in drinking sake, and parties were very popular. The women were not averse to drinking, and in fact held their liquor well.

As the glittering elite, kuge were constant slaves to fashion and had to stay on top of the trends. It is because of this that self-imposed customs were in fact more adhered to by the lower classes.

Nonetheless, the kuge were like all other classes in that they believed that behaving outside what was ‘appropriate’ for their social station was suicide for their career. In fact, the kuge were kept in check by a banishment system employed by the government. In addition, the power plays between various social ranks formed the backdrop for significant drama.

An excellent example of this would be a daimyo (translated as ‘great name,’ and the feudal equivalent of a martial governor), exercising his social duty to have the peasants of a town he was passing turn out and show him deference. Now consider a random kuge from the court appearing opposite the daimyo on the road in full view of the populace. The daimyo, although he has the political power, is inferior in social rank and therefore would have to descend from his lacquered carrier and show respect. Of course, to the daimyo this would be a stinging indignity.

Perhaps this kuge, who doesn’t make all that much money, decides to exact a fee from the daimyo to ensure that this embarrassment could never happen again? Such would be a practical indication of the social hierarchy at work.

While kuge lifestyles eventually resulted in the overthrow of the government and Imperial Restoration of 1868, their time-inspired notions of what was ‘proper’ and ‘suitable’ were rubbing off on the classes below them, and on the military houses (buke) in particular.

At about the same time, the concept of Bushido (or ‘way of the warrior’) arose to complement the establishment of the buke nobility as a social force. The class was extended to include all warriors allowed to carry two swords after Hideyoshi, Japan’s Second Unifier, disarmed the populace through his ‘sword hunt.’ He further mandated that all samurai live in the city, and that only warriors could carry the two swords, katana and wakizashi (known collectively as the daisho).

This idea of the buke warrior (and of the samurai in particular) is traced back to a legend of a quasi-divine hero who earned from his enemies a name of prowess. This name became associated with the concept of ‘old Japan,’ and warriors (bushi, within which the buke were the nobility) aspired to cultivate those qualities - bravery, loyalty, and tenacity - that were believed to be a singularity to Japan.

In addition, bravery on the battlefield was held in the highest esteem; military acts of particular skill and courage were admired by friend and foe alike. Although these qualities are admired to this day, the buke were not considered to be heroes by the kuge, who felt they were above everybody.

Naturally, this same air of superiority was assumed by bushi when dealing with their social subordinates; this is because the position is hereditary and based on the notion that no one will try to advance or behave outside his social station.

Still, the buke lived in constant fear that the commoners would try to rise. It was against them, therefore, that they showed the most unflinching attitude – and they used a complex language that could give respect or a lack thereof. They would swagger, appear haughty, and subdued bonge (commoners) with an icy glare.

At night, however, they might disguise their head with a basket and visit the merchant theatre, which they did at great risk to their reputations. This is because buke were sternly admonished from coming in contact with merchants, the power of their money, or commoners.

Approved artistic activities depended on the rank of the samurai; lower classes engaged in physical training, either martial or sportive. Higher-ranking samurai devoted more and more time to arts more compatible with the higher classes, i.e. chado (tea ceremony) and ikebana (flower arrangement).

The rank a bushi had was inherited, with little room for advancement between classes. This meant that although a bushi knew his inherited position would not change due to incompetence, he was obliged to reiterate his status constantly. This was done by changing his attitude depending upon whom he was dealing with.

The medium of economic exchange was in koku, or the amount of rice it took to feed one person for a year. The key here is that the buke were created from the lower classes, and the fact their salary (rice, not money) was produced by the lower classes showed the true dependence of the buke and kuge (and the rest of Japan) upon the peasant.

This koku-rating had all sorts of applications; for example, it dictated the area of land upon which a samurai was allowed to build. For the lowest ranks, this meant communal living in longhouses. Again, rank was all-important, and was reflected in the clothing they wore.

Higher ranks, for example, had leggings that trailed on the ground. These required practice and sharp foot movements to keep the extra fabric flowing behind the feet, showing that the wearer had the leisure to learn how to carry himself. Another view is that the highest authorities ordered them to be worn, so that they would naturally impede any violent personal attacks from high-ranking (and therefore constantly plotting) courtiers.

What of their wives? With each man that maintained a position of social power, his woman (like the social classes below him) was subjugated to reinforce his station. Never mind that the women (like the commoners) toiled laboriously; like kuge wives, they also were unfairly subservient to their men. Fear was known as ‘fire, wind, and father.’

This meant the wives had to educate their children and instill in them a sense of class, while also controlling the household expenses. They were fearless of death, and were neither elegant nor well-read. They could write hiragana poetry however, and were trained in the use of the nagingata. The point is to illustrate how the boys got all this training on how to achieve honor and ideals, while the girls were completely repressed to maintain the status quo. This was done by male leverage of the social roles of love and marriage.

The concept of the ‘role’ of love and marriage in Japan’s feudal times was clearly defined, as was pretty much everything. Since the preoccupation was with the political, economic, and social motivators that precluded the development of chance relationships into true love, marriage was more of a utilitarian institution.

Buke codes dictate that marriage is so important that mere personal convictions must submit to policy. The treatment of a buke wife was therefore in reverse correlation to her husband’s station. Of course, that would explain why it was perfectly acceptable for a samurai to have sexual relations with other women to satisfy his desires, since he has to ‘sacrifice’ his marriage for the sake of a sociopolitical or business alliance.

Therefore, financial and business considerations were of the highest priority. The effect on the women, of course, was their socialization into mere tools to be used by men. As such, a woman’s education in feudal Japan served little purpose beyond training her how to be useful to the men in her life, who were (in order) her husband, father, and eldest son.

They did not attend any schools, like the male samurai youth. They learned from nearby women how to be a good wife and homemaker, and would learn the social graces from traveling masters. In addition, to prepare for her new duties as a wife, she was educated in sexual technique so that she could please her husband.

It was given that she would face stiff competition in terms of extracurricular entertainment, and it was to her (and the family’s) advantage to keep the man and his limited resources at home. In the case of merchant families however, there was a greater degree of freedom in that a son could, in taking a wife, gain control of a segment of the family business as well. Plus, any country girl would have been delighted to marry an anonymous man from the city because the country life was far more laborious.

Another interesting point is how easy it was for a man to divorce his wife; he had to only write a form letter that "freed his wife from any obligation." He need not even give a reason - he was only obligated to return the dowry (if any was left, that is). If pregnancy became an issue after the divorce, the man would be expected to take responsibility for the child. The woman, meanwhile, could count on support from her father (or the head of her former family). It is not surprising that women shared no such privilege when it came to divorcing their husbands.

This is the root of humanity in question, because Japanese children were socialized from earliest youth to accept as axiomatic the idea of social stratification. They were taught that one's social station should be determined solely by the actions of one's ancestors.

Therefore, a buke was trained to be respectful and loyal to his social betters while maintaining unassailable dignity and personal decorum, which was quite different from the dream-harem-life of the kuge. On the other hand, both were trained to have strong moral standards and behave "justly" to those socially below them.

The kuge and buke were obviously very different. The kuge floated among the clouds of the Pacified Capital while the buke struggled to advance their status at the expense of the peasants. At the same time, the women of all classes were wholly repressed and socialized to accept the cold axiom of tradition.

With the arrival of the Portuguese in 1543, the Crucifix was accepted in return for the Arquebus. The implications of this statement, however, require some preliminary background before one can understand. The Portuguese arrived in the form of Franciscan monks, and it wasn’t long before their arch-rivals the Dominicans arrived. Thus began a period of intense western competition for Japanese converts.

The Christians were beyond obnoxious, and with the Hideyoshi government in power, it was not long before persecution of Christians began in earnest. In fact, there are mountainous chasms in Japan famous for being spots where hundreds of Christians were forced to take that fatal leap of faith - with women and children among them.

Meanwhile the arquebus was being reverse-engineered, and the art of musket-making soon became one of the highest social forms of merchant culture. In fact, Japan made the world’s finest guns until WWI. One can therefore assert a posteriori that Western military science was critical to Japanese feudalists. So critical, in fact, that the notion of Christianity was tolerated in order to gain those all-important musket technologies.

This heralded the influx of Western science and medicine, which was systematically reverse-engineered and improved upon by the Japanese. After three more centuries of alternating isolation, Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in 1853 and, armed with the policy of Manifest Destiny, triggered the most rapid and complete scheme of national modernization to be found anywhere in the world.

This further illustrates the unique qualities that make up the Japanese people, which cannot be understood until one comprehends the feudal roots of Japanese social tradition.