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There are good reasons why the reign of the Emperor Yozei is little known and less studied. A close look at the years between Yozei’s birth (869) and his death more than eighty years later (949) can shatter some of our most dearly held illusions about the Heian Court. Traditionally, the Court is rightly hailed for its creation of a unique civilization which produced immortal literary works. These literary works, themselves, have become the standards by which the Court has been judged over the centuries. They have been used, also, to illuminate the history of the courtier class, and so we have ended up with all kinds of ideas about life at court based on the literary imagination of some of its members. Clearly, however, Heian literature prefers to ignore the darker aspects of the Court’s existence, its predatory hold over rural Japan, for example, its exploitation of all those who surrounded it, and its arrogant assumptions about the importance of the blood line. Here we will try and look dispassionately at the Heian Court through the historical sources relating to one of its Emperors, and leave the literary production of the period on the side. We will see that the court’s domination of Heian society was not free of random violence, which under Yozei even penetrated into the inner sanctum of the Imperial Palace. We will have occasion to observe how this Emperor’s blasphemous behavior caused his own downfall and has been an embarrassment to the Imperial Family and its apologists ever since, influencing historical studies in Japan to this very day. Admittedly, the case of the Emperor Yozei is an extreme one, but it is through the behavior of its extremists that the parameters of a society are defined. |
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