J.R. Piggott
and prosperity, and where urban decay, fires, crime, and poverty reflected the failure of proper
royal governance. He described too how oligarchs of the Fujiwara regents’ clique in the Left
Capital were wealthy enough to enlist unlimited servants and guards, but lower officials like
himself could only retreat to solitary plots in the lower Left Capital, where he retired to his Pond
Pavilion.^37
Other signs of serious social disaffection included street protests by supporters of religious
institutions such as Ise Shrine and official temple- monasteries such as Kōfukuji and Enryakuji. In
that regard, Mikael Adolphson explains how monastic thinkers of the time were proclaiming the
equality of the King’s Law and Buddha’s Law (ōhō buppō), a profound change in mentalité from
the eighth- century ritsuryō Laws on Monks and Nuns (sōniryō), which had proclaimed the monarch
preeminent over the Buddhist establishment.^38 Takahashi Masaaki has suggested too that the
number of great religious institutions founded outside the capital in the ninth and tenth centu-
ries, including Iwashimizu (estab. 860), Ninnaji (estab. 886), Daigoji (estab. 874), as well as
various noble cloisters on Mount Hiei diluted the spiritual primacy of the royal capital.^39 And in
the capital itself the appearance of the Amidist proselytizer Kūya (?–964), “holy man of the
marketplace,” is one more sign of developing urban culture as well as an indicator of looser gov-
ernment control over the streets. Although public preaching had been forbidden by the ritsuryō
codes, Kūya seems not to have faced serious complaints.^40
In a significant departure from the past, tenth- century capital residents created new ritual
stages within the capital perimeter for use during shrine festivals. We hear, for instance, of the
tabidokoro where the Inariyama deity’s palanquin was carried and parked for propitiation. Also
associated with that festival, nighttime entertainments in the streets, once forbidden, were cus-
tomary by the 950s. High- ranked courtiers continued to complain about the street singing,
dancing, eating, drinking, and other mischief, but even court emissaries and official guards
ignored sumptuary prohibitions and engaged in extravagant spending on raiment, carriages, and
outriders.^41
This lack of control resulted in violence at times. In the third month of 995, for instance, the
Matsunoo festival, based at the shrine west of the capital, witnessed brawling between shrine sup-
porters and onlookers from the Yodo- Yamazaki vicinity south of the capital.^42 An increasing
sense of “insider” versus “outsider” may have been the reason that the term “capital resident”
(kyōjū) began to appear in the historical record of the time. Their households were being taxed to
support specific court offices, night patrols by the kebiishi, and even His Majesty’s table.^43 Mean-
while local notables called tone were functioning as neighborhood bosses. They had low or no
rank but served as local liaisons with the kebiishi.
This environment of a city under less control produced what literary historian Fukuzawa
Tōru calls a new literary genre, that of “urban literature” (toshi bungaku).^44 One striking instance
of the genre is the Shinsarugakuki (“New Monkey Music”), a prose essay composed around 1050.
Thought to have been written by the literatus and royal tutor Fujiwara Akihira (?–1066), Shin-
sarugakuki provides lively and humorous accounts of street entertainments as well as detailed
descriptions of urban craftsmen and other specialists of the time, both men and women. Its cast
of characters might be called “the human comedy” of mid- eleventh-century Kyoto. Among
them appear a cabinet- maker, a master painter, a maker of Buddhist icons, a yin- yang diviner, a
seer, a fuel provider, a calligrapher, and monk ritualists from both the Shingon and Tendai Bud-
dhist schools. We also hear of products made and sold in the Seventh Ward, such as cloth, thread,
swords, fans, saddles, bows, and quivers.^45
Fortunately Shinsarugakuki is not our only description of street life in the eleventh- century
capital. In 1096 the minister Fujiwara Munetada (1062–1141) also described festival streets filled
with field dancing (dengaku) in his Chūyūki journal, wherein the capital’s modern name, “Kyoto,”