326 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
saying, “When a zuryo falls down, he comes up holding dirt.” Everyone, peas-
ants and aristocrats, hated the zuryo, and the system they administered, and
worked to find ways to undercut it in self-protection. Peasant men who were
forced into military service for indefinite periods simply disappeared. From the
official point of view, a whole class of “missing persons” had emerged—real
people but without registered identities—who came to be called ronin. The new
system that had been imposed from the center was apparently experienced by
people in the provinces as an early version of odious “Big Brother” centralized
control. Every household, once blissfully autonomous, was registered by the
state, their land was allotted by the state, taxes due were determined and rigor-
ously collected, and theoretically every six years all the land could be redistrib-
uted. Never had the state been so intrusive.
The system was equally despised by local elites, who developed their own
brand of evasion. Some of them—the old court families who had been too
powerful to be dispossessed—had been allowed to keep their lands tax free.
Many of the aristocratic families in the provinces were descendants of emper-
ors who were victims of “dynastic shedding”; that is, they, like Genji, lost their
princely titles and were given surnames (Minamoto, Taira, Tachibana, Ari-
wara) and estates in the provinces, where they were free to make their fortunes
as best they could. These estates were called shoen. Buddhist monasteries and
Shinto temples also had shoen, often extensive tracts of land that came with cul-
tivators to work them. The rest of the population was at the mercy of the
despised zuryo.
To protect themselves they began “commending” their lands to local shoen,
religious or aristocratic, that is, attaching themselves in vassal-like relationships
to the shoen overlord, the daimyo (“great name,” a term applied to any lord who
controlled lands producing more than 50,000 bushels of rice a year). This prac-
tice was so widespread that it drastically altered the nature of Japanese society
and its power structure within a couple of centuries. By the twelfth century,
nearly all the rice lands of the country had been gathered into huge private
estates, and the capital was close to bankruptcy by loss of revenue. Further,
because the court had no standing army, all the military muscle was in the pro-
vincial estates where overlords were able, with the growing wealth of their
estates, to raise their own armies. Since the conscription of peasants had
proved a failure, warriors were recruited from the rural elite, and this gradually
turned into a permanent class of mounted warriors known as the samurai. The
word means “to serve”; its earliest use was for domestic servants at court, and
it later came to be used for the imperial guardsmen. With the growth of feudal
society the samurai became an elite class that formed its own code of honor
based on courage, loyalty, and martial skills. The “Way” (-do) of the warrior
(bushi) was not originally codified, but its ideals were enshrined in sung and
acted war tales. Only later, as the samurai class began to sense its own decline,
were works such as The Code of the Samurai by Daidoji Yuzan written down.
Thus, greatly simplified, arose the feudal society of Japan’s middle period.