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Medieval Japan
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Classical Japan during the Heian Period | World History | Khan Academy
Video transcript
- [Instructor] What we're
going to do in this video is talk about roughly 1000
years of Japanese history that take us from what's
known as the Classical period of Japan through the
Japanese Medieval period all the way to the Early Modern period and the key defining characteristic
of the Classical period is this is when Japan really
began to unify and have an imperial form and began to
borrow a lot of the traditions and philosophy and even
religion from China. Then as we get into the Medieval period, Japan gets fragmented, it
comes under military rule, and then as we get into
the Early Modern period, it gets reunited. So as I mentioned, China had
a huge influence on Japan. Even though China never conquers Japan, because of how close they
are, many things like the idea of a centralized bureaucracy,
the Japanese borrow many of these ideas from China
during the Classical period. In fact, the Japanese rulers
sent delegations to China in the 7th century in order
to understand all of what the Chinese do, in order
to run their government, to run their country,
and they start to borrow a lot of the ideas of
Buddhism and Confucianism and merge it with some
of their own beliefs which are often known as Shinto, which you can view as the
original Japanese belief system. So the first part of the Classical period that we're gonna go into some
depth is the Heian period. Its capital Heian-kyo, modern day Kyoto, and as I mentioned, it
was known for taking a lot of these ideas from China and
particularly the Tang dynasty in China and bringing them to Japan. The Heian period was known
as a golden age of Japan. It was a time of culture, it
was a time of architecture, people in the imperial court
would focus on the arts, they would focus on philosophy. As an example, this right over
here is the Byodo-in Temple in Kyoto which shows the level, and this is actually only part of it, it shows the level of cultural
advancement of this time. As I mentioned, the arts were a big deal and women in the imperial
court of Heian China had a lot of influence, in fact, the
most influential family, the Fujiwara family
maintained its influence by having the emperors marry
women from their family and those women would end
up having a lot of control over the emperor and of
course the next emperor. But to get a sense of
the arts of this period, here's an excerpt from the Tale of Genji which was written by Lady
Murasaki, who was believed to be a member of the Fujiwara family. And Lady Murasaki gets a lot of credit, before Chaucer, before Shakespeare, she is by many historians viewed
as the first true novelist that we know of in human history,
not just Japanese history. But I encourage you to read it,
its actually quite riveting, the Tale of Genji, and
this is just a small quote from that story or from that novel, it's about a very handsome prince, Genji. "The difference between
enlightenment and confusion "is of about the same
order as the difference "between the good and
the bad in a romance. "If one takes the generous view, "then nothing is empty and useless."