“In all things I yearn for the past.” It’s a defining phrase, of a man and his book — the man, a literary monk named Yoshida no Kenko (1283-1350); the book, his classic miscellany “Tsurezuregusa” (“Grasses of Idleness”). His monkish vows drew him out of the world; his literary vocation and his aristocratic ancestry and inclinations drew him into it. He hovered on the edge, a less than thoroughgoing recluse. He wrote: “They speak of the degenerate, final phase of the world, yet how splendid is the ancient atmosphere, uncontaminated by the world, that still prevails within the palace walls.”
Within those walls reigned the emperor — Emperor Go-Daigo from 1318 to 1339, Kenko’s peak years — and the question immediately arises: How can the seat of rule be “uncontaminated by the world”? It can’t be. The emperor did not rule. He reigned. To rule was human, to reign merely divine. So it had been for a century and a half — actually far longer, though earlier it had been courtiers who had exercised power in the emperor’s name; now it was a bakufu, a military government.
An imperial succession dispute in the mid-12th century had drawn to opposing sides warrior clans marginalized until then by ruling courtiers whose power lay not in arms but in dance, music, poetry, calligraphy, handsomeness and very high birth. From the death struggle that followed, the Minamoto clan emerged supreme. Japan was reborn, a land now of warriors and war, a samurai land. Bakufu headquarters in remote Kamakura showed the court in Kyoto — the “uncontaminated world” — outward deference, honoring its divinity but warning it in effect to stick to its traditional arts and ceremonies. Power would lie elsewhere. Power was contaminated and contaminating. Human, not divine, hands would wield it — the shogun’s, not the emperor’s.