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In short, to become a master of polite accomplishments and the cuisine in the military era of Japan demanded patient and industrious study. The fashions of the Heian epoch in the manner of travelling underwent little change during the military age. The principal conveyance continued to be an ox-carriage or a palanquin.
Besides the six-stringed harp or wagon, much more complex harps or lutes of thirteen or twenty-five strings were used, and in general there was a great increase in the number and variety of instruments. Indeed, we may list as many as twenty kinds of musical instruments and three or four times as many varieties of dance in the Heian epoch.
It is remarkable that a very large and important part of the best literature which Japan has produced was written by women. A good share of the Nara poetry is of feminine authorship, and, in the Heian period, women took a still more conspicuous part in maintaining the honour of the native literature.
Fujiwara Fuyutsugu, who, as mentioned above, took such an important part in the legislation of his era, may be adduced as illustrating the error of the too common assertion that because the Fujiwara nobles abused their opportunities in the later centuries of the Heian epoch, the great family's services to its country were small.
Turning to the inner life of the people in the Heian epoch, we may say with little fear of exaggeration that the most notable thing was the increase of superstition. This was due in part at least to the growth in Japan of the power of Buddhism, and, be it understood, of Buddhism of a degraded and debased form.
But subsequent and repeated neglect of the claims of the Southern branch in regard to the vital matter of the succession betrayed the insincerity of the Ashikaga, and provoked frequent appeals to arms. The situation may be said to have been saved by the habit inaugurated at the close of the Heian epoch.
Cushions and arm-rests were the only other important pieces of furniture. In the Heian epoch, Court costume was marked by the two characteristics that we have seen elsewhere in the period extravagance and convention. Indeed, it may be said that Chinese dress and etiquette, introduced after the time of Kwammu were the main source of the luxury of the period.
The fiction of this period, usually termed the Heian and there is plenty of it still in existence was for the most part written by women, so that it will be seen the female novelist is not, as some persons appear to imagine, a comparatively modern development.
An excellent translation of this has been made by Mr. F. V. Dickins in the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," Jan., 1887. In short, an extraordinary love of literature and of all that pertained to it swayed the minds of Japan throughout the Nara and the Heian epochs.
The two greatest works which have come down from Heian time are both by women.* This was no doubt partly due to the absorption of the masculine intellect in Chinese studies. But there was a still more effective cause. The position of women in ancient Japan was very different from what it afterwards became when Chinese ideals were in the ascendant.
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