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To the Teacher: This one-page historical introduction refers you to a unit in the excerpts from Essays in Idleness in the Literature Section. It provides students with a glimpse of the social upheaval taking place at this time through a primary source reading drawn from the era. It will aid their understanding of the many changes that accompanied the development of a feudal system in Japan and also remind them that premodern Japanese history was not all of one piece nor always dominated by samurai.

Essays in Idleness

Yoshida Kenkô (1283-1350) wrote his Essays in Idleness about 1330. This was a period characterized by almost constant warfare, as various groups of warriors outside the court sought to extend their control over greater areas of Japan. The days of the aristocratic culture of the Heian Court were over. Yoshida Kenkô, himself a former courtier, fled the poverty of the court and became a Buddhist monk in 1324. Many of his fellow courtiers did the same.

The social change that took place in Japan during this period was at times very dramatic, and Kenkô* offers an important example of individual response to enormous social upheaval. The period of transition from court-dominated to warrior-dominated society saw a loss of one set of values as primary, and the gain of a new set. Kenkô is trying to salvage what he can from the old with an awareness that its time has passed; what he made from that still informs Japanese sensibility.

Kenkô's aesthetic was never lost, but it was overlaid by more confident, optimistic forms. The later periods of feudalism come to us in their cultural expressions as more robust and exuberant, as in the woodblock prints of the Tokugawa era.

*In Japan, it is often customary for famous people to be referred to by their individual name or "first name" - in this case Kenkô - not their family name or surname. Remember that the individual name follows the family name in Japanese word order. This writer's family name is Yoshida.