The Kofun Period was a time of great expansion for the Yamato state.
Yamato became a rising power in the region, mostly attributed to the massive rise of agricultural
production at this time.
The growing influence of the Yamato court brought about increasing unification.
However, the Yamato rulers had a problem.
You see, the Yamato state was less of a unified state and more of a confederation of many
clans.
There’s an Emperor at the top that theoretically oversaw it all, but these clans were powerful
and controlled their own lands.
Some clan leaders even had more de facto power in the court than the Emperor.
The Yamato rulers thought, “What the hell?
We’re the boss here, we should be in control!”
And so, the Imperial Family devised two strategies towards one goal:
How to make ourselves more important.
This would continue to be their objective in later periods.
Firstly, they created the kabane system.
Kabane were titles of nobility.
The Imperial Family declared that it had the sole authority to bestow these titles to individuals.
There was a grab bag of titles that I don’t know the names of, but the top two were omi
and muraji.
The title of omi was given to male clan leaders who claimed direct descent from the mythical
first emperor, Jimmu.
The title of muraji was given to male clan leaders who claimed direct descent from really
important kami.
There wasn’t exactly a scientific way to verify these claims, so instead of the titles
granting power to people, it was the other way around, initially.
They went to people who already had power.
Now kabane were not just useless titles that came with no authority, like Vice President.
They had important consequences.
You could only hold high government offices if you had a title.
Some people were given the titles of great omi or great muraji.
These people held the highest offices.
The title-holders became the aristocracy of Japan.
It was a success, people really identified with their titles.
It became like a club, omi hung out with omi, muraji went to, I dunno, plays with muraji.
If an argument arose, you defended your omi brothers against the dirty muraji.
These two groups had similar political power and they fought all the time in the Yamato
court.
One feature of these titles that made them so valuable… they were hereditary.
If your dad was an omi, you also became an omi.
For the lower-ranked titles, it became a way of making sure your kid started on third base.
Your daddy became your save-point.
For example, daddy works his whole life to get to Rank 2.
Little Timmy is born, automatically loading up daddy’s save point at Rank 2, and now
has a better chance of getting to Rank 3.
That’s how games work, right?
Well, unless you had the Sega Genesis back in the 90s which couldn’t save and you had
to keep the damn game on for 5 hours.
And if you died, that meant another 5 hours to get back to where you were.
Yeah, I’m looking at you Ghouls’n Ghost, with that music.
The kabane system gave Yamato rulers a way to grant power that could last for generations.
Even so, most historians agree that it was not that effective in bolstering the Imperial
Family’s authority, but it was a step towards that direction.
A second thing the Imperial Family tried was they organized people into occupational groups
called be.
These be and the clans had a close relationship.
Now when we say clan, that’s a translation of the original Japanese word uji.
It’s a pretty good translation, but a warning though, uji were different from the European
notion of clans.
European clans mostly had blood bonds, they were your relatives, your kin.
An uji was much bigger than a European clan, and the bonds between members of an uji were
broader.
There were definitely bonds of blood, of course.
You were born into an uji.
But an uji also accepted outsiders, non-relatives.
These were bonds of loyalty rather than blood.
So each clan had a leader, and worshipped a guardian kami.
Unlike later, many clan leaders in this early stage were women.
Uji were the basic political units at this time.
Similar to how the United States has 50 states, the Yamato state had a bunch of clans, except
these clans annoyingly dominated the central government.
The Imperial Family organized people into these groups called be.
A be was like a clan, but a clan that specialized in one occupation.
For example, if you wanted to order some haniwa, you would go to a be that worked with clay.
You had be for farming, fishing, military service, all kinds of occupations, but mostly
farming.
Like regular clans, the be had a hereditary component.
You were born into a be.
Wanna play the violin instead of being a farmer?
Sorry, that’s your life now, you deadbeat.
You can think of be as hereditary corporations, or hereditary guilds.
Be members were originally skilled immigrants who came over from the Korean Peninsula, but
eventually included locals as well.
The Imperial Family assigned each be to a clan, some clans oversaw multiple be.
They charged each clan with providing an occupational function to the Emperor.
For example, the Mononobe clan was responsible for maintaining weapons for the Imperial Family,
which meant they oversaw a be that maintained weapons.
Each be answered to both its overseeing clan and the Emperor.
This benefited the Emperor greatly.
They had be all over the Yamato state, not only do they extract resources and goods,
bypassing local rulers, they also served as the Emperor’s eyes and ears in faraway places.
The Emperor could get information that is not filtered through the mouths of the clans.
And now that the Emperor has a presence everywhere, it allowed the court to meddle in local affairs.
These power consolidation strategies were limited in effectiveness, but they were a
start.
Over the next few periods, the power struggle would continue between the clans and the Imperial
Family.