You would think that on the list of rules for a marriage, Do Not Kill Your Spouse would
be on that list.
But in Heian Period Japan, there’s one situation where you could kill your spouse.
See if you can guess it right now in the comments.
I’ll tell you the answer later.
Marriages in the Heian Period were different from what we’re used to.
So let’s talk marriages, wifely duties, drama between wives, and marriage ghosting.
Heian Japan was a polygamous society.
To be more specific, they practiced polygyny, which just means each husband could have multiple
wives.
Sorry ladies, the opposite was not true.
Women only had one husband.
One thing to note, we’re only talking about marriages among the Heian elite in this video.
Unfortunately there’s little info on the life of the common folk.
So when we mention polygyny, some guys out there may be like,
“Wow, a harem of wives? Good for them”
and picture an Eyes Wide Shut kind of scenario.
First of all, that may not be as wonderful as you think, but it wasn’t true.
Like most polygynous societies, the majority of Heian nobles only chose to have one wife,
and anything over three wives was rare.
The exceptions were emperors, who just said hold my beer.
A man’s first marriage was not for love, but for clan and career.
People married at a young age, probably as young as 11.
Men had multiple wives but much like your love for your kids, not all the wives were
equal.
A man’s first wife was his main one and the other wives had to respect her position.
Both families treated this first marriage like choosing a starter Pokemon.
They went through long discussions and sleepless nights, and had to consider all future ramifications.
The Fujiwara clan famously married their daughters into the Imperial Family, allowing them control
over the Heian court for 200 years.
The previous video about Heian dating talks about the political factors that went into
marriage planning, check out that video after this one.
It’ll be on the test.
What, you think I’m joking?
Do I sound like I’m joking??
The first wife was a bit of a cougar.
She was usually older than the husband, sometimes even a decade older.
She acted more like his mentor or guardian at first.
According to Confucian tradition, she was expected to be faithful and obedient, and
to provide her husband a son.
For the first wife, social pressure dictated that people only marry within their rank.
As you can imagine, at the very tippy top of the social ladder, they understood what
it was like to be a...furry,
the number of potential partners was small.
Don’t feel bad though, secondary wives could be of different ranks.
Now the position of secondary wife or concubine, I’ve seen people use both words, was more
shaky.
The family usually didn’t arrange these marriages like they did the first marriage.
They started out more casually; discreet meetings, temporary dalliances, kidnappings.
While the main wife was older than the husband, secondary wives were usually much younger.
If you fell in love with some low-class girl from the provinces, you would make her a secondary
wife.
Once the husband made it official with this new wife, she was expected to respect the
status of the main wife.
The main wife’s position was considered permanent.
Secondary wives often stood on shaky ground, they could be hit with a divorce-quake at
any time.
Now you may be thinking that with multiple wives, there was potential for drama.
Well 10 out of 10 Pikachus for you because you’re absolutely right.
The husband, the main wife, and the secondary wives all wanted different things.
If you were a husband, you wanted a large family.
Death from childbirth was a real danger, so having more wives gave you better odds of
having children to marry off to other families and continue your line.
If you were a main wife, you wanted a smaller family, less wives for your husband, less
competition.
The last thing you wanted was for him to bring home some hoe and rob you of some of the respect
that a main wife was owed.
And goddess forbid he would give her kids precedence over your kids.
And if you were a secondary wife, you also wanted a smaller family for much of the same
reasons.
Your goal was to get these skanks off your man.
You couldn’t really hope to take the main wife’s place, that didn’t happen or was
extremely rare.
Even if the main wife could not produce a son, she would adopt the son of a secondary
wife.
But what you could do was try and make sure your husband preferred you over the other
wives.
Family dynamics got complicated.
And if that wasn’t enough, reality is complicated.
Officially there was a difference between main wife and secondary wives.
In practice, the line was blurry.
It was common for men to treat all their wives like main wives.
Jealousy and backstabbing ensued.
Okay, so after marriage, where did the couple live?
At first, it wasn’t like today, where the couple would move in together.
No, for a handful of years, the wife and husband stayed in their parents’ homes, like before
the marriage.
Once in a while, the husband would visit his wife to migrate his tadpoles.
This arrangement allowed the wife to remain independent, but there was a big shift in
marriage relations in the Heian Period towards the husband providing more responsibility
for the family.
This initial period of the couple living separately became shorter and shorter until it disappeared
altogether and the couple did move into their own home right after marriage.
In these cases, the wife’s family provided the home, but over time this responsibility
also shifted towards the husband’s family.
And in the subsequent Kamakura Period, it became the norm for the couple to move into
the home of the husband’s family after marriage.
A woman’s house was her life raft.
She kept it even after a marriage ended through divorce or the husband’s death.
It was the most important thing she owned.
You see, a husband didn’t really have any obligations to his wife and kids.
He could cut off support for them whenever he wanted to.
Of course, it would’ve taken a heartless man to let his wife and kids live in the streets,
but there are heartless people out there, like whoever canceled Firefly.
Dick.
The house was her economic life raft, a way for her and her children to survive in case
her husband left.
Also, when a man wanted to marry, he looked for a woman who could provide for HIM.
Could she house him?
Could she pay for his men and horses?
Could she clothe him?
Clothing was actually one of the most important things a wife’s family did for her husband.
Heian clothing was extravagant and required expert tailors who charged expert prices.
We can assume that as the husband rose in the ranks of the Heian government, he would
start to provide support back.
There’s a story that wonderfully shows us what Heian culture expected of a wife.
The story goes...there was a wife who was living with her husband in her parents’
home.
When her parents died, she lost a huge chunk of income.
She told her husband,
“While my parents were alive we were able to manage in one way or another
but now I shall no longer be able to take care of you.
It won't do for you to be shabbily attired at court.
You must act in your own best interest.”
The husband looked confused.
She said, “I meant, find another sugar mama.”
The husband said, “Oh.”
But he refused out of love.
However, as his clothing became shabbier and his underwear disintegrated, he finally had
to leave the house and find a new wife.
She started taking jobs as a maid, and eventually ended up being the maid for some government
official.
After working there for a while, she met the governor of the province, a very important man
They chatted and eventually fell in love.
The plot twist?
The governor was her ex-husband!
I assume they didn’t notice because they didn’t see each other’s faces.
You’d think it would be a happy ending, but nope, she dies from the shock.
Anyways.
Divorce in the Heian Period was basically ghosting.
It was really easy to do, by both men and women.
The legal code did have the concept of divorce, but trying to pinpoint the exact date of a
divorce could be us applying modern standards to a different time.
It could be that the exact date of divorce wasn’t a concept that entered their minds.
A lot of times divorce was uncertain for both parties, especially if the couple lived separately.
There was no legal paperwork to go through, no lawyers.
A husband could just choose to ghost his wife, as in stop visiting.
After some time has passed, you could say in hindsight,
Oh that was when the divorce happened.
But then, one day he could choose to come back and resume visiting.
So was it a divorce or were they just on a break?
Hard to tell,
just ask Ross.
Now the wife could choose to remarry, at which point the divorce was certain because a woman
could only have one husband.
In general, there were no harsh custody battles.
Children usually stayed with the mother.
Chivalry was pretty much dead in Heian Japan.
Husbands didn’t hold the chair or open the door for their wives.
There was a high government official who liked to help his wife down from her palanquin,
and people were like,
“Oh my goddess, what a wacky dude.”
Women were safe from bodily harm.
It was against the law for a husband to beat his wife, and certainly against the law to
kill her.
Except in one case.
It’s interesting because the open secret in Heian society was that everyone cheated.
In theory, wives were expected to be faithful, but they were not and everyone knew it.
The most frequent type of relationship was not marriage, not premarital dating, but marital
affairs.
However, if a husband caught his wife in the act with another man, he could actually kill her.
I know, double standards.
Hashtag Heian Feminism hashtag not all men.
But all in all, Heian women had better lives than in many other cultures at the time.
So I tried to pack a lot of info about Heian marriages in this video, that’s why it’s
longer than usual, but there’s so much more.
If you want to step into the halls of the Heian court, I recommend grabbing Ivan Morris’s
classic The World of the Shining Prince.
You’ll discover how people actually lived in this unique world.
I wanna thank our new patron this week, Daoud Faquiryan.
I like this Daoud.
Alright much love guys, and spread the knowledge.