If I could describe in one sentence the life of an upper class woman in the Heian period,
it would be...
extreme boredom,
interrupted by
casual cheating, lots and lots of casual cheating.
I’ll be talking about Heian women and marriage and promiscuity in the next few videos so
click subscribe and the bell to follow along.
When I think of Heian women, I picture Scarlett Johansson, stuck behind bars.
Let’s be clear, we’re talking about aristocratic women here, upper class women in the Heian
court.
Peasant women lived differently, more starvingly, and with a bit more misery.
The life of an upper class woman was a life of contradictions.
She had more freedom than in most other times in Japanese history, but couldn’t even leave
the house.
She was considered both inferior to men, and more valuable.
Okay number 1.
Upper class women had lives of luxury and high status, but at the same time they had
almost no freedom to move about.
It was like they were under house arrest.
Not literally of course, but women mostly stayed at home.
You see, a woman was expected to be hidden from outside men, the only men she saw were
her father and husband.
Women had private quarters and stayed concealed behind screens.
The only time women ventured outside to be social was to attend the occasional festival
or to visit a temple.
Their experience with social interaction was like my experience with sex, it happened rarely,
and when it did, it was over too quickly.
They did have social interactions though, most of it mouthless, didn’t involve a mouth.
Actual talking through the mouth was done with her parents, husband, female servants,
or the occasional female visitor.
Socializing with other people was mostly done through a brush.
She would take a brush and poke people with Morse code to communicate.
No, she didn’t.
Court ladies wrote letters and poems to communicate outside their home bubble.
Sometimes they would get male visitors, joyous occasions I’m sure, but even in those cases
they’d be behind a screen or in another room.
They’d speak with the visitor through notes or through a female servant.
I know right, imagine talking to people not by talking but by writing only.
What a world the Heian.
Okay, so women didn’t get to do much socializing, but they were rich, they lived in big houses.
There’s always stuff to do around the house right?
At least they weren’t totally bored.
No, no they were totally bored.
These were proper ladies, and a proper lady didn’t do housework, she had proper servants
for that.
Servants also took care of her children.
So put yourself in her shoes right.
You’re stuck at home, there’s no Internet, there’s no Netflix, no housework to do,
no one to talk to, what the hell would you do all day?
Actually, leave a comment below about what you would do, I’m curious.
The boredom was real.
Nothing changed from day to day.
Women were known to sit for hours just staring outside or at the wall.
It was bizarre.
They’d wait, yearning for a visitor or a letter or a poem to arrive from whoever they
were penpals with.
One woman wrote in a diary an entry that I absolutely love:
“Seventeenth day of the month.
There is a slow drizzle.
My direction today is unlucky and so I can expect no visitors.
The world seems a dreary, cheerless place.”
Ugh.
Women tried different rich people ways to have fun, like playing go, calligraphy, music,
and sewing.
But most famously, they wrote stuff.
A lot.
And thank the old gods and the new for that because their writings opened the paper door
and allowed us to peer into the halls of the Heian court.
At the same time, we gotta be careful because most of what we know about Heian women is
from writings of distinguished women.
These were people of high prestige.
They wrote from a more privileged perspective than their peers.
So women absolutely crushed men in the literature department, women made the Japanese written
language popular in Japan.
Contrary to most cultures, famous Heian authors were almost all women.
Why?
There’s some debate on this.
It could be because men were expected to write seriously, while women could be more creative.
Men were in government and they wrote in Chinese because that was the language of official
documents.
Women were not allowed in government, so they didn’t learn Chinese.
Instead they wrote in the simpler, brand new Japanese language of hiragana.
Now in truth, many women did know Chinese, they just pretended not to.
It was women who led the spread of the Japanese script that Japan still uses today
While men wrote dull government edicts, women wrote all kinds of things, diaries, poems,
fiction, non-fiction.
Thanks to women with excess free time, new Japanese styles of writing and poetry flourished,
pushing aside the old Chinese styles.
There were even male authors who pretended to be female so they could write something
not mind-numbingly dull.
Number 2.
Heian women were considered both inferior and more valuable than men.
Chinese Confucian teachings and Chinese Buddhist teachings at the time weren’t playing around,
they hammered home the idea that women were inferior.
Buddhist teachings claimed that a woman had to reincarnate into a man before ascending
higher in the path to enlightenment.
Women were banned from government.
At the same time, they were often considered more valuable than men because of marriage
politics.
The Fujiwara clan famously married their daughters into the Imperial Family and secured 200 years
of control over the government.
Inheritance of property usually went to women over men, giving them significant economic
freedom.
Yeah, they couldn’t leave the house, but they had it pretty good.
Violence against women was prohibited.
A woman could climb the social ladder much faster than a man.
A lowborn girl from the provinces could catch the eye of some big shot in the capital, get
married, and boom she’s swapping poems with a prince.
A lowborn boy from the provinces?
I have a better chance with Scarlett than he had with ladies from the capital.
A wife didn’t actually join her husband’s clan.
She kept her own clan name and, upon death, was buried among her own clan members.
Now up to this point we haven’t talked about the most exciting aspects of a woman’s life:
relationships, marriage, and cheating.
Lots and lots of cheating.
Like today, good fashion attracted guys, and the Heian Period had a pretty imaginative
fashion sense.
White skin was considered attractive so women used rice powder to paint their faces and
necks pure white.
Funny enough, white teeth was NOT considered attractive, and teeth looked kind of yellow
against that white skin, so women blackened their teeth making their smiles look like
these black holes that can swallow your soul.
They plucked their eyebrows, replacing them with painted eye blotches.
Long straight hair was beautiful, so they just let that hair go, meters in some cases.
A woman took care in coordinating the colors of her outfits and putting together the right
ensemble to reflect her personality.
Men couldn’t look upon women’s faces, so they had to gauge women by their outfits
or sleeves.
Sleeve fetish was rampant.
In a life of crippling boredom, relationships with men were freaking exhilarating.
Marriage was obviously important and they wanted to marry someone of high status.
But the most common relationship between men and women was not marriage, it was extramarital
affairs.
Heian men and women slept with people outside their marriage ALL the time.
It was expected, you just had to do it discreetly.
It was a time of sexual freedom.
Being a virgin was NOT good, in fact, people were suspicious of virgins.
They thought a girl who remained a virgin for too long was possessed by an evil spirit.
We’ll dive into marriages and bedroom hanky panky in the next couple videos, it’ll be
interesting I promise.
So don’t forget to like the video and click subscribe and the bell.
And share the video around.
So there’s a special guy I wanna thank, his name is Tercero.
He’s a viewer and he actually volunteered his time to do the research for this video
and the coming videos about Heian marriages and relationships.
Please say thank you to Tercero, he’s doing great work.
Also, shoutout to this week’s new patrons.
Lee Hamrick, Isaac Kubacka, Louis Gariépy, John Partika, and MikkiWiki, that has nice
ring to it.
Alright much love guys, spread the knowledge!