Getting married was different in Heian Japan.
The husband and wife didn’t immediately move out and live together.
In fact, they couldn’t.
They’d die, they’d die instantly.
They’d walk into their new house and bleh, dead.
Okay not that fast, but they’d die.
And here’s why.
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So we’re talking about peasants in this video, the common man and woman.
The Heian era is known for art and culture and nobles living posh lives.
But let’s be clear, those idiots made up a tiny speck of the population.
Almost the entire aristocracy lived in the capital of Heian-kyo.
Japan at the time had a population of 6 to 7 million people.
The capital had 100 to 150 thousand people.
And the aristocracy made up only 1 to 2 percent of the capital’s population.
Even more amazing, the people who held any actual influence in the government numbered
only 100 to 125 men.
Outside the capital, Japan was still an agrarian culture based on rice farming.
They didn’t really have villages even.
Peasants lived in loose settlements, I guess you could call them hamlets, and households
were mostly independent.
It was common for a house to be more than 100 meters away from the next house.
Because of their independence, households were pretty big, about 8 to 10 people.
Marriage arrangements among the peasants happened like this.
It was similar to aristocratic marriages.
The wife kinda got the short end of the stick with regards to responsibility.
The husband basically visited to make sperm deposits, then went on his merry way.
Newlyweds didn’t move into a new home.
They stayed separate, living in their own parents’ households, like they had been
before marriage.
The husband would visit his wife once in a while at night, because, you know,
babies.
Then he would just go back home.
Children were raised in the wife’s household.
This phase of living separately wasn’t permanent, most of the time.
Although in some communities, it would last for the entire marriage.
But usually it lasted 5 or 6 years, after which they would finally move in together.
This marriage situation gave them some interesting family dynamics.
On the up side, kids were raised in a home where there were always people to take care
them.
Mother could go work on the farm while grandma and her sisters watched Junior.
The wife had more freedom than if she had lived in the home of her husband’s or the
in-laws’.
On the down side, the husband had less freedom because he still lived under his parent’s
roof writing angsty poetry.
This also gave the older generation a lot more control over the lives of the younger
generation.
So why didn’t a new couple just move out and escape their parents’ control?
Because wet rice farming is a bish.
Let me tell you how to grow rice.
You know those pictures of people in Asia in the rice paddies?
You know what they’re doing?
It’s called transplanting.
In the Heian Period, this process became widespread.
The old way of planting rice was pretty easy, you just threw down a bunch of seeds, water,
and let them grow.
This was called direct seeding.
Transplanting was different.
Now the idea was introduced well before the Heian, but it required so much work that many
people said eh screw it.
Here’s how it works.
First, you plant the seeds and grow them in a dry seedbed.
Then you prepare your field making everything even.
When the seeds grow into seedlings, you flood your field and take out each seedling and
plant them one by one in the field in neat rows.
These were huge fields, imagine planting each seedling one by one to fill the entire field.
Not only that, you gotta do it fast.
The soil can’t be too dry or wet.
Too wet and the seedlings won’t take.
So you have to fill the entire paddy with seedlings, and you have a limited time.
The paddy is drained midseason for the rice to mature in dry soil, then it’s harvested.
Flooding the fields gives you higher yields because of less competition from weeds.
Rice likes water, weeds don’t.
But transplanting required more people than one family had, so families had to hire help.
And this is why couples couldn’t have survived if they had moved out immediately after marriage.
You needed a lot of people.
A large household still had to rely on hiring outside labor.
A married couple, a household of two, was way too small to run a farm.
By staying with their own families, it kept the family labor supply stable.
As if farming life wasn’t tough enough, the Japanese court did something that made
life even tougher, but the hardy peasants turned a bad thing into something that made
them even more successful.
One of the responsibilities of the state was to ensure the public could freely use uncultivated
land.
The rich could not reserve free land for their own use.
Commoners used free land for all kinds of things like grazing animals, collecting wood,
and catching pokemon.
But over time, the state started giving more and more uncultivated land to temples, shrines,
and powerful clans.
These land grants shrunk the amount of land available for grazing, forcing people to keep
their animals inside stables all year because they couldn’t go out to graze.
People either had to teach their horses to live on peasant suffering, or find another
food source for them:
rice stalks.
Remember only the tip of rice stalks contains rice grains, just the tip, the rest can be
used as animal feed.
These animals were mostly work animals rather than yummy animals, and likely very few farmers
had them.
This actually introduced a new source of income for farmers, selling hay to animal owners.
Keeping animals at home all year allowed owners to collect their poo for fertilizer.
It had a huge effect on peasant life.
The availability of poo increased crop yields.
Usually fields went fallow after planting crops for one or a few years.
Manure, and the widespread use of a relatively new technology, the plow, allowed people to
use their fields every year.
Another effect of keeping animals at home all year was that it kept families together.
Taking animals out to graze was a big deal.
Someone had to take time out of the year leading them to pasture.
Without that, the animals and family members were available all year long at home.
In theory, the labor cost of transplanting and the monetary cost of plows should have
encouraged people to form closer and larger communities, but we don’t see that in the
Heian.
There were some hamlets with houses built close together, but they were the exceptions.
Peasant households remained independent in the Heian.
Closely cooperating communities will pop up in the subsequent Kamakura Period.
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