The Winter Gardens of the Kakita
Fan Fiction for the Legend of the Five Rings
Note: Much of my research here comes from The Taming of the Samurai by Eiko Ikegami, as well as the great videos from Let's Ask Shogo (including this one).
So I spent some time talking about the history of Japan up until 1180, and about the Chinese philosophies that infused the aristocratic culture of the Heian period. But Legend of the Five Rings is about samurai, so it is important to know where they came from. By the end of the Heian period, the "Height" of Japanese Imperial Society, three powerful philosophical/religious forces were holding sway over the land: The first was early Shinto, the religion of the common people. Originating with the Jōmon and Yayoi, this religion saw the world as filled with supernatural and natural spirits to be appeased, some hostile, some friendly, and all worthy of reverence, and some fear. Because of the actions of Himiko, the head of this religion, though in a very distant, "in name only" form, was the Emperor, who officially owned all the land of Japan. The second was the Chinese Philosophies, particularly Confucianism, first brought to Japan by wealthy political refugees, and later actively imported by the Imperial government in the form of scholars and advisors as a way of centralizing and modernizing Japan. The third was Buddhism, brought by monks eager to evangelize, but supported by the Imperial Court also as a way of centralizing control of Japan. There were also Taoist spiritualists, but they tended to make their way up into the mountains as hermits and did not play a major part in the building of Japan. But where were the Samurai? Prior to the samurai, all land was officially owned by the Emperor, who portioned it out to all free men in exchange for their service and taxes (preferably in rice). However, it was very hard to make the farmers give up their taxes...rice agriculture took a lot of land development, and the farmers would just flee to the hills anyway. So the Emperor made an edict that would allow anyone to permanently own those lands that they "reclaimed" as long as they paid the tax on that land, which was called a shōen. "Reclamation" meant "convert the land over to rice production and compel taxes out of it." And if small developed plots happened to be in a larger 'reclaimed' area and got lost in the paperwork? A convenient mistake. Once the shōen were established, the next order of business was for the ones holding the shōen to try to get out of paying taxes themselves. To this end, they did all kinds of schemes, like pretending the shōen was really controlled by the keepers of a shrine, masking their wealth in untaxable goods, and so on, thus keeping the territory and wealth while diminishing the wealth of the Imperial Court. This edict suited the Imperial Courtiers, who had the money to buy off undeveloped areas in the developed south, hire mercenaries to collect taxes, and pay laborers to convert the land, while they themselves worked in Kyoto with the Emperor. And it suited the Buddhist monks, who had large numbers of devoted followers who would work the land around their monasteries , and encouraged them to strengthen their military might. Shrines not being taxable helped them a lot, and the Imperial Court feared the divine retribution involved with contradicting the monks. But it also suited strongmen with martial and military skill who could carve out sections of the undeveloped tribal territory to the north and bring in (or compel) labor to convert the land. And unlike the courtiers, these strongmen stayed with their land, and so were able to pass it on to their families, especially if they had links, however tenuous, to the Imperial court and noble families. While the court and Confucianism despised these warriors for their culture of violence and being unclean with blood on their hands, having lands meant economic power, which made the warriors more socially acceptable. Eventually, the Buddhist monks and their holdings became powerful enough that leaders among the monks looked at claiming the Imperial throne. The Imperial Court then hired more warrior-trained men to protect their holdings for them, with those warriors then using courtly influence to rise in wealth and power. Others who had claimed shōen needed to protect their territories from others. They hired more warriors with greater strength, and those warriors grew more powerful as the shōen's wealth increased. Finally there were warriors who had claimed smaller territories who needed protection or independent warriors who worked out networks of alliances and vassalage, where a warrior would show himself brave, trustworthy, and loyal to a regional greater lord, and in exchange, would be given protection, privileges, titles, and new lands won off of enemies or out of undeveloped land. These three kinds of warriors became the Samurai. After watching numerous other war leaders fall to the infighting related to the Imperial Court, one of these war leaders, Minamoto no Yoritomo, kept himself separate from them as he consolidated his power among all these samurai as Shogun, and finally a whole administrative structure based around fighting men. This leading to a Japan split three ways with three different administrations: The Imperial Court, the Temples, and the Shogunate and the system of vassalages and loyalties of the samurai. Although the Imperial Court and its associated warriors would try to sow dissention between the different samurai families and overthrow the Shogun's hold on power, they were never truly successful. It's good to have the warriors on your side.
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So, in my previous mini-article? I talked about the History of Japan. The key element I wanted to emphasize is that the courtly culture, the culture of the upper class in that society, and from which the samurai sprang, came from China. (Note: Prior to 1995, scholarship in English in Shinto was pretty sparse, so more in-depth scholarship into historic Shinto was not necessarily available even if the RPG writers had wanted it. The RPG market as a whole was pretty small and niche, especially compared to today.)
Chinese philosophy is a great synthesis of four competing schools of thought, each of which, if you look for it, can be traced all the way into the culture of Rokugan. They all evolved in China around the same time (around 550 to 250 BC during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States period). This is important: At the same time that Japan was a hunter/gatherer, stone-tool using people, China had been debating high scholarship between Mohism, Confucianism, Taoism, and Legalism for a couple of hundred years. It should be noted: I am speaking of these as philosophies, not religions…at least the scholars originating them did not consider them to be religions, though the principles were followed religiously by different people at different people at different times. They are more beliefs and principles of thought, like those of the Stoics in the West. Taoism /is/ considered a religion with roots in the more animistic faiths prior to its encoding, but here I am speaking of the philosophic aspects and how it is applied to culture. Prior to Confucianism, the spiritual practices of China were mainly animistic, and heavily aligned with the state and the support of the Imperial Lines. But the key work of study, predating Confucius the later philosophies, was the I-Ching. The I-Ching was a book of divination from before 1000BC, was considered a ‘manual’ to describing how the universe worked. It introduced concepts such as yin and yang, the importance of the family, of structure and roles, and the inevitability of change. People did not need to believe in its properties of divination, but it was unquestioned as a description for how the universe was set up. Confucius and the other great philosophers arose from the scholarly tradition of interpreters and advisors, based on the I-Ching, and many of their works were addressing its concepts. Confucius, himself, lived about from 551-479BC, and was the oldest of these Philosophers. Obviously there’s a lot to write about his life, and his philosophies, and I could not hope to capture all of it. However, if you want to remember one thing about Confucius, other than that he was a brilliant scholar, was that he was a musician. As a musician, he understood the world, and human society as a great web of musical notes in relationship with each other. And the goal of all people is to create harmony. Suffering comes from discord, which comes from ignorance or lack of virtue or vice, or from those behaving out of accord or out of harmony with and with respect to others in their relationships. Distilling Confucianism down to a very threadbare definition, then, is this:
The other three major philosophies, then are, in some ways, discussions with or against, Confucianism. The next of these, Legalism, tended to be an approach that was an attempt to encode the moralistic Confucianism with the legal enforcement of the state. It was not created by any one philosopher, but grew out of the various bureaucratic institutions. It arose around 400BC by reformist-minded administrators like Shen Buhai. Legalism, unlike Confucianism, was pragmatic and cynical: human beings maybe ought to pursue virtue, but they do not. Evil exists, and ministers and rulers will pursue their own ends to the detriment of others. Therefore, rules need to be put in place to prevent evil. It presupposed that each role could be condensed into a series of rules, and if those rules were followed strictly and enforced, society may be peaceful and avoid evil. This would have the side effect of decreasing suffering, but that was not the goal. Enforcement of the structure of leadership was the goal. Clear structure, rather than societal harmony, was the best that could be hoped for. To that end, Legalists advocated clear definitions of roles and duties, civil service exams and encoded meritocracy, strong punishments and rewards, and models and standards. The next major philosophy debating for control of the Chinese world at the time was Mohism. The scholar Mozi lived from 470-391BC, was a brilliant civil engineer and siege tactician. Mohism believed in pragmatism, merit, austerity, and the obligation the superior human being has to protect the less gifted. They despised music and aesthetics as extraneous, and believed that all people should be treated with impartiality. They believed that some people were divinely talented, and that, as such, they had a duty cultivate their powers, including supernatural gifts granted from heaven, in order to protect those weaker than them. Society often killed those with the greatest talents as threats, but instead, society should elevate them. They should rule with austere discipline so the people will do the same. If ruler and people act as one organism in accord, then society will be peaceful. The final school of Chinese Philosophy introduced during this period was Taoism. The founding of Taoism is attributed primarily to Lao Tzu, who is a (potentially legendary) contemporary of Confucius, but Taoism did not really spread until the late 300’s BC. Taoism eschews the artificial structures, focusing on naturalness, simplicity, and, most importantly, the concept of ‘wu wei’. Wu wei is the idea of non-action, that nature will and should progress as it should. The universe will unfold harmoniously without human intervention, and when human beings enforce their will against that action, it will disrupt the harmony and cause unintended consequences that may well be worse than what would have happened without human intervention. It looks to the older texts, such as the I-Ching, for guidance on the natural patterns of the universe. Leaders, per Taoism, have great powers, and as such, it is even more important that they do /less/. Obviously, all of these brief descriptions are only scratching the surface of each of these major philosophies. But each of these philosophies were supported by their adherents, and all were well in place by the time China came into contact with Japan. And the primary way each of these philosophies was shared and spread, from the time of their founding and throughout history, even to the present day, is through stories. If you look to the folklore, then, of Japan, the stories of their heroes, and the moral lessons that are encoded into their artwork, then, and divide it all into groups, you are going to find this underlying structure of four competing philosophies. If you then take those categories of story and group them together, and stick labels on them to make them different ‘clans’ of people who embrace the principle behind those philosophies…Confucianism. Legalism. Mohism. Taoism. Crane. Scorpion. Crab. Dragon. Funny how that works out. Last week, I explored, in a limited way, the concepts of Individualism and Collectivism as concepts of anthropology and sociology and how that might relate to Rokugan. In my next article, I am once again wade into waters out of my depth and talk about Chinese philosophy.
But first, I’ll talk about why. Rokugan is based on Japan. It is built on the myths and stories and philosophies of ancient Japan, as presented through the lens of its stories as shared in the West. But our image of Japan is not based on the society of its original inhabitants who lived there in isolation for thousands of years. Its original peoples, the Jōmon, were a hunter-gatherer, stone-tool using society, and they held the islands right up until 300 BC, when they were displaced by the Yayoi from the Korean peninsula. The Yayoi were an agricultural, bronze-age society that began around 300BC, and combined its own religious practices and the religious practices of the Jōmon to create the Shinto religion. Around 200 AD, Himiko, a priestess and queen, brought an end to the warring states of the Yayoi and founded the kingdom the Chinese called Wa, and we call the beginning of Japan as we know it. Around this same time, there were the first contacts between the Chinese and the Japanese. The Yayoi period ended in 300AD, and was followed by the Kofun, Asuka, and Nara periods, which were marked by rapid cultural import and immigration from China and Korea. In particular, the culture of the social elite and educated adopted more and more Chinese customs and traditions, while the villagers followed their traditional ways. Buddhism, Chinese writing styles, Chinese governance, Chinese philosophy, all came to dominate the culture, and was actively promoted throughout society, though Shintoism remained in harmony with Buddhism. The modern Imperial dynasty was founded during the Heian period in 794 AD, with its founder, Emperor Kanmu, tracing his descent to Lady Sun and the beginning of the samurai class. The Chinese influence began to lose dominance at the end of the 9th Century when rebellions in China caused the Japanese to cut off trade with the Tang dynasty. But the Heian period was considered the height of culture, and Chinese philosophies, inventions, and education, dominated Japanese courtly society through the end of the Fujiwara period with the Gempai war in 1180 and the Shogunate that followed. So. Why write my very fore-shortened history of Japan? Because Rokugan is based on Japan…but Japan itself is based on a mix of native Japan (Jōmon) and Korea (Yayoi and Kofun) and China (Asuka through Fujiwara). The stories of Japan come from all three cultures. You can’t separate the threads. Legend of the 5 Rings is not a snapshot of Japan during the Sengoku Jidai or during the Edo. The sensibilities of the clans reflect different periods in Japanese history. But even if Rokugan were a snapshot of a single period, because of this history, the philosophies of Rokugan, similarly, have to be a synthesis of different philosophies and religion: Shinto, Buddhism, and the Chinese Philosophies. And when you're talking about the customs and manners of court, the greatest influence comes from China. So...I'll tackle Chinese Philosophy. Hang in there. A daimyo is executed unjustly for an act he did not commit. Forty-seven of his most loyal followers hunt down the man who caused this act, leaving their wives and families, their lives and their positions, to kill him. And then they all bring themselves to the capital to present themselves and commit seppuku, taking their lives as a consequence for what they have done. The Forty-Seven Ronin is a classic Japanese story. But nothing similar happens in western European literature, even with the most devoted followers. How does a Western game designer create a game system that encourages, or even just allows, such stories to be run in the system? The honor mechanic is an, albeit clumsy, way to try to encourage such story telling, but the challenge is deeper than that. To tell a Japanese story in an English RPG, you end up stumbling across the difference between Collectivist and Individualistic values. So this week, I'm going to start there. (Don't worry....I'll get back to honor. I just realized after some events this week, I needed to start "further back".) Before you start researching this topic on your own, I need to make a very BIG warning. If you come from a Western society, make sure that you use only sources from a collectivist society...either Asian, African, or certain areas of South America such as Mexico. This topic has been addressed extensively in anthropology...and then it was grabbed, twisted, and made as racist as s*** in some places. Stay away from that. The sources I provide here are not, but the internet is an ugly place. I'm sorry. Each person is uniquely made up of a group of traits and virtues that define them. These traits are valued differently, however, by the society in which they live. One society might value strength, for example, while another might value a slender build and manual dexterity. In a strength-favoring society, children would be taught to play games of strength, while another society might encourage playing games requiring fine motor control. Each child has similar access to all the human virtues and gifts independent of race or creed or where they are born, but the societies in which they live teach them to value and train in virtues differently. Intellectual and social traits similarly are prized differently by different societies.
One area where societies differ in their values is whether that society is considered individualist or collectivist. (Note: I'm taking a lot of this information from Individualism and Collectivism by Dharm P. S. Bhawuk, University of Hawaii because it's a good paper, but you can find it in plenty of anthropology and sociology textbooks.) Individualist cultures value personal independence. Members are taught to see themselves as separate from others, with each person responsible for themselves and their own decisions. Who they are is defined by how they feel or perceive themselves on the inside, and they are encouraged to ignore what others perceive of them. Individualistic societies value freedom, non-conformity, choice, ambition, and fairness. Relationships and trade are considered to be reciprocal and for the fulfillment of the self. Communication is direct and being blunt and precise (and clear) is valued, with less regard to the feelings of the other. Strangers and family should be met equitably and fairly, but neither strangers or family or anyone else should be able to control the actions of an individual. Collectivist cultures value personal interdependence. Members are taught to see themselves as parts of a larger social group, defined by their performance and characteristics as they stand within their web of relationships. Who they are is relative to their social context, and they are encouraged to always be aware of how others perceive them. Collectivist societies value sharing, empathy, cooperation, duty, and conformity. Relationships and trade are considered to be mutual for the good of the whole, rather than the fulfillment of the self. Communication is indirect, and sensitivity is valued. Strangers are often met with hostility and kept out of the inner sphere of relationships, but once accepted into the sphere, they are valued much more as part of the collective self than in an individualist society. No culture is purely individualist or purely collectivist. However, in general, Europe and North America are considered to be more individualist, while Asian and African cultures tend to be more collectivist. These two sets of traits are also not considered opposites. They are instead areas of emphasis that can be considered more complementary than anything. A person's own acceptance of Individualism or Collectivism is not determined by their race or their society. Indeed, this is a set of psychological traits that can be 'primed' by setting up specific kinds of social situations and contexts. And neither kind of culture is superior at problem solving. Generally it has been found that groups are most successful at problem solving when individualism and collectivism produce synergistic effects: people primed to accept the group values as paramount while ensuring that each person is primed to represent themselves individually. What a society values, however, is going to 'prime' members into the ways of thinking and acting that most conform with the values of that society. The myths and stories and lessons and advancement within that society is going to be based on the values of the society, and so people who conform to those values will advance in that society the most. So...the point of all this. The United States is considered to be an Individualist society. It is also considered to be a rural society, with most of our 'mythmaking' about who 'real `Mericans' are' coming from a rural archetype. It is also considered to be a nomadic society, where people are not innately tied to a specific of area of land and are free and encouraged to travel to seek the best circumstances for themselves. Rokugan, alternatively, is created to be a collectivist society. It is an urban society, with much of mythmaking and storytelling about an urban/court elite. And it is considered to be a settled society, where people are commonly tied to a specific area of land and do not travel broadly beyond those lands. The challenge of the GM is to try to make the sort of the stories that can cross that great divide and see what is on the other side. Last week I wrote a bit about ways I understood honor to be an uncomfortable and unpleasant topic for members of the Asian diaspora to deal with, in games or other forms of popular media, as well as the dangers of orientalism in RPGs. Thank you to Terri Ann for referring me to other episodes of Asians Represent for some additional insights. Among the additional insights shared, the cast talk about how games often homogenize many different Asian cultures into one single culture, and also how honor mechanics can force players into stories they may not wish to tell. Both of these points are well deserved.
It is important to note that, even though I may not agree with a specific point shared, and I may not think that that point applies to L5R or at least to how I would run L5R at my table, that does not make the point invalid. Even if a critic gets some nuance of Japanese culture wrong doesn't make their criticism invalid. As critics, they are sharing their experience and their feelings, and the reasoning behind those. The feelings are valid...they don't need to be justified with an extensive education in Japanese history or encyclopedic knowledge of the game lore. There doesn't have to be a 'good reason' for the feelings. If they weren't shared, members outside that minority would never know them. I admit that it can hurt when something I care about gets harshly critiqued for reasons that I don't necessarily feel 100% apply. It is pretty human to feel defensive. But how an RPG is received is as or more important than the intent behind how the RPG is created, and it's good to know. I don't know if getting a sensitivity reader or only letting minority members of a culture write anything to do with that culture is a good solution, even if it is straight-forward. Not every project has the budget even to pay the primary creator. But we can all be more sensitive to the way works are created and received, and be as careful as we can. And part of being as careful as we can is listening to criticism, even if it's hard. I only hope those reading me are patient with me as I stumble my way through. In my posts about story axes, one of the ones I talked about was self verses community, and I explained that as being related to the stats for glory and honor in the Legend of the Five Rings RPG. Honor, and how it works in L5R, is a big deal for me, and related to a lot of things I want to talk about in this Blog, but before I do so, I better get the bad part out of the way.
Before I go on, I need to state clearly that I'm not the best person to talk about these sorts of topics. I will probably mess up, and certainly, I cannot have the same personal stake in the discussion and personal understanding as an Asian person would. However, this is my blog, and there aren't really many good discussions on this topic for L5R, and it's not fair to the Asian members of our community to endlessly have to explain things like this over and over again, so you, gentle reader, are stuck with me and my own poor offerings. If you wish to contest...I read comments gratefully and am happy to reassess. Anyway. If you watch the Asians Represents podcasts about L5R (here), the immediate response when the word 'Honor' was raised was a collective Ugh. Even though Honor has many interpretations even just in English, even though the group had not yet read anything about how Honor was interpreted in the L5R system. This response is very understandable. From my reading, Honor is problematic for many in the Asian community in two ways. The first is its association with Orientalism. Orientalism in this context is a form of racism that focuses on the exoticness of another culture, playing up the differences between that culture and European/North American culture to titillate or add excitement. Some consider it a way to praise the culture it is describing, but the net effect is to make members of that culture seem less human, alien, and unable to be understood and therefore subject to both gawking and fear...and treatment as other-than human. This othering is perpetuated in the media long after the original orientalist style is gone. This othering effect is compounded by a certain 'explorer' syndrome. Prior to the advent of cameras and modern anthropology, the understanding that was developed in the West of the cultures of faraway places was based on travel diaries and observations by those who had visited those cultures. Observations from these travel logs were publicized and shared and eventually committed as public knowledge. However, as stories written for publication and the excitement of the reader, experiences that were strange and alien to the writer were played up for excitement, and remembered the most by the readers, while mundane things that were the same were forgotten or not written about much. This emphasis caused something that may have been a very rare occurrence in the different culture to seem, to readers from the West, to be happening very frequently. This also increased Orientalism. These early perceptions are our descriptions of the past, and the history of Japan, lacking any other force to update them, has used these descriptions, and has lasted uncontested for hundreds of years. Honor, as a concept, or at least, terms that were translated into English as 'Honor', was often the emotional motivation for these actions that seemed remarkable to Western observers, and the term became a shortcut for what seemed like a completely alien way of thinking. The actual meaning of the term, as used in China and Japan, and the motivations behind such actions was lost in the simplicity of one word that can be interpreted in many ways. Honor is an incredibly difficult word to define even referring to what it is used for in English. Used to describe these "alien" actions, the term evolved, as such misunderstandings and exaggerations do, from concept, to catch-all, to caricature. It becomes a parody. And, for many in the Asian community now living in the West, a hurtful one. Honor has a second complication. The term really does have significance, and is linked to a variety of honor/shame family dynamics that are common in many Asian families. These family dynamics can have considerable psychological implications, some beneficial, some harmful. For those who have been harmed under such a family dynamic, honor, especially the caricature of honor, carries a different level of significance, and it can cause understandable pain to see it used trivially. All of this is a really long way, I suppose, of saying that it's completely understandable why some would have issues with using Honor in Legend of the Five Rings. But, using this concept of Honor can bring some really powerful storytelling to your game, and it can touch upon concepts deeper than you find in other games. Next week, I'll try to explain how I interpret Honor as used in L5R, and how it fits in with the culture of Rokugan. Again, I'm sorry I'm not the best person to talk about these topics, but I've tried to do my homework and want to share it so I have a chance of reducing harm in the way we play L5R. My kids are settling into a new RPG, and had their session zero today, where they got to select the Story Axes they wanted to play along, as I described in my previous article. I wanted to note the difference between a story axis and a story engine, since I will use both terms. A story axis, is an emotional line of tension within the story around which conflicts may unfold. They often mirror Real Life lines of tension, because such things have emotional resonance with us. A story engine is a mechanic or narrative element that creates new stories by just existing. For example, the Prosperity System is a mechanical system that spawns adventures as players must find ways of dealing with hazards and perils that have built up in their communities. The existence of a slowly rising Shadowlands threat, or the Elemental Imbalance, might be potentially considered narrative story engines, if they generate multiple adventures for the characters. They, in themselves, are not the emotional crux of play, but they make adventures around which the crux of play can be generated. In my next blog post, I will start a long effort to break down the most powerful, but also one of the most difficult, of L5R's story axes: Honor. |
Author
Kakita Kaori, also known as Jeanne Kalvar, has played the Legend of the Five Rings Role-playing game since 1st Edition. If you want to read her thoughts on things other than gaming, you can find them here:
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