Island of Exiles (49 page)

Intellectual life reached a high point during the eleventh century. The sons of upper-class families (the “good people”) were trained in Chinese and Japanese studies at local schools and at the universities in the capital. Their sisters wrote generally only in Japanese, but they produced exquisite poetry, di-aries, and the first novel anywhere. In the other social classes, education probably ranged from illiteracy to the partial acquisi-tion of useful skills, especially that of writing with ink and brush not only in Chinese characters but also in Japanese script.

Akitada, with his university training, would have been adept at both, in addition to having a very good knowledge of the Chinese language, while the
shijo
Yutaka would associate characters only with their Japanese meaning. The emphasis of education was on supporting an efficient bureaucracy run by the “good people.”

A brief reference to the Ezo (modern Ainu), a people distinct in origin and custom from the Japanese, may explain the very real danger of Okisada and Kumo’s plan. Considered barbaric by the Japanese, the Ezo had been pushed northward for centuries until, by the tenth century, they were more or less pacified in Dewa and Mutsu, the northernmost provinces of Honshu. The pacification process had been achieved by allowing Ezo chieftains to become Japanese lords, often with the title of high constable of their territory. But in 939 the Dewa Ezo rebelled and in 1056 the Nine-Years War erupted when the Abe family, who had Ezo origins, rose against the governor of Mutsu. Thus the warrior lords in the unstable northern provinces close to Echigo and Sadoshima would have been obvious allies for Kumo and Okisada.

Finally, the story of the fake silver bars was suggested by an early Chinese legal case (# 9A) in Robert van Gulik’s translation of the
‘Tang-Yin-Pi-Shi
.