A certain gentleman, Fujiwara no Kaneie by name, received a promotion. He was made vice-minister of war. What a nuisance! “The post was so distasteful,” his wife noted in her diary, “that he quite ignored his official duties.”

His boss, the war minister, sent a reproachful poem: “Threads in the same skein. Why then do they not meet?” Kaneie replied, “How sad to be told that being of the same skein should mean so little.” “Not meeting” suggests Kaneie’s truancy. “Same skein” could mean “same office.” Or “same family” — the all-powerful Fujiwara.

Where are we? In the 10th century, in the nation’s capital, Heian-kyo, today’s Kyoto. The indolently aristocratic, exquisitely cultured, ceremoniously mannered, squeamishly pacifist Heian Period (794-1185) is in full flower. The supreme literary masterpiece of the era, “The Tale of Genji,” is a generation in the future, but a promising precursor of greater writing to come is the “Kagero Nikki” (“The Gossamer Years”). Part-diary and part-memoir, it is the work of a high-born lady whose name is not known.

It is the first portrayal in Japanese literature of an anguished soul — hers. Heian was polygamous, and Kaneie, eight or nine times married and something of a philanderer besides (the poems cited above begin an extended exchange full of sexual, possibly homosexual, double-entendres; they must be read as they were no doubt written, with much winking and grinning). The diary is a neglected wife’s vent for dammed-up resentments that threaten at times to strangle her.

They are not our concern, however. This is a workaday story of the workaday world — comic, not tragic.

Japan’s government before the seventh century was no government at all. There was no country to govern, merely an assemblage of clans, essentially independent though paying vague homage to the same divine emperor.

A revolution changed all that. It broke out in 645. A branch of the Fujiwara clan sparked it, led it and rode it to power. They made Japan a nation. The model they looked to was China. Japan clothed itself in Chinese robes, decked itself in Chinese culture, did as much as it could with and in the Chinese language, imperfectly mastered, and imitated Chinese government, which was a vast bureaucracy. Japan’s rulers became officials, paper-shufflers. They spent their days — or were supposed to — as most of us do: at the office.

The war ministry was a dead end. No one who could help it made a career there. Love, music, poetry, flowers, beauty in all its manifestations, were what mattered to Heian courtiers. War and warriors were out of sight, out of mind. Courage was no virtue, cowardice no shame. There was nothing for ministry staff to do except, quite literally, stand on ceremony with one another. No wonder Kaneie found his new post “distasteful.” He lived from 929 to 990 and received his unwanted promotion around 962. It didn’t detain him long. Over time he rose to offices closer to the Imperial presence and more to his taste.

For Fujiwara no Kaneie (929-990), a job in the war ministry was
For Fujiwara no Kaneie (929-990), a job in the war ministry was "distasteful." | KIKUCHI YOSAI (990)/ PUBLIC DOMAIN

He became a power in the land, but what seemed to count far more than power was rank and its visible symbols. The civil service the revolution created was a rigid hierarchy. Promotion hinged on birth, not ability. There were 20 or so distinct ranks (the number varied from generation to generation) with names borrowed from Chinese Confucianism — “Benevolence,” “Righteousness” and so on, each rank divided into “Greater” and “Lesser,” or “Senior” and “Junior,” and assigned a cap of a specific color, as prescribed by Imperial edict, altered from time to time with ceremonial solemnity. There were prescribed modes of address between one rank and another, and it all must have been great fun, giving us today an impression of children at play in very high office. There was of course — presumably — more to it than that.

We cannot leave Heian — for we are about to — without mentioning a more characteristic and relevant office than the war ministry: the “Yin-Yang Bureau,” or bureau of divination. As an example of what it dealt with, there is this entry in a contemporary chronicle, quoted by Ivan Morris in “The World of the Shining Prince: Court Life in Ancient Japan”: “On the fourth day of the eighth month something appeared in the sky over the Datchi Gate. It looked like smoke but was not smoke; it looked like a rainbow but was not a rainbow.... People declared that nothing like it had ever been seen before.”

What could it mean? Morris comments: “The Masters of Yin-Yang announced that this odd manifestation presaged a typhoon, floods and fire, and the terrified people rushed into the streets for safety. Shortly afterwards there was an earthquake — the only disaster that had not been predicted.”

Heian decayed and crumbled, its 400 years of peace yielding, from the mid-12th century, to 400 years of civil war. The nation fell exhausted at last, around 1600, into peace. What would it bring? Few then living could imagine. One who could was a samurai named Mitsui Sokubei. The samurai topped the social hierarchy, and continued to do so throughout the Edo Period (1603-1868). But their principal occupation was gone, and the honor accorded it rang hollow. In 1616, Mitsui gave up his samurai rank and became a merchant.

It was his son, Mitsui Hachirobei (1622-94), who founded the Mitsui conglomerate that thrives to this day. He started small, buying and selling cloth. His methods were presciently modern: no bargaining, no credit, no distinction between noble and commoner clients, all treated with the deference and courtesy due a paying customer. On rainy days he handed out free umbrellas — which, unfurled, displayed the Mitsui logo for all to see, a brilliant advertising stroke. It was the birth of the commercial spirit we live so comfortably with today.

Edo’s fate mirrored Heian’s. Succumbing to internal rot, it gave way to a more robust and vigorous regime. The Meiji Period (1868-1912) “modernized” Japan. It set the nation in motion. It transformed a stagnant, isolated agrarian backwater into one of the most dynamic societies on Earth — commercial, industrialist, capitalist, ambitious, crass and ugly, as commercial industrial capitalism must be in its early stages at least.

To finer samurai spirits — nurtured, however anachronistically, on ancient ideals of absolute loyalty and eager self-sacrifice — this was anathema. A contemporary novel well captures the mood. “Ukigumo” (“Drifting Clouds”), by Futabatei Shimei (1864-1909) appeared in 1887. The very first paragraph sets the tone: “A swirling mass of men stream out of (Tokyo’s) Kanda gate, marching first in ant-like formation, then scuttling busily off in every direction.” It’s quitting time, the offices are emptying.

Bunzo, the main character, is one of the ants. He has just been laid off. His friend and former colleague, who survived the staff cuts, takes him to task: “Unreasonable or not, you can’t go against a superior.” Bunzo protests. He did no such thing. He meant no defiance. He merely “made a suggestion.” The friend stands his ground. Just say yes and carry on with your work, he insists — as he does. He’ll go far in this new world. Bunzo, of samurai birth, will wither — he’s withering already. A samurai kowtow to an office superior! Unthinkable. He fails to realize that he’s not a samurai anymore. There are no samurai anymore. They are all office workers.