Sakyo no Daibu Michimasa

For our third print this year we have another member of the Fujiwara family, Michimasa. It has been common in this series to find that most of the men are identified by their position (can I say 'job'?), and Michimasa is no exception - the title 'Sakyo no Daibu' indicates that he was the administrator responsible for the 'left' half of the capital city. I wonder though, just what such a title really means. Did he get up in the morning, head over to the 'office', work all day at various city problems, and then come home in the evening and put his feet up? Really? Somehow I find that a bit difficult to visualize - my image of these Heian-era aristocrats as foppish men in cumbersome kimono sitting around writing love poetry doesn't quite match this image of a man with daily work to do ...

Of course it's impossible to get any kind of realistic picture of what daily life was like for those people - so much has changed in the intervening thousand years. It's useless trying to use our experience of present-day life to try and visualize the life of somebody in such a bygone age. But when I look at the poem, and read about some of the background behind it ... I'm not so sure.

Unlike many of the poems in this series, which seem to depict an imaginary situation, it seems that this one is 'true-to-life'. Michimasa had been 'seeing' a lady, an ex-priestess from the Ise shrine, but her father, Retired Emperor Sanjo, had put a stop to it by posting guards around her. Now here is a story that seems to cross all boundaries of time and space. Don't we read about similar incidents in many different cultures: the king locking his daughter in the castle to 'protect' her; the noble arranging a marriage for his daughter in an attempt to advance his own position ...? The idea of treating one's offspring as 'property' to be controlled at will is certainly not unique to this old Japanese culture.

I don't know the reason behind the old Emperor's disapproval of Michimasa - perhaps his rank was too low, or perhaps it was something to do with her shrine connection - but I'm sure that whatever it was, it was something that didn't seem too important to his daughter.

I suspect that some of you may be chuckling to yourselves as you read my comments. You may be criticizing these fathers now, you are saying to me. 'But just wait until your own two beautiful daughters are a few years older ... Then we'll see if your story changes!'

Well I wonder about that. As I write this they are 12 and 14 years old, and haven't started bringing boyfriends home yet. I know though, that one day they will, and I suppose that when I meet those boys, with their (to me) strange way of dressing, and their (to me) impolite ways of speaking, I may feel some resistance to the idea that they could be close to my daughters. But of course I will not 'post any guards', and I will not try to influence their choice of partner in any way. I like to think that I have brought them up in a way that has encouraged them to think for themselves and to consider carefully the consequences of their actions. As they approach full adulthood, it will be increasingly they that have to make the choices, not I.

But on the other hand, perhaps it would be better for my girls if I were to step in and stop them from seeing their boyfriends. That way, only those boys who were really serious would try and find a way to get in to see them. Perhaps those boys would even start writing poetry and have the poems sent in by messenger! After all, if Sanjo In hadn't posted those guards, we wouldn't have this poem! What do you think - was it worth it?

May 1997

Translation by Tom Galt - 1982 Princeton University Press