People take their eating, sleeping and bathing habits for granted, so they seldom write about them. This makes it very difficult and time consuming to research everyday habits from historical sources. Even though everyone thinks of them as natural, there is great diversity in such habits in contemporary society as well as historically and they reveal much about the key values in each society.
In many societies family life revolves around the kitchen and the dining place. Thus it is somewhat surprising to discover that food and the eating place are seldom mentioned in well-known works of Japanese literature from a thousand years ago, such as The Pillow Book and The Tale of Genji. Instead, as I argue in my forthcoming book on sleep habits in Heian-period Japan, families were constituted in and around the sleeping place. In my research I discovered that aristocratic girls received a curtained bed on the occasion of their coming-of-age ceremony. Such a bed served to confirm – or in some cases to elevate – a girl’s social status and prepare her for marriage. When a man was courting a woman, he would visit her behind her curtains, and after three nights followed by an exchange of poems they would exchange vows. Thus, a woman’s bedroom was the place in which a marriage was established, children created and much family time was spent. This is quite different from the custom of a dowry given to the bridegroom’s family in other cultures. It shows that there was a strong matrilineal element to aristocratic families in Heian Japan, despite the patriarchal influence from China and the fact that marriages were often arranged by parents for the sake of the family rather than the individual.
You asked about sleep times. We often assume that before the invention of electric light people slept from dusk to dawn and stayed awake throughout the hours of daylight. But this is not the true picture. There is, in fact, evidence of an active nightlife throughout history, both for work and for pleasure, and also many stories about daytime sleep.
You may be aware that I have studied the habit of inemuri in Japan – dozing off while officially doing something else, such as riding on a train or attending a business meeting – and that one of my articles which was published on BBC Future has been translated into Chinese. Japanese people have often explained the prevalence of inemuri to me in the following way: Life in Japan is so busy that we are constantly exhausted and cannot help dozing off during the day whenever there is a quiet moment; we are able to make up for lack of sleep at night in this way because Japan is such a safe country. However, through studying sleep historically, it has become evident that dozing off in the company of others has been common since ancient times and has never been restricted to people with busy lifestyles or those living in a safe environment.
In popular culture, it is only the samurai who are believed to be able to stay alert while asleep. In Kurosawa’s film ‘The Seven Samurai’ the eponymous heroes protect a peasant village and take turns to keep watch at night. Kikuchiyo, who claims to be a samurai but is actually of peasant stock, falls into a deep sleep and two of his comrades demonstrate how easily he could be overcome in the event of a real attack. Kyūzō, on the other hand, as the epitome of samurai virtue, sleeps in the sitting position while embracing his sword. He senses approaching danger and quickly disappears into the woods and kills the attackers before the others, who have been awake, have detected a sound. Inemuri is a way to catch some shut-eye without withdrawing completely.
In the seventh century, the Japanese government introduced the ritsuryō system of administration based on the laws and codes of Tang China. This included the introduction of a calendar and time system based on a sexagenary cycle of zodiacs and basic elements. Thus Japan became part of the Chinese cosmology with divination based on time calculations exerting a significant influence on people’s daily lives at court. In addition, civil servants had to study the Chinese classics, as well as mathematics, astronomy and calendar science.
However, in practice the Japanese model of administration soon came to diverge from the more rigorous Chinese system. Japanese aristocrats displayed no great enthusiasm for science and often left the mastery of such skills to the lower ranks. Instead, they preferred the pursuit of beauty, which they often expressed in their poetry. Everyday activities such as eating and sleeping were rarely scheduled according to the officially announced zodiac hours and people paid more attention to other time signals. For instance, it was the first cock’s crow in the morning that signalled the start of the day and the time when a man who had spent the night with his lover should return home. People loved to observe the natural world throughout the year – be it blossoms, the snow or fireflies – and they adjusted their clothes to the changing seasons.
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