Nakayama Tadachika

Who They Were

Nakayama Tadachika (中山忠親, なかやま ただちか) was a Japanese court noble of the late Heian period, born in 1131 and dead on 23 April 1195. He belonged to the Fujiwara family, the aristocratic clan that had dominated the politics of the imperial court for centuries by marrying its daughters into the imperial line and serving as regents and chancellors. His father was Fujiwara no Tadamune.

Tadachika lived through the years in which real power in Japan moved away from the great families of the capital and into the hands of provincial military houses. He is remembered less as a political actor than as a writer: his records of court life and of the wars of his age survive as historical documents for a period that is otherwise poorly described.

Life and Career

Tadachika was born in 1131, in the first year of the era name Tenshō (天承), during the reign of Emperor Sutoku. He was raised inside the court aristocracy at Heian-kyō, the capital city laid out in 794 that is now Kyoto, and he held the rank and offices expected of a noble of his lineage. His occupation is recorded as that of a samurai, a term that in this period still meant a warrior retainer of the court and the great houses rather than the landed military class it would later describe.

His marriages tied him into the same tight network of court families. One of his wives was a daughter of Taira no Tokitada, a prominent noble of the Taira house; another was a daughter of Fujiwara no Mitsufusa. His mother was a daughter of Fujiwara no Ieyasu. He had a son, Nakayama Kanemune, and a daughter who married Sanjō Kinfusa.

Tadachika's adult life coincided with the Genpei War of 1180 to 1185, the conflict between the Taira and Minamoto clans that ended with the destruction of Taira power and the establishment of Minamoto no Yoritomo's military government at Kamakura. In 1185 the Heian period closed and the Kamakura period opened, with political authority passing to the warrior class. Tadachika outlived that transition by a decade, dying on 23 April 1195.

Why They Matter

The value of Tadachika's writing lies in its position. He was a court insider recording events at the moment the court lost its primacy, which makes his accounts a witness to the shift from aristocratic rule to military rule. Later historians of the period rely on such noble diaries and records because the winners of the Genpei War left their own version of events, and the court's perspective is otherwise easy to lose.

He is also a useful figure for understanding what the word samurai meant before it meant what it means today. A man of Fujiwara descent, married into the Taira and Fujiwara nobility, living in the capital and writing about the court, is recorded as a samurai — evidence that the category was still bound up with service to the court rather than with provincial landholding and arms alone.

The Name in Japanese

The name is written 中山忠親, read in kana as なかやま ただちか, and romanised as Nakayama Tadachika. The family name comes first, as is standard in Japanese.

中山 (なかやま, Nakayama) — the surname.

• 中 (なか, naka): "middle", "inside", "centre". It is the same character used in 中央 (ちゅうおう, chūō, "centre") and 家中 (かちゅう, kachū, "within the household").
• 山 (やま, yama): "mountain". One of the most common elements in Japanese place names and surnames, as in 富士山 (ふじさん, Fujisan, Mount Fuji).

Read together, 中山 is a common Japanese surname, literally "middle mountain" or "central mountain". It is also the name of a place, and noble families of this era frequently took their family name from a residence, estate, or district.

忠親 (ただちか, Tadachika) — the given name.

• 忠 (ただ, tada): "loyalty", "devotion", "faithfulness". It appears in words such as 忠誠 (ちゅうせい, chūsei, "loyalty") and 忠実 (ちゅうじつ, chūjitsu, "faithful"). In personal names it is read ただ.
• 親 (ちか, chika): here it means "close", "intimate", "kindred", from the sense of closeness between people. The same character, read おや, means "parent", and read しん it appears in 親切 (しんせつ, shinsetsu, "kindness") and 親族 (しんぞく, shinzoku, "relatives").

So the given name carries the sense of a loyal and affectionate person — an auspicious name of exactly the kind the Fujiwara aristocracy favoured. Note that 親 is a very common element in Heian-period male names, where it is usually read ちか, as in the name of Tadachika's own father, Tadamune, whose name shares the 忠 element.

Legacy

Tadachika's son Nakayama Kanemune carried the Nakayama name into the next generation, and the family line continued within the court nobility. His daughter's marriage to Sanjō Kinfusa linked him to another great court house, extending the same web of alliances that had shaped his own life.

His enduring contribution is documentary. Because he wrote during the years when the Heian court gave way to the Kamakura military government, his records preserve the view from inside the capital at the exact moment that view stopped being the one that mattered. For anyone studying the language of this period — the late classical Japanese of court diaries and chronicles — the world Tadachika described is the world that produced it.