(Reviewer's note: Macrons over vowels in Japanese names and terms cannot be transmitted correctly over the Internet. I have adopted the following conventions to render these vowels: a long 'o' is represented by 'oh'; a long 'u' by 'uu'. I apologize for any irritation this may arouse.)
In 1909, according to the essay in this book by Ohyama Kyohhei, the distinguished Japanese medievalist Hara Katsuroh first used the term chuusei (medieval) to signify a period in Japanese history, defining "the warrior class as the bearers of the new period and culture" (p. 352). The Kamakura and Muromachi periods -- the late twelfth through sixteenth centuries -- were classified as chuusei by both Japanese and Western historians. Parallels were drawn between Japanese warriors and European knights, and historians on both sides of the Pacific found similarities between the feudal system of medieval Europe and aspects of government, landholding, and lord-follower relationships in Japan.
If chuusei was seen as the age of the warrior, it was also seen as the age of the courtier's decline. The textbook explanation of the Genpei War, a civil conflict that took place from 1181-1185, is that it marked the end of the power and influence of Japan's civilian aristocracy. Henceforth emperor and court would play a legitimating role, but they would have no real access to political power. The failed effort of the Emperor Go-Daigo to reassert imperial power in the early fourteenth century was dismissed as a foolish attempt to turn the clock back.
For some time, however, Japanese and Western historians have been reevaluating the Kamakura period (1185-1333), arguing that the courtiers had been written off too soon. Warriors shared power with civilian aristocrats and court appointees, according to this view; and both warriors and courtiers fed themselves from the same landholding system that supported the civilian aristocracy in the classical age. Still, Kamakura was termed chuusei, and the Genpei War was seen as an abrupt break with the past that propelled a new class, the warriors, into governing power. The Kamakura Bakufu, a government by and for warriors that functioned in parallel with the imperial court in Kyoto, still seemed to mark a radically different political system from that of the classical past.
The argument that pervades many of the essays in The Origins of Japan's Medieval World is that the Kamakura period clings far too much to the old order to be called medieval, and that the medieval age -- characterized as a sharp break with the past in various aspects of history, not just in the status and occupation of the ruling elite -- began in the fourteenth century rather than at the end of the twelfth. It was then, according to editor Jeffrey P. Mass, that "the spell cast by courtier was finally broken" (p. 3) and Japan emerged into the true warrior age.
In this new scheme, like the old, the ruptu{e between the classical and the medieval orders is provided by warfare. But the overthrow of the Kamakura Bakufu, the brief Kenmu episode in which the Emperor Go-Daigo tried to gather political power into his own hands, and the intermittent warfare between his supporters and the new Muromachi Bakufu that drove him from the capital, were elements of a far more complex conflict than the Genpei War.
Mass and colleagues argue that life after Kenmu was transformed in many arenas and for many people in Japanese society. How well this argument works depends largely on the aspect of Japanese society examined. Certainly the status of courtiers was diminished far more in the fourteenth century than it had been in the twelfth, and warriors began to develop their own systems to legitimize their power and validate their position in society, rather than relyino entirely on systems borrowed from courtiers. Rupture seems most obvious in areas of central political power, control over the provinces, and landholding, but it can also be demonstrated in religious affairs and in the circumstances of non-elites.
Mass (Chapter 1) sets the stage by exploring changes in the apportionment of land rights, from a system in which rights depended on status to one in which they were bargained and traded. The challenge to the status-based authority of old proprietor elites found a parallel in the exercise of military power in the 1330s by provincial warriors, hitherto subordinate to the proprietary class. Thomas Nelson (Chapter 4) discovers important changes in the way the center (the Muromachi Bakufu) dealt with the provinces, as it began to violate old geographical boundaries in its appointments of provincial governors (shugo).
Thomas Conlan (Chapter 2) and Seno Seiichi (Chapter 3), while not directly engaging the issue of rupture, explore the meaning of loyalty and treachery among warriors in battle. Although the fourteenth century has been called an age of turncoats, Conlan points out that warriors with independent power bases were expected to act out of rational self-interest, not loyalty, and overlords who needed their services were expected to reward them appropriately. Seno's chapter examines the reaction of one Kyushu warrior family, the Kikuchi, to betrayal by its erstwhile allies, and the disastrous consequences for the K}kuchi when their anger at betrayal impelled them to choose the wrong side in the civil war of the 1330s.
Andrew Goble's elegantly crafted essay on Emperor Go-Daigo (Chapter 6) is, in my opinion, the highlight of the book. The essay argues that the Kenmu episode was a revolution rather than a restoration as it is usually characterized, and represents a rupture with the Heian-Kamakura order and the onset of the medieval age. Goble focuses on the way in which portraits of Go-Daigo suggest new concepts of sovereignty and legitimacy; in particular, when Go-Daigo embraced coercion as a legitimate function of the throne, he made "the first truly medieval statement about the nature of sovereignty" (p. 135).
New types of village organization, and a marked decline in the status of women, indicate that change permeated society rather than floating on the top. Among the more successful arguments in support of redating the beginning of chuusei appears in Kristina Kade Troost's article (Chapter 5) on the development of the corporate village that differentiated between members and outsiders, and provided villagers with the collective power to bargain successfully with elites. Here the fourteenth century appears as a real turning point, as indicated by the fact that most villages in Japan were settled in that century or later, while villages settled earlier seem to have disappeared. Hitomi Tonomura (Chapter 7) examines changes in women's lives that penetrated the arenas of family, sexuality, and work, and cut across status lines. The shift from predominantly wife-visiting and matrilocal marriage patterns to patrilocal ones, was one significant mark of a transformation in gender relations.
Cultural forms changed more slowly than political structures, and one can argue that in literature, the spell of courtiers was by no means broken in the fourteenth century. Robert Huey's article on imperially-sponsored poetry anthologies (Chapter 8) shows how warriors gradually asserted their influence and control over these official collections; but the cultural values represented in the poetry were still largely those of the Heian court. Court values permeated some new cultural forms such as Noh theater, even though bakufu patronage enabled its development as a serious cultural form: Paul Varley (Chapter 9) demonstrates the dramatist Zeami's creation of a theatrical warrior who was as skillful in traditional court culture (bun) as he was in the arts of war ( bu). G. Cameron Hurst (Chapter 10) further examines the dual character of the ideal warrior as the exemplar of both bun and bu. Warrior values changed in the fourteenth century, but did so in part by appropriating Confucian precepts and the emphasis on etiquette and correctly- performed rituals that had marked classical court society.
The relationship between warrior government and religious institutions seems to have changed sharply after the establishment of the Muromachi bakufu. Mikael Adolphson (Chapter 11) demonstrates how the bakufu undermined the judicial immunities and economic power of the monastic complex of Enryakuji, a major component of the classical-era power structure. Martin Collcutt (Chapter 12) explores changes in Rinzai Zen institutions through an examination of the career of the Zen master Musoh Soseki, who accepted the patronage, in turn, of the Kamakura Bakufu regents, Go-Daigo, and the Muromachi Bakufu. Both scholars point out the emergence of Zen institutions that were clearly subordinate to the latter bakufu, in contrast to classicial Buddhist institutions that shared, if not entirely equally, in the exercise of political and economic power. In a final essay on fourteenth-century religious life (Chapter 13) , Carl Beilefeldt focuses on the Buddhist history Genkoh shakusho, arguing that it represents an innovative effort to establish the historical position of Zen, linking it with both Chinese cultural tradition and the earliest Japanese Buddhism.
Later historians have characterized the fourteenth century as an age of turncoats, and have dismissed its two most prominent actors, the Muromachi shogun Ashikaga Takauji and the Emperor Go-Daigo, respectively as a traitor and an anachronistic fool. The last two essays examine the place of the fourteenth century in historical studies. I.J. McMullen (Chapter 14) explores the treatment of Takauji in the historical works of Tokugawa intellectuals Asama Keisai and Yamaga Sokoh, demonstrating how Asama's emphasis on a strict geneaological basis for legitimate rule caused him to characterize Takauji as an usurper, while Yamaga's concern for the moral qualifications of rulers and competent government led him to blame Go-Daigo for the collapse of the Kenmu polity and to evaluate Takauji more favorably. Ohyama Kyohhei's contribution explores the development of modern historical studies of the fourteenth century, assessing the contributions of "political," "cultural," and Marxist analyses, and ending with a discussion of contemporary historians Kuroda Toshio, Amino Yoshihiko, and Murai Shohsuke.
Mass and colleagues make a good case in this volume that the fourteenth century, not the twelfth, marks the true beginning of chuusei. Yet it still seems very hard to categorize the entire Kamakura age as truly classical, given an experimental polity that incorporated warriors, changes in landholding and inheritance patterns, the introduction of cash payments for rents and taxes, and new trends in Buddhism that emphasized evangelism and crossed class boundaries. It may never be entirely reasonable to draw sharp lines between eras, since doing so obscures the differential rates of change in different social arenas, and the fact that transitions can be slow, halting, and sometimes non-linear.
Still, we need periodization, if only to organize our class syllabi. If we fail immediately to hustle the Kamakura age off to the "classical" subsection of our courses, it won't be because this volume has failed to present us with plenty of justification for doing so. The most important contribution of this book may be to start us thinking about the pitfalls of rigid periodization and to make us recognize the ambiguities of transitional ages -- such as both Kamakura and the fourteenth century.