Editor’s introduction: Kuroda Toshio and his scholarship

Abstract

KURODA TOSHIO (1926-1993) was a historian ofJapan's medieval period who has greatly influenced, if not reshaped, the field of Japanese history with several innovative theories. His ideas went against the grain of existing twentieth-century scholarship, and hence were revolutionary and controversial. In particular, Kuroda's views on medieval religion shifted the focus from the so-called new schools of Kamakura Buddhism which had dominated scholarship up to that point. These schools stand as Japan's most prominent forms of Buddhism today, but in the medieval period their influence was not yet pervasive. Kuroda sought to identify the predominant form of religion then by exploring the place of religion in medieval Japan's social, political, and intellectual world. The conclusions he arrived at challenged the conventional wisdom among scholars. He asserted that it was not