Finding Origins and Meaning in the Warring States

Abstract

This chapter looks at the warrior domain's response to Pax Tokugawa in “Finding Origins and Meaning in the Warring States,” a study of the ways in which the battles that brought an end to the Warring States period were remembered in Tosa domain over the Tokugawa period. It explores two interrelated aspects of how the warfare of the Warring States era was remembered in the Tokugawa era. One is how the outcome of the battle of Sekigahara authorized a centuries-long latent conflict in the Tokugawa period between people who identified with the winning and losing sides of this last great battle of the Warring States period. The other aspect is related to the “Great Peace” itself: the memory of the wartime activities of ancestors became important in the status politics of peacetime samurai because it served to supplement their legal identity as warriors. The chapter then elaborates on a body of writings from Tosa, particularly by partisans of the Chōsogabe and Yamauchi clans, that record or investigate clan histories of the sixteenth-century Unification era. Marking three stages in documenting clan relationships to that final period of pre-Tokugawa warfare, the chapter unveils complex motivations behind the creation and content of these discourses that illuminate the politics of war memory for peacetime samurai of the Tokugawa period.