Late Medieval Japan Research Articles

What Rats Reveal about Cooking in Late Medieval Japan

The Illustrated Rat’s Tale (Nezumi no sōshi emaki), an anonymous Japanese picture scroll created between 1550–1650, depicts a rat wedding banquet, and for a period with few other visual references of cooking, it is an important source for understanding the staff and procedures for food preparation in elite warrior households, which it emulates. The wedding party of the rat lord takes inspiration from the festivities for late medieval (1400–1600) warlords, and it includes rodent equivalents of the great performers and cultural influencers of the age. Analysis reveals the gendered division of labor and status in the duties of food preparation in a late medieval (rodent) warrior household with male chefs in charge of flavoring and carving at the top of the kitchen hierarchy and female servants performing manual labor outside at the bottom. For both rats and humans, the picture scroll further demonstrates that food played a powerful role in the representation of authority.

Изобличение нерадивого вассала в порицаниях Ода Нобунага для Сакума Нобумори и Нобухидэ. Ода Нобунага. Памятная записка / Пер. со старояп. и прим. С.А. Полхова

The article examines the reprimands of the ruler of Late Medieval Japan, Oda Nobunaga, written in 1580 and addressed to his high-ranking vassal Sakuma Nobumori and his son Sakuma Nobuhide. Copies of this document have been preserved as part of the Shinchō-kō ki chronicle. Sakuma Nobumori, one of the highranking vassals of Oda Nobunaga, who commanded the siege of the Ozaka fortress, fell out of favor in 1580 after Ozaka came under Nobunaga’s control. Probably this disfavor is connected with Nobunaga’s desire to redistribute the lands and control over the vassals in Oda house, and the reprimands were supposed to justify Sakuma Nobumori’s separation from power in the eyes of other samurai. Nobunaga condemned Nobumori for inaction during the siege of the fortress, as well as for inappropriate treatment of subordinate military commanders and stinginess. He recalled the past failures of Nobumori and set his other commanders as an example to him (Akechi Mitsuhide, Hasiba Hideyoshi, etc.), who conquered new lands and glorified themselves. Criticizing Sakuma, Nobunaga simultaneously creates for his vassals the ideal of a commander subject to him, sophisticated in the way of the warrior and skillfully managing his vassal house. Thus, Nobunaga relied on ideas and doctrines that were widespread in Late Medieval Japan. Subsequently, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who became Nobunaga’s successor, also addressed similar documents to the vassals who incurred his wrath. The annex to the article contains a commented translation of Nobunaga’s condemnations into Russian.

Child adoption as a factor in the coalescence of temples, aristocrats and the Muromachi shoguns in late medieval Japan

Child adoption as a factor in the coalescence of temples, aristocrats and the Muromachi shoguns in late medieval Japan

The Medieval Origins of Smithian Growth: The Proliferation of Occupations and Commodities in Japan, 1261–1638

AbstractWhile early-modernists tend to believe that the period around 1600 saw a structural break in Japan’s economic history, research by medievalists since the mid-1970s has suggested that a market economy was on the rise from the 14th century onwards. This article examines several listings of occupations and commodities compiled between the 13th and the early 17th centuries to see if a proliferation of non-agricultural activities was underway before c.1600. As Adam Smith envisaged, the separation of one productive activity from another, i.e. an increasing division of labour, will lead to economic growth. Since this type of market-led change, often called Smithian growth, has been considered an ‘early modern’ phenomenon by economic historians, it is worth examining if there were signs of an increasing division of labour in late medieval Japan. The article’s findings indicate that some signs of occupational and product differentiation appeared by the 16th century. As far as Smithian growth is concerned, therefore, the article concludes that there was some degree of continuity between the medieval and the early modern periods.

The Bunbu Paradigm Reconsidered: Warrior Literacy and Symbolic Violence in Late Medieval Japan

The Bunbu Paradigm Reconsidered: Warrior Literacy and Symbolic Violence in Late Medieval Japan

An Entrepreneurial Aristocrat: Matsugi Hisanao and the Forging of Imperial Service in Late Medieval Japan

An Entrepreneurial Aristocrat: Matsugi Hisanao and the Forging of Imperial Service in Late Medieval Japan

Casting Spells: Combat Charms and Secret Scrolls in the Warrior Fiction of Late Medieval Japan

Casting Spells: Combat Charms and Secret Scrolls in the Warrior Fiction of Late Medieval Japan

中世後期の集団間紛争の解決における「罪科の成敗」 : 住宅破却・焼却の「成敗」を中心に

中世後期の集団間紛争の解決における「罪科の成敗」 : 住宅破却・焼却の「成敗」を中心に

‘公武體制’의 政治構造와 祈禱 : 室町時代 새로운 政治體制像 試論

‘公武體制’의 政治構造와 祈禱 : 室町時代 새로운 政治體制像 試論

Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky

Reviewed by: Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky Karl Friday (bio) Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan. By Peter D. Shapinsky. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2014. xiv, 326 pages. $65.00, cloth; $25.00, paper. In this long-awaited study, Peter Shapinsky literally opens new territory with regard to our understanding and definitions of medieval lordship, casting his eye seaward, to explore sixteenth-century Japan “from the water-line” (p. 7). Despite their obvious importance to an island nation, mariners, navies, and maritime activity have hitherto received surprisingly little attention from premodern historians, particularly those publishing in English. In fact, George Ballard’s 1921 overview of naval history, a handful of studies of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century “Japanese pirate” (wakō) activities in the coastal waters of China and Korea, and brief treatments of eighth- to twelfth-century sea banditry in broader monographs on Heian warriors and warfare constitute pretty much the extent of the literature on this subject.1 Shapinsky’s new volume is a welcome contribution. [End Page 406] He focuses his study on the fortunes of a group of loosely related families surnamed Murakami, who plied the waters of the Seto Inland Sea. Although Shapinsky uses the term “pirates” in the book’s subtitle, he is quick to point out that the Murakami and their associates had little in common with the eye-patch-wearing, parrot-toting characters familiar to fans of Errol Flynn movies and Disneyland rides. While they did engage in their share of Blackbeard-esque seaborne raiding and banditry, they are, he argues, more properly viewed as maritime counterparts of the land-based daimyō of the period: “sea lords” and masters of autonomous “littoral estates” and networks of people, resources, and travel lanes, in Shapinsky’s terminology. Such sea lords, he says, operated primarily in the islands and channels of the Inland Sea, where waterways served as the principal routes for travel, communication, and transport of goods. Here they built domains based on protection networks, control of maritime production and trade, and the patronage of competing land-based patrons and suzerains. Emerging during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, they exploited the growth of commercial market systems in and around the Inland Sea area, collecting fees from merchants and political authorities to guarantee safe passage for shipping. By the sixteenth century, they were behaving even more like sengoku daimyō, maintaining coastal fortifications (“sea castles”) at strategic choke points along interisland waterways, and purveying naval forces to the regional hegemons of the era. Their autonomy, which depended on their ability to market their services among competing daimyō, ended when Toyotomi Hideyoshi became strong enough to impose vassalage on them, handling them as he did his other liegemen—including moving them to other parts of the country, away from their ancestral bases, and thereby rendering them indistinguishable from other early modern daimyō. Shapinsky sharpens his point concerning the resemblance of Murakami predominance and power to other forms of medieval lordship with an extensive discussion of the extent to which medieval and early modern historical sources contrived to conceal the roles of sea lords within the late medieval polity. He argues that written records from the sixteenth century [End Page 407] need to be understood as the product of authorities and institutions suffering from what he terms “terracentrism,” a bias that premised land-based authority and political economy as normative, and sought to impose this “particular, self-serving perspective, obscuring alternative visions and agendas” (p. 8). Intriguingly, he notes, the Murakami themselves eventually became party to this same distortion of the historical record, during their early modern transformation into land-based domainal officials and lords, which included the creation of genealogies and chronicles that portrayed their ancestors as faithful retainers to regional lieges—in particular the Mōri and the Tokugawa. The book is more encyclopedic and descriptive than thesis-centered, offering up a wealth of detailed information on a wide range of subtopics relating to piracy and seafarers in premodern Japan. In his introduction, Shapinsky sets the stage nicely, outlining his reasons for rejecting the term “pirate...

Review: Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan

Review: Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan

A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan by David Spafford (review)

A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan by David Spafford (review)

Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky (review)

Reviewed by: Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky Noell Wilson Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan. By Peter D. Shapinsky. Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2014. 327 pages. Hardcover $65.00; softcover $25.00. Peter Shapinsky’s Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan is an impressive study of sea power and state formation that resituates medieval Japanese history within a dynamic East Asian maritime world. The core interpretive goal of this book is to rehabilitate the conventional image of the premodern Japanese pirate from a violent and nefarious wakō, vilified by Ming China and Chosŏn Korea alike, to a savvy littoral authority who in fact substantially shaped premodern Japanese political and economic development by imposing order in maritime spaces. Shapinsky accomplishes this recasting through an innovative exploration of how littoral magnates (his “sea lords”) cultivated not only recognition by land-based authorities, but also the organizational tools that were most characteristic of ruling provincial lords (daimyo) within premodern Japan’s terracentric power structure. The book contains six numbered chapters covering, roughly, the period 1300–1600 (his “late medieval”), beginning with a historical overview of elite Japanese representations of the sea and how shifts in these worldviews shaped the significance of kaizoku (sea bandits) in Japan before 1300. Shapinsky bases this analysis on ancient texts, such as Kojiki, to explore a continuum of terracentrism that “stretched between the desire of the land-based court to incorporate the sea into state institutions and perceptions of the sea as terrifying, unknowable, uncontrollable space” (p. 36). This narrative draws on a rich synthesis of sources, ranging from familiar works of literature such as Konjaku monogatari to less-often-mined texts such as the seventh-century Chinese Nan shi (History of the Southern Dynasties); documents from Kongōbiji, a Mt. Kōya temple complex; and fourteenth-century Gyōki maps of Buddhist cosmology, which reveal the sea as both integrated into, yet partially distinct from, landforms. [End Page 293] Some of Shapinsky’s most compelling evidence emerges from tracing the etymology and use of terms such as ama and kaijin (distinct character combinations both translated as “sea people”) and how literary sources, such as Kojiki and Wamyōruijushō (an early tenth-century dictionary), situated these littoral populations, initially designated as seafaring “Others,” along a “continuum of incorporation and fear” (p. 38). By the Muromachi period, the shogunate had acknowledged the utility of kaizoku in protecting sanctioned trade with Ming China, while local daimyo continued to outlaw piracy to maintain their tenuous monopoly on violence. This is an ambitious chapter that primarily surveys the emergence of piracy in Japan before the fourteenth century and within the larger context of the sea as an evolving historical imaginary. Yet with eight separately titled subsections in just thirty-four pages, the chapter does not always flow with a clear interpretive coherence, and the final section, “Effects of Increased Maritime Exchange,” while critical background for later arguments about the role of kaizoku in medieval economic development, seems tacked on to the chapter as an afterthought. Chapter 2 explores how the growth of local authority and commerce in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries catalyzed the transformation of kaizoku into sea lords. The chapter’s core argument is that sea lords emerged as the scope of commercialization increased with the expansion of maritime authority, although it stops short of identifying this relationship as either causal or parallel. It explores three limitations on early sea lord power: geographic scale, generational continuity, and number of patrons. Yet even with these challenges to the consolidation of authority, his sea lords leveraged the confluence of political decentralization, military strife, and economic growth to gradually increase the stability and scope of their influence. Shapinsky excavates this trajectory by exploring the relationship between “local maritime magnates” and a few littoral estates, particularly the island estate of Yugeshima (p. 82). Here, a fascinating case study is the rise of sea lord Ben no Bō Shōyo, who exploited the waning power of Kyoto and Kamakura in the early 1300s to aggrandize his influence, using...

Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky

Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan by Peter D. Shapinsky

A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan by David Spafford (review)

A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan by David Spafford (review)

What’s in a Name?: House Revival, Adoption, and the Bounds of Family in Late Medieval Japan

David Spafford examines the relationship between warrior houses and their names in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Japan. Widespread reliance on adoption of heirs and the less common revivals of extinct houses reveal how late medieval warriors framed the membership and boundaries of the house ( ie ). Together and separately, adoptions and revivals force us to reckon with the malleable nature of warrior houses—which included both kin and non-kin—and their essentially political character. They force us to think through the several dimensions of the ie as an analytical framework: heraldic group, house/lineage, household. The decisions of individuals and individual lineages about naming, affiliation, and identity demonstrate both that a house’s surname served to symbolize familial continuity and that the openly constructed nature of the house-as-multigenerational-named-entity allowed strategic use of marriage and adoption for family survival through the long age of civil strife.

David Spafford. A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan.

David Spafford. A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan.

A sense of place: the political landscape in late medieval Japan

A Sense of Place examines the vast Kanto region as a locus of cultural identity and an object of familial attachment during the political and military turmoil of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in Japan. Through analysis of memoirs, letters, chronicles, poetry, travelogues, lawsuits, land registers, and archeological reports, David Spafford explores the relationships of the eastern elites to the space they inhabited: he considers the region both as a whole, in its literary representations and political and administrative dimensions, and as an aggregation of discrete locales, where struggles over land rights played out alongside debates about the meaning of ties between families and their holdings. Spafford also provides the first historical account in English of medieval castle building and the castellan revolution of the late fifteenth century, which militarized the countryside and radically transformed the exercise of authority over territory.Simultaneously, the book reinforces a sense of the eastern elite's anxieties and priorities, detailing how, in their relation to land and place, local elites displayed a preference for past precedent and inherited wisdom. Even amidst the changes wrought by war, this inclination, although quite at odds with their conventional reputation for ruthless pragmatism and forward thinking, prevailed.

Battling Tengu, Battling Conceit Visualizing Abstraction in The Tale of the Handcart Priest

sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Tale of Handcart Priest tells of an eccentric Zen practitioner's encounter with legendary Tarobo, a tengu of Mt. Atago who is attracted to priest because of priest's excessive pride. This article provides a close reading of Tale of Handcart Priest in its historical and literary context, drawing upon such related works as noh plays Kuruma-zo and Zegai, otogizoshi Matsuhime monogatari and Itozakura no monogatari, and puppet play Shuten Doji wakazakari. I discuss significance of tengu, carts, and priests in Japanese textual and pictorial sources from twelfth through eighteenth centuries, as well as possibilities for psychological realism in larger world of medieval Japanese fiction. Taking a psychoanalytic interpretive approach, I argue that in Kuruma-zo soshi and other medieval and Edo-period literary sources, characters' struggles with tengu can often be read allegorically as externalized depictions of those characters' internal struggles with their own demons of conceit.KEYWORDS: tengu-Zen-otogizoshi-nara ehon-setsuwa-noh-Tarobo- Zegaibo-medieval Buddhist fiction(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)At some time in sixteenth or early seventeenth century, an anonymous author composed a short work of fiction known as Kuruma-zo soshi ..., The Tale of Handcart Priest. Classified today as an otogizoshi ..., an amorphous and eclectic genre of medieval Japanese prose literature, Kuruma-zo soshi survives in a single illustrated manuscript in possession of Kyoto University Library: a colorful, likely seventeenth-century nara ehon ...,1 pages of which were unbound at an unknown time and mounted to form an exquisite hand scroll. In 1941, manuscript was reproduced in a fine facsimile edition (with a total of three hundred numbered copies), and in 2002, it was photographically reproduced in a series of books devoted to Kyoto University Library collection of otogizoshi (Kyoto Teikoku Daigaku 1941; Kyoto Daigaku Bungakubu Kokugogaku Kokubungaku Kenkyushitsu 2002, 80-116). Yet despite its relative fame in Japan, Kuruma-zo soshi is almost wholly unknown in English-speaking academic world, where, along with most nara ehon, it has been neglected by literary and art historians alike.Kuruma-zo soshi is fantastic tale of an eccentric Zen Buddhist practitioner by name of Kuruma-zo, the Handcart Priest, who is said to have wandered Japan in a rickety two-wheeled cart. story is based, in part, upon noh play Kuruma-zo ..., first recorded performance of which was held in Nara in tenth month of 1514,2 a century or more before transcription of Kyoto University Kuruma-zo soshi manuscript. Like its source play, Kuruma-zo soshi concerns a day in life of an itinerant handcart priest, a type of lowlevel Buddhist renunciant of whom little is now known, but who Tokue Gensei argues was a relatively common figure in late-medieval Japan. Tokue posits that these mendicant beggar-priests employed their carts as both rolling homes and platforms from which to preach, and that in their sermons, they expounded upon metaphorical implications of their carts as vehicles of Buddhist Truth (Tokue 1962; Tokue 2006, 150 and 164). In Kuruma-zo soshi, Handcart Priest confronts a succession of hostile tengu ... (anti-Buddhist, supernatural demon-bird-men) who challenge him on significance of his cart and seek to punish him for his pride. After a protracted battle of wits and magic-a struggle that extends well beyond range of noh play Kuruma-zo-the Handcart Priest succeeds in driving offthe tengu horde.Like many otogizoshi, which are often concerned with otherworldly creatures, magical settings, and improbable events, Kuruma-zo soshi can be seen to function on a symbolic level by depicting Buddhist and psychological abstractions as external, concrete phenomena, allowing audiences privilege of visualizing invisible, or seeing unseen. …

War and State Building in Medieval Japan (review)

Reviewed by: War and State Building in Medieval Japan Bruce L. Batten War and State Building in Medieval Japan. Edited by John A. Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth. Stanford University Press, 2010. 192 pages. Hardcover $60.00; softcover $19.95. Among the many conference volumes on Japanese history, this one stands out for its brevity and coherence. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two editors are political economists, not historians. Although one of them (Rosenbluth) has published widely on modern Japan, neither editor can claim prior expertise on the subject of this book, which is aptly summarized by its title, War and State Building in Medieval Japan. War and State Building owes its origins to a workshop held in Kyoto in March 2004, which the editors organized to "bridge the divide between history and social science" (p. v). To that end, they invited six historians of medieval Japan: three Americans (Karl Friday, Carol Richmond Tsang, and Thomas Conlan), one Frenchman (Pierre Souyri), and two Japanese (Susumu Ike and Tsuguharu Inaba), each of whom contributes a chapter to the present volume. In this volume, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth apply recent (and not-so-recent) theorizing on state formation to the case of late medieval Japan. The basic argument, à la Charles Tilly, is that in Japan, as in Europe, warfare played a crucial role in the emergence of the modern, territorial state. This will hardly come as a surprise to most readers of this journal; it would be difficult, I think, to find a specialist who disagrees with the notion that warfare was a catalyst to state building in late medieval and early modern Japan. That said, this volume does present a refreshing take on the matter. The editors and several of the contributors (particularly Inaba, Tsang, and Souryi) favor a "bottom-up" approach, focusing on popular movements and resistance rather than the exploits and accomplishments of "great men" such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. According to the editors, peasants' "willingness to supply resources for large armies lies at the root of Japan's political unification in the sixteenth century" (p. 4). More generally, "the main story of the emergence of the modern territorial state is a Hobbesian one of distraught peasants exchanging financial and labor resources for military protection" (pp. 3-4). Although this perspective does not deny the role of military elites, it certainly gives commoners an agency lacking in many older accounts of the state-building process. Unfortunately, but perhaps unavoidably, the assertion that commoners submitted to higher authority in exchange for protection remains just that—an assertion. The case studies provide much information about community resistance to daimyo rule, but little evidence of how local actors actually viewed their final submission to military authority. So whether they were "rational peasants" making a conscious choice, as the editors imply, or were simply overpowered, as I would guess, is not clear from the material presented in this book. To be fair, however, it may well be that the historical record is silent on the motivation of non-elites, rendering this point moot. One great strength of War and State Building is its explicitly comparative, multidisciplinary framework. In a sense, one wishes that the editors had gone even further in this regard. For example, the comparisons that Ferejohn and Rosenbluth make with European history are interesting and insightful, but other regions of the world are wholly ignored. The editors also seem to conflate the notion of the "modern, territorial state" with that of the state itself; [End Page 154] there is little recognition that other types of state have existed in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere, often well before the period covered by this book. However, these weaknesses are also strengths, because the focus on modern, territorial state building in Japan and Europe contributes to the book's overall coherence and readability. In any case, the editors are to be congratulated for their bold application of theoretical and comparative perspectives to the study of premodern Japanese history—a field badly in need of such outside stimuli, as I will argue below. This brings me to the six specialized chapters by historians, which can be summarized roughly as follows: Karl Friday, in "They...