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English-Language Studies of Medieval Japan: An Assessment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2011

Conrad Totman
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Extract

A number of English-language scholarly studies of medieval Japanese institutional history have appeared in print in the past few years. This seems a fitting time to appraise their contribution to our understanding of Japanese history from late Heian through the Muromachi period, ca. A.D. 1100 to 1600. I do not intend to evaluate the works as individual monographs, but rather to consider their larger cumulative historiographical significance. After summarizing the main interpretive constructs used by scholars writing in English I will discuss ways in which the recent works have and have not enriched these constructs or suggested helpful new ones.

Type
Review Articles
Information
The Journal of Asian Studies , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , May 1979 , pp. 541 - 551
Copyright
Copyright © The Association for Asian Studies, Inc. 1979

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References

1 I have attempted concise assessments of several of these studies, specifically of Hurst (footnote 14 below), Hall and Mass (footnote 18 below), Mass (footnote 15 below), and Mass (footnote 17 below) in issues of Asian Student.

2 This point is old hat, of course; it is made, for example, by Hall, John W. in a discussion titled “Feudalism in Japan — A Reassessment,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 5:1 (1962), 15–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 As Hall points out in his “Reassessment,” the term feudalism was used by Westerners in Japan decades before Murdoch wrote.

4 Asakawa, K., “Some Aspects of Japanese Feudal Institutions,” Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan, 46:1 (1918), 77–102Google Scholar. Asakawa, Kan'ichi, The Documents of lriki (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1929)Google Scholar. Several other Asakawa writings were recently republished as Land and Society in Medieval Japan (Tokyo: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, 1965)Google Scholar.

5 Sansom, G. B., Japan, A Short Cultural History (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, Inc., 1931Google Scholar and later editions); Sansom, G. B., A History of Japan, 3 vols. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958, 1961, 1963)Google Scholar.

6 Reischauer's, most lucid statement is his “Japanese Feudalism,” in Coulton, Rushton, ed., Feudalism in History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1956), pp. 26–48Google Scholar.

7 Longrais, F. Joüon des, L'est et L'ouest (Tokyo: Maison Franco-Japonaise, 1958)Google Scholar.

8 Duus, Peter, Feudalism in Japan (New York: Knopf, 1969)Google Scholar.

9 Reischauer, Robert Karl, Early Japanese History (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1937)Google Scholar.

10 Beasley, W. G. and Pulleyblank, E. G., eds., Historians of China and Japan (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1961)Google Scholar, offers examples of interpretive approaches.

11 Hall, John W., Government and Local Power in Japan, 500–1700 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

12 Hall, Government, p. 5.

13 Hall, John W., Japan from Prehistory to Modern Times (New York: Dell, 1970)Google Scholar; published originally in German as Das Japanische Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Biicherei GambH, 1968)Google Scholar. For Hall's critique of the feudal paradigm see, in addition to his “Reassessment,” his Japanese History, New Dimensions of Approach and Understanding (Washington, D.C.: Service Center for Teachers of History, Publication 34, 1961)Google Scholar. Perhaps because of concern with the deforming potential of the feudal paradigm, the index in Hall's study of Bizen has no entry for feudalism. He does use the term in one chapter title, but he is at pains to show the distinctly Japanese character of samurai arrangements, and he generally prefers either particularistic terms such as buke or kuge, or universalistic ones, such as military in place of feudal.

14 Hurst, G. Cameron III, Inset: Abdicated Sovereigns in the Politics of Late Heian Japan 1086–1185 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar. Portions of this study also appear in Hall and Mass, cited below in footnote 18.

15 Mass, Jeffrey P., Warrior Government in Earl Medieval Japan (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

16 Shinoda, Minoru, The Founding of the Kamakura Shogunate, 1180–1185 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

17 Mass also makes these points in the introduction to his collection of documents, The Kamakura Bakufu: A Study in Documents (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1976)Google Scholar.

18 Hall, John W. and Mass, Jeffrey P., eds. Medieval Japan, Essays in Institutional History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974)Google Scholar.

19 Varley, H. Paul, The Onin War (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1967)Google Scholar.

20 Mass, Warrior Government, pp. 31 — 32, 56, 62. He also makes this point in his “Epilogue,” in Hall and Mass, p. 250.

21 Varley, pp. 22–23.

22 Varley, p. 37.

23 See, for example, Prescott B. Wintersteen, Jr., “The Muromachi Shugo and Hanzei,” in Hall and Mass, pp. 210–20.

24 Varley, pp. 64, 108.

25 Kiley, Cornelius, paper delivered at the Association for Asian Studies convention in Chicago, March 31, 1978Google Scholar.

26 Grossberg, Kenneth, “From Feudal Chieftain to Secular Monarch,” Monumenta Nipponica, 31:1 (Spring 1976), 29CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Hall, John W. and Takeshi, Toyoda, eds., Japan in the Muromachi Age (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1977)Google Scholar.

28 Hall, “The Muromachi Power Structure,” p. 41; and Satō Shin'ichi, “The Ashikaga Shogun and the Muromachi Bakufu Administration,” pp. 45–52 in Hall and Toyoda.

29 John M. Rosenfield, “The Unity of the Three Creeds: A Theme in Japanese Ink Painting of the Fifteenth Century,” in Hall and Toyoda, pp. 205–25.

30 Barbara Ruch, “Medieval Jongleurs and the Making of a National Literature,” in Hall and Toyoda, pp. 279–309.

31 Stanley Weinstein, “Rennyo and the Shinshū Revival,” in Hall and Toyoda, pp. 331–58.

32 David L. Davis, “Ikki in Late Medieval Japan,” in Hall and Mass, pp. 221–47.

33 The problem of narrowness of sources may be exacerbated by what is evidently a current fascination with “documents,” usually meaning official administrative records. See Hurst's “Bibliographic Note,” pp. 315–17, and Mass's Study in Documents, p. 9, for discussion of “documents” as sources.

34 Hall and Mass, p. xv.

35 Murdoch, I, 25, 27.

36 Hall and Mass, p. 248.

37 Hall and Mass, p. 254.

38 Hurst, p. 11, n. 3.

39 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., The King's Two Bodies (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957)Google Scholar.

40 Robert Brenner and his critics appear in issues No. 70, 78, and 79 of Past and Present (February 1976, February 1978, and May 1978).

41 Strayer, Joseph R., On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970)Google Scholar. This work also suggests the possibilities of constitutional approaches such as those Kiley uses. In a similar vein, Hurst, in his essay on the Heian Court in the Hall and Mass volume, hints at the interpretive possibilities of “state-building” and “kingship” in studying ancient Japan, but in his book he does not follow up on the hints.

42 Finley, M. I., The Ancient Economy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973)Google Scholar.