This collection of essays is built around a major but previously unstudied theme in Japanese history--the extent to which the exaggeration of antiquity has distorted historical understanding. Ranging widely across the first thousand years of Japanese history, the author juxtaposes contemporary sources with inherited traditions and shows how standard periodizations are now being undone. Much of what has seemed old and potentially older turns out to be just the opposite; in a sense, Japanese history is "not as old as it has seemed to be". This theme of "historical misplacement" is pursued variously in these seven essays, four previously unpublished and three revised for this volume. In Chapters 1 and 7, which deal with the progress of Western historiography on premodern Japan, the author shows how research in primary sources has enabled scholars to challenge some of the most sacred assumptions about Japan's pre-1600 history. Chapter 1 assesses the contribution of John Whitney Hall and the scholarship he has helped to inspire, and Chapter 7 focuses on research done on the Kamakura era and what still needs to be done to increase our knowledge of this strategically placed period. In Chapters 2 and 6, the subject of antiquity is dealt with more directly: key historical terms and the concepts they have generated are relocated to the time frames where they actually appear, and lacunae in the sources--"black holes" in the author's phrase--are probed for possible new insights into the general subject of antiquity. In Chapter 3, the author uses the external historical construction of feudalism to illuminate conditions in medieval Japan, and his search for the language of lordship and vassalageresults in some surprising discoveries. Chapter 5 is a kind of primer on contemporary source materials: where to find them, how to translate them, and how to deal with the special problem of vocabulary--unknown words that appear in no dictionaries and words that confound by the multiple contexts in which they appear. Chapter 4 introduces a new topic with a pioneering investigation of personal names, examining individual and group identity from the perspective of the names of individuals in the medieval era. Multiple names--susceptible to change, addition, and subtraction--are shown to reflect a wide spectrum of perception: passage through life's several stages, societal pressures, bondings, gender and kinship and, ultimately, notions of self and others. Altogether, the essays offer a rich mix of history, historiography, revisionism, and personal insight from the preeminent scholar of pre-1600 Japanese medieval documents and history.

This collection of essays is built around a major but previously unstudied theme in Japanese history - the extent to which the exaggeration of antiquity has distorted historical understanding.

The Kamakura period, 1180-1333, is known as the era of Japan's first warrior government. As the essays in this book show, however, the period was notable for the coexistence of two centers of authority, the Bakufu military government at Kamakura and the civilian court in Kyoto, with the newer warrior government gradually gaining ascendancy.

This volume analyzes the recurring form of warrior government known as the Bakufu (or shogunate) that ruled Japan for nearly 700 years. All the essays in this collection clarify aspects of Japanese political tradition that have been neglected by Western writers, and point out alternatives to already stated views.

This pioneering collection of fifteen essays proposes to change the way we think about fourteenth-century Japan and what preceded and followed it. Most notable is the search for Japan's medieval beginnings, which are found not in the developments flowing from the establishment of the first shogunate in the 1180's, but rather in the shogunate's collapse 150 years later. In this admittedly controversial interpretation, the Kamakura age becomes the final episode in Japan's late classical period, with the courtier and warrior regimes of that era together seeking to maintain the traditional order. But under the leadership of Japan's first truly "medieval men" (the emperor Go-Daigo and Ashikaga Takauji), the old order was dramatically transformed. In the editor's words, "the rules changed, new behavior was everywhere, the past was only one of several competing influences. After the better part of a millennium, the spell cast by courtiers was finally broken." Among the topics treated are the strange new partnerships within the social hierarchy, the impact of sustained warfare on societal values, the new subservience of women in the post-Kamakura environment, the unprecedented emergence of warriors as the moralists and spokesmen of a new age, and the appearance of a new, more sharply partisan religious sectarianism. In addition, we are shown the fragility of a history now dependent on battlefield success, the assumption of control of imperial poetic anthologies by warriors, the condition of the old and new Buddhist establishments, the paradox of warrior flamboyance and warrior stolidity, and the imposition of enduring village names.

This book is a much expanded and wholly rewritten treatment of the subject of the author's first book, "Warrior Government in Early Medieval Japan," published in 1974. In this new version, the "warrior" and "medieval" character of Japan's first shogunate is significantly de-emphasized, thus requiring not only a new title, but also a new book.
The author's new view of the final decades of twelfth-century Japan is one of a less revolutionary set of experiences and a smaller achievement overall than previously thought. The pivotal figure, Minamoto Yoritomo, retains his dominant role in establishing the "dual polity" of Court and Bakufu, but his successes are now explained in terms of more limited objectives. A new regime was fit into an environment that was still basically healthy and vibrant, leading not to the substitution of one government for another, but rather to the emergence of a new authority that would have to interact with the old.
The book aims to present a dual perspective on the period by juxtaposing what we know against our best possible estimate of what Yoritomo himself knew. It is deeply concerned with the multiple balancing acts introduced by this ever nimble experimenter in governing, who was forever seeking to determine, and then to promote, what would work while curtailing or eliminating what would not. The author seeks to recreate step-by-step the movement from one historical juncture to another, whether this means adapting already available information, building anew, or working with combinations of materials. Throughout, the book addresses new topics and offers many new interpretations on subjects as wide-ranging as the 1189 military campaign in the north and the phenomenon of delegated authority.

This pioneering collection of fifteen essays proposes to change the way we think about fourteenth-century Japan and what preceded and followed it. Most notable is the search for Japan's medieval beginnings, which are found not in the developments flowing from the establishment of the first shogunate in the 1180's, but rather in the shogunate's collapse 150 years later.
In this admittedly controversial interpretation, the Kamakura age becomes the final episode in Japan's late classical period, with the courtier and warrior regimes of that era together seeking to maintain the traditional order. But under the leadership of Japan's first truly "medieval men" (the emperor Go-Daigo and Ashikaga Takauji), the old order was dramatically transformed. In the editor's words, "the rules changed, new behavior was everywhere, the past was only one of several competing influences. After the better part of a millennium, the spell cast by courtiers was finally broken."
Among the topics treated are the strange new partnerships within the social hierarchy, the impact of sustained warfare on societal values, the new subservience of women in the post-Kamakura environment, the unprecedented emergence of warriors as the moralists and spokesmen of a new age, and the appearance of a new, more sharply partisan religious sectarianism.
In addition, we are shown the fragility of a history now dependent on battlefield success, the assumption of control of imperial poetic anthologies by warriors, the condition of the old and new Buddhist establishments, the paradox of warrior flamboyance and warrior stolidity, and the imposition of enduring village names.

The Kamakura period, 1180-1333, is known as the era of Japan's first warrior government. As the essays in this book show, however, the period was notable for the coexistence of two centers of authority, the Bakufu military government at Kamakura and the civilian court in Kyoto, with the newer warrior government gradually gaining ascendancy.

A collection of essays tackles a neglected field of Japan's history.