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- Convenor:
-
Daniel Schley
(University of Bonn)
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- Stream:
- History
- Location:
- Bloco 1, Piso 0, Sala 0.05
- Sessions:
- Thursday 31 August, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
Problematizing issues of periodization and methodology for the study of the Kamakura (1185-1333) era in Japan, this panel will use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the thirteenth century on its own terms, pointing to significant changes that occurred in Japanese political culture.
Long Abstract:
This panel seeks to interrogate thirteenth-century political culture in Japan through new lenses. First, the panel aims to set aside modern agendas for narrating the past, instead focusing on insights that come from recovering the voices of contemporaries. Such an approach calls for critiques of both periodization and methodology. In terms of periodization, we investigate issues that suggest the thirteenth century saw major shifts in political culture writ large. Whether pointing to specific events such as the pivotal Jōkyū war (1221), as do Michael McCarty and Daniel Schley, or tracing formative changes over the course of the thirteenth century, as do Jinno Kiyoshi and Erin Brightwell, all papers point to major realignments calling for the significance of the thirteenth century on its own terms. This panel thus raises problems for a periodization scheme—in both Japan and the west—that continues to prioritize only the rise and fall of succeeding warrior regimes at the top.
In methodological terms, the papers question many of the disciplinary boundaries that have often divided medieval texts into mutually exclusive source bases. Instead of perpetuating distinctions between categories such as law, history, or literature, this panel attempts to showcase the benefits of working across disciplinary lines. Erin Brightwell takes texts that have often been alternately relegated into realms of the historical and literary and traces their evolution as a single genre of "Mirror." Jinno Kiyoshi demonstrates the importance of moving beyond the mere study of law codes to explore definitions of violence through a broader range of texts. Michael McCarty unites historiography and literary criticism to elucidate changes in historical memory fostered by the Jōkyū War. Finally, Daniel Schley investigates historiographical narratives and ideas of kingship to suggest new perspectives on political culture. Such boundary-breaking illuminates real changes in the arrangements of society and power, as well as the conceptual underpinnings of authority, religion and culture that mark the thirteenth century more broadly.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 31 August, 2017, -Paper short abstract:
Taking Japan's "Mirrors" as a collective site in which medieval ideas of morality, historiography, and authority intersect, this paper explores a changing configuration of religious movements, discourses on writing, and political vicissitudes that legitimated particular ways of presenting the past.
Paper long abstract:
Japan's 11th- through mid-14th-centuries saw the rise and fall of the historiographic "Mirror" as a potentially powerful means of talking about the past. The first to appear, "The Great Mirror," touched off a mini-boom in "Mirror" production that yielded six additional "Mirrors". While four overtly engaged with one another and shared a commitment to presenting the past in cosmological terms, the period also produced the seeming outliers "The Mirror of the East" (13th/14th c.) and "Mirror of the Watchman of the Fields" (1295). Although these "Mirrors" have rarely been treated as a set, this paper proposes taking the "Mirrors" as a collective site in which medieval ideas of morality, historiography, and divine as well as worldly authority intersect. So doing reveals the workings of a changing configuration of religious movements, discourses on writing, and political vicissitudes that together legitimated particular ways of relating and understanding Japan's past.
The early "Mirrors" featured circular narratives ordered along multiple genealogical lines and written solely in a local idiom. By the mid-thirteenth century, however, "Mirrors" increasingly incorporated a more straightforward annalistic format, engaging with the language and structure of orthodox historiography. The fact that it is "The Mirror of the East" and not "The Annals of the East" or "A Tale of the East" that recounts the founding of the Kamakura bakufu suggests that the genre and its recent developments were seen as conveying a certain amount of authority. Nevertheless, "Mirrors" failed to be established as the preferred voice of a warrior-led government. This paper argues that we can best make sense of this by examining the flip side of the "Mirrors'" move towards the center: the elision of cosmological rhetoric from the "Mirrors" and its resurfacing in contemporary texts that would collectively resonate with a wider audience: "A Record of the Jōkyū Years," "A Disquisition on Plum and Pine," and most famously, "A Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns." In this, we see the workings of a move from the old trappings of orthodoxy—annals, Chinese, etc.—towards a new sense of what constituted authority in late medieval Japan.
Paper short abstract:
Focusing on violence (the power that forcibly destroys or detains a person; or destroys or confiscates a person's property) as a tool to understand 13th-century Japan, this paper reviews definitions of the Kamakura Bakufu's laws and their consequences on the life of the Gokenin (shogunal retainers).
Paper long abstract:
Focusing on violence (the power that physically or forcibly destroys or detains a person; or destroys or confiscates a person's property) as a tool to understand thirteenth-century Japan, this paper reviews definitions of the Kamakura Bakufu's laws and their consequences on the life of the Gokenin (shogunal retainers). This paper consists of three sections. The first compares and reviews regulations on violence of the late Heian-period Imperial Court and the thirteenth-century Kamakura Bakufu. The second studies how these regulations changed throughout the 13th century. The last reviews how these regulations corresponded to the actual violence observed in the Gokenin's lives.
"Goseibai-shikimoku (Formulary of Adjudications)" is a major historical source, but it is not sufficient to understand specific details of the Kamakura Bakufu's laws. Tsuikaho (additional laws) and Satamirensho (the legal code guidebook for the Kamakura Bakufu's legal system) are also important, reciting crimes subject to criminal prosecution. The majority of such crimes were Youchi (night attack), Goutou (robbery), Sanzoku (banditry), Kaizoku (piracy), Satsujin (murder), and Houka (arson). Also, certain types of Akko (defamation) were defined as crimes because of their nature to incite violence. As the recounting of such violence is nearly identical in many historical sources, comparing similarities in these accounts through a detailed study of violent acts and crimes can help us further understand how the Kamakura Bakufu categorized violence.
Reviewing established laws can never give us full understanding of actual violence in a society; therefore, Saikyojo (judicial decisions) of the Kamakura Bakufu and various ancient documents retained by Gokenin families are also reviewed to shed light on what kind of crimes were actually inflicted by the samurai and how society reacted to them.
Paper short abstract:
Investigating how the Jōkyū Disturbance of 1221, which caused the defeat and exile of the Japanese emperor, loomed behind depictions of earlier events like the Genpei War (1180-85) in medieval discourse, this paper argues for a re-conceptualization of genre, authority and memory in medieval Japan.
Paper long abstract:
The Jōkyū Disturbance of 1221, in which powerful retired emperor Go-Toba was exiled after military defeat by the Kamakura Bakufu, rent the fabric of Japanese political ideology. The fact that a "heavenly sovereign" of the Japanese throne had been defeated by a warrior government with no such claims to divine authority posed deep problems for theodicy, kingship and authority. In the aftermath of the Jōkyū Disturbance, however, it was ironically tales on events before 1221 that most caught the attention of medieval writers. The texts that did discuss Jōkyū were much less inventive and prolific, never becoming enshrined in the pre-modern cultural imagination like works about the earlier Genpei War (1180-85). Yet precisely because the Jōkyū corpus had a relatively contracted period of textual development, the majority of Jōkyū texts predate the majority of narratives about the Genpei War. Thus, we are left with a historiographical time-warp: texts on the later Jōkyū event give an earlier picture of Kamakura society than their Genpei cousins, while texts ostensibly about the twelfth century reflect the changed realities of warrior and court power after 1221.
Building upon the suggestion of some scholars that all war tales written after 1221 betray a "post-Jōkyū historical consciousness," this paper will evaluate the intersections of history, memory, and authority in a variety of writings from the Kamakura period (1185-1333). In this "broad" thirteenth century, texts on past conflicts inevitably treated the position of the retired emperor as a touchstone for issues of power and (mis)rule. I will argue that the figure of Go-Toba, the sovereign whose mismanagement of affairs led to open conflict between court and Bakufu, looms behind the portrayal of other emperors in war tales describing the earlier Hōgen (1156), Heiji (1159), and Genpei (1185) wars, revealing the changing ideology of kingship and power in the thirteenth century. These and other parallels between Jōkyū and earlier conflicts also suggests medieval writers were more comfortable confronting the problems of 1221 indirectly through discussion of earlier events, forcing scholars to think more carefully about our conceptions of genre, periodization, and memory in pre-modern Japan.
Paper short abstract:
In 13th century Japan, the political ideal of benevolent government assumed an unprecedented importance for defining kingship between Kyoto and Kamakura. Its influence and meaning will be explored in historiographical and literary sources like Azuma kagami, Rokudai shōjiki and Kokon Chomonjū.
Paper long abstract:
13th century Japan witnessed a revival of Confucian ways to organize and to buttress political power. Following the brief clash between court and warrior government in 1221, questions about the structure and qualities of good kingship were readdressed in many different social arenas. Among the classical political topoi, which had been introduced to Japan from China during the formation process of the ritsuryō-state in the 7th century, the ideal of benevolent government (tokusei, zensei, jinsei) gained new currency. It came to be connected with early medieval, social and religious developments and influenced political debates as well in Kyōto and Kamakura as in the provinces.
Usually the political culture during these decades is discussed with regard to the relationship between the ancient seat of kingship in Kyōto and the raising influence of Kamakura. Interpretations range from different levels of subordination of the warriors to tennō and court (e.g. Kōchi Shōsuke) up to independence as an autonomous kind of warrior kingship (e.g. Hongō Kazuto). The common interpretative pattern therein is the separation of kingship into power (kenryoku) and authority (keni). Modern Japanese historiography has applied this distinction foremost to explain the long dynastic continuity until the present.
If it serves as well, however, to understand the political conceptions and dealings of 13th century's contemporaries is yet another question. How teachings from the past, in this case especially the Confucian model of benevolent rule, organized and produced political reality, needs to be addressed to illuminate new aspects of medieval political culture.
Concerning the sources for past perceptions, not only official documents and historiographical writings (Gukanshō, Rokudai shōjiki, Azuma kagami), but especially tale literature contains valuable information as well and should not be dismissed because of their unreliability in regard to historical facts. This paper will therefore analyse also literary sources like Kojidan, Jikkinshō and Kokon Chomonjū as well to explore the discussion of benevolence in a wide range of texts, grouped together under the umbrella term "reality narratives" ("Wirklichkeitserzählungen", Klein/Martinez 2009). This approach shall help to add a further perspective to the main line of research focused on events, institutional structures and single actors.