Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the role of the Tokugawa judicature in the arbitration of local conflicts at Kōyasan temple in the seventeenth century. In so doing, I reassess state power and complicate the discussion of the medieval-early modern divide.

Paper long abstract:

Over three decades ago, the medieval and early modern historians who jointly produced a series of studies on ikki cautioned the emergent trend to conflate a theoretical division between the two eras with the actual ones (Minegishi Sumio et al, eds. Ikki, vol. 1. Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1981). Since, significant strides have been made in both medieval and early modern studies, the break between the two being hinged upon the state formation at the turn of the seventeenth century. However, the divide as reified by historians remains largely presupposed, while attempts to examine the logics and dynamics of society during and across the transition based on records from the time are rarely seen. Nowhere is this more prominent than in the treatment of temples and shrines, where analysis of policies that fit neatly into the overdetermined narrative of state domination is deemed sufficient to explain the epochal shift.

The premise of the paper is that established accounts are constrained by normative assumptions about state power and a lack of conceptual models to analyze the complex social tensions that are recorded in documents. Rather than predicating the analysis on a preconceived tension between the state and religion or society, we ought to confront the chaos of the social world and recover the ground-level struggles that shaped history. To deal squarely with those struggles and assess their historical significance, I suggest we focus on the territorial practices of diverse and at times competing groups dialectically with the schemes of power that institutionalized their social existence. The paper uses documents of Kōyasan temple to explore the relations between local territorial politics and the judicial system of the Tokugawa state in the seventeenth century. By shedding light on the processes by which diverse stakeholders of Kōyasan negotiated the boundaries of their rights and privileges, I discuss the role of the Tokugawa regime as the master of territorial allocations whose power structured the fraught space of the temple by resolving conflicts.