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Paper short abstract:

Widespread adoption of heirs in sixteenth-century warrior houses signaled not disregard for kinship ties, but rather an open acknowledgment of the constructedness of familial attachment and succession, and a need to extend the boundaries of the familial (and political) group beyond consanguinity.

Paper long abstract:

The adoption of heirs (both infant sons and adult sons-in-law) was widespread in premodern Japan. Heirs could be adopted from near or distant kin or from non-kin, not only to compensate for a lack of male offspring but also to shore up the allegiance of collaterals or to forge truces or political alliances with neighbors and rivals. During the volatile years of the civil war, when instability was the only certainty and doom on the battlefield a near-constant threat, adoptions of male offspring came to be little different from marriage alliances, in which daughters were given away as brides and virtual hostages. While such adoptions guaranteed the nominal continuity of a lineage, they also exposed the fiction of ties of blood, offering warrior houses maximum adaptability at the cost of minimal consanguinity. Given the social acceptability of adoption, it is not surprising that in contemporary discourse "blood" does not figure prominently as shorthand for ties of kinship.

Yet kinship, sometimes pictured as a river delta of sorts, flowing ever more disparately from a common fount, was central to social identity and political imagination alike. The war-torn sixteenth century is well known as an age of betrayals; most unsettling to chroniclers were the stories of brothers feuding and sons betraying fathers, though more numerous are those of adoptive heirs serving their new families loyally. Indeed, it is clear that contemporaries took ties of kinship seriously even when these ties were visibly constructed.

In this paper I argue that adoptions and marriage alliances, far from denoting unequivocally the malleability of familial ties, signaled instead the complex and creative (if at times contradictory) ways in which kinship bonds were invoked to stabilize a dangerously unstable world.