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.