Paper short abstract:

This paper addresses legal and cultural attitudes toward documentary forgery in premodern Japan. It examines late medieval forgeries on artisanal privileges to consider ideas of forgery/falsity and how laws were (at times openly) transgressed to maintain institutional order and economic survival.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses legal and cultural attitudes toward documentary forgery in premodern Japan. The earliest known laws regarding counterfeit documents originate in the eighth century and continue to appear in various court and warrior regulations through the end of the sixteenth century. Despite lacking an official definition of forgery, government bodies and individuals were tasked with determining a text's authenticity and thus maintaining the integrity of bureaucratic documents that were used to maintain and administer institutional order. In this talk, I will survey documentary forgery in the context of these formalized structures, after which I offer an examination of several cases of counterfeit document production in the sixteenth century. Scholars have characterized Japan's late medieval period as the start of a "golden age" of forgery production, a time in which the devolution of central authority left room for false documents to proliferate. However, I complicate this view (as well as the boundaries of "forgery" itself) by considering the creation of dubious official records as well as semi-fictive, legendary texts that granted imperial economic privileges for metal caster organizations. In an effort to revitalize and stabilize imperial patronage, laws concerning forgery were (at times openly) transgressed in order to maintain the court's economic and institutional order while securing the profits necessary to survive