Customer Reviews

The Origins of Japan's Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century

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This is an edited volume which contain articles by some of the biggest names in medieval Japanese history. The editor, Jeffrey P. Mass, is of course the most renowned authority on Kamakura studies in the West. The binding thread for this volume is a shift in periodization, whereby the "origins" of medieval Japan is moved forward to the 14th century, rather than the traditional peception which focused on the late 12th century. Mass and the other contributors feel that the Kamakura period, which saw the establishment of the first "shogunate," did no so much mark the end of the "classical" period ruled by a heavily top-down bureacracy and the central aristocrats from Kyoto. Instead, the Kamakura period is now considered to have had more in common with the period that preceded it, and the real watershed moment was the 14th century, when warfare became endemic, new social groups and movements began to appear in the historical records, and the estate system of absentee proprietorship began to disintegrate. This was when Japan fully entered its medieval age. The artilces in the volume cover a wide range of topics and historical subjects, including changes in warrior culture or ethos, gender, peasant/village organization, decline of once-powerful religious institutions, and the "visions" of one idiosyncratic emperor. A must read for anyone serious about premodern Japanese history.