October 7 – 8, 2011
University of Michigan
One of the most fundamental and significant activities for Japanese warriors was documenting their military service in order to receive rewards. Much scholarship has focused on the documents issued for this purpose in the period of the Northern and Southern Courts (ca. 14thc.): gunchūjō (records of loyal service) and kassen teoi chūmon (record of battle injuries). But scholars have yet to clarify subsequent changes in military service records issued in the sengoku (warring states) period, or whether the practices associated with those records survived at all in the early modern period when warfare largely disappeared. This paper considers these transformations.
First, I focus on a document written by Naraaki Raizō, a samurai of Hagi Domain during the Boshin war of the mid-nineteenth century. This document can be called a “modern gunchūjō,” because it closely resembles a typical medieval gunchūjō in style. I examine if Narazaki Raizō indeed issued this particular document, and explore further how warriors recorded their military service following the two early modern centuries of no war.
Then, by tracing the development of military service records from sengoku to early modern times, we note some stylistic variation, which can be organized into two groups. First is the teoi chūmon style, which records the injuries suffered by the issuer (both to himself and those under his command) as evidence of service. This type can be found from the fourteenth (Nanbokuchō) through the nineteenth centuries. The second group consists of documents known variously as kubi chūmon and bundori chūmon, which emphasize the evidence of injuries and loss on the part of the opponent. This type of documents increase in number in the sixteenth century, and are prominent among records kept by the warrior houses of western Japan. The style continues to develop, for example, into hana uketorijō, or “nose receipts,” a documentary format used during Hideyoshi’s invasions of Korea in 1592-98.
It is possible to see how early modern records of military service changed and how long they were written by looking at the invasions of Korea, the Battle of Sekigahara (1600), the Osaka anti-Toyotomi campaign (1614-1615), and the Shimabara Rebellion (1637-38). We first observe that changes in records suggest that the meaning of battles for warrior society had changed considerably already by the Shimabara Rebellion, the last major battle in the seventeenth century. In early modern warrior society, the duty and obligation that a warrior owed his lord shifted from “military loyalty (gunchū)” to a more generalized concept of “service (hōkō),” giving rise to a new form of documentation: “records of service (hōkōgaki).
Finally, we reflect on the place of the medieval style military service record issued by Naraaki Raizō in the nineteenth century in the history of transformation in the form and style of reward documents, and consider what it suggests about the changing meaning of war and service in warrior society.
戦功を記録することによって恩賞を得ることは、武士にとって最も基本的かつ重要な行為であるとみなされており、それに関わる南北朝期の軍忠状や合戦(かっせん)手負(ておい)注文(ちゅうもん)については研究の蓄積がある。しかし戦国期、さらには戦争がなくなるとされる近世において、それらがどのように変化あるいは消失していくのか、必ずしも明らかにされていない。報告ではこの点を考える。
最初に、１９世紀半ば幕末の戊辰(ぼしん)戦争(せんそう)で活躍した楢崎(ならざき)頼三(らいぞう)という萩藩士の、一見典型的な中世軍忠状そのものである「近代の軍忠状」に注目したい。彼が本当にそれを提出したのか否か、200年ぶりに現実の戦闘を経験した武士が書いた戦功の記録とは、実際どのようなものだったのかを考える。
そこから遡って、戦国時代から近世へと戦功の記録の形を追っていくと、まず戦功の記録にはいくつかのバリエーションがあることを指摘できる。一つは自己の損害の多さを戦功の証とする「手負(ておい)注文(ちゅうもん)」の系列で、14世紀南北朝期から19世紀までずっと存続する。一方、16世紀戦国時代にはいると、「頸(くび)注文(ちゅうもん)」「分捕(ぶんどり)注文(ちゅうもん)」など相手方の損害を戦功の証とする記録が次第に増加していく。特にこれらは西国の武家文書に多く残るようになる。それが「文禄・慶長の役」という朝鮮への侵略戦争における「鼻請取状」のような文書につながっていくのである。
さらに、近世における戦功の記録は、どのような形で、いつまで書かれたのかを、朝鮮への侵略戦争、関ヶ原の合戦、大坂の陣、島原の乱とみていく。戦功の記録という観点でみると、17世紀最後の戦闘ともいえる島原の乱の武家社会のなかでの位置づけが、それ以前の戦争とは大きく異なることが指摘できる。そして近世では、主人に果たすべき武士の義務が、「軍忠」から、もっと一般的な「奉公」へと変化し、「奉公書(ほうこうがき)」なる文書が生まれてくることを指摘したい。
このようにみてくると、最初にとりあげた楢崎頼三が実際に書いた戦功の記録は、それが戦国時代から近世にかけて変化していった、その大きな流れのなかに位置づけられることがわかる。
This paper examines the development and transformation of the images of a Kamakura warrior, Kumagai Naozane through the Muromachi and the Tokugawa periods as seen in a variety of popular literary forms.
Naozane was a local warrior of modest size who fought valiantly for the cause of Minamoto Yoritomo during the Genpei war. Later he broke the tie of vassalage with Yoritomo to become a disciple of Hōnen and a fervent believer in Amida. Heike monogatari (Tale of the Heike) created an episode in which Naozane allegedly fought with a young warrior, Taira Atsumori, and killed him in spite of his sympathy for the youth of noble blood. This paper will examine the development of Naozane’s image during the Tokugawa period in three different categories: 1) documents handed down in the main lineage of his descendants, 2) plays and ballad-dramas, 3) religious tales associated with the Pure Land sect.
In materials from the first category, including “Naozane’s testament,” forged probably in the Muromachi period, Naozane appears as an upright warrior and as a great master of Buddhism at the same time. The image of Naozane appearing in the second category developed mainly based on the episode from Heike monogatari. Until the early Tokugawa period tales of Atsumori’s son originating in the Muromachi period were still popular. In these Naozane played a supporting part of little importance. Yet in the mid 18th century more elaborate Bunraku and Kabuki plays both gave Naozane a more central role and also transformed the story in ways that might be expected to appeal to Tokugawa audiences. In these plays, Yoshitsune, caught between his duty as a Genji general to kill Atsumori and the wish of the Cloistered Emperor Goshirakawa that the young Heike noble be spared, has one of his men, Naozane, take over the management of the difficult task in his place. Naozane fulfills the task by killing his own son under the pretense that he is Atsumori. The image of Naozane in this play became widely accepted.
Most of the writings of the third category present Naozane as the alleged founder of several temples and were published from the middle Tokugawa period to propagate Pure Land belief and attract people’s attention to certain temples. Toward the middle of the 19th century we can observe a new development in which such propagation by Buddhist temples was synchronized with the production of Kabuki plays featuring Naozane.
Creating a medieval period for Japanese history involved more than simply designating a certain span of years as the “Middle Ages.” To qualify as a historical period in the modern sense of the term, the Middle Ages had to be recognized as possessing its own, distinctive character. It needed to be an epoch set off from others because it was intrinsically different from them. Producing such differences meant coming to understand the past as distanced from the present in particular ways. Put simply, my argument is that towards the end of the eighteenth century authors of historical fiction began to effect just such a distance shift.
Writers from Tsuga Teishō through Ueda Akinari, Santō Kyōden, and Takizawa Bakin turned to the medieval past, the fifteenth century in particular, as a setting for their stories. The upheavals of the era afforded opportunity for heroics, but the medieval past in the works of these authors seems also to allow for giant eagles and wizardry, for ghosts, demons, and changelings, for arcane knowledge lost to posterity. The past emerges as a distinct, enchanted realm, where great heroism and base treachery are not only possible but commonplace, where one may readily encounter fantastic beings that can no longer exist in the more prosaic present. One consequence of this qualitative separation of past from present was the possibility of imagining the era in which these stories are set as distinct, a time that modern history recognizes as the medieval period.
Tobacco arrived in Japan around 1570, and by 1820 one contemporary estimate counted the number of smokers in Edo at 97% to 98% of the population. While that number is probably inflated, it would have been difficult for many at that time to imagine life without smoking. Images of smokers filled the pages of the comic books (kibyōshi) of Santō Kyōden (d. 1816). Kyōden also owned a store selling tobacco cases that novelist Kyokutei Bakin (d. 1848) advertised in two short stories. Tobacco stores usually hired beautiful salesgirls, and a long pipe was an essential accessory for a courtesan in the woodblock prints of Kitagawa Utamaro (d. 1806). Kabuki star Ichikawa Danjūrō VII (d. 1859) praised the virtues of tobacco on stage and wrote a short ode to it. And the paraphernalia of smoking was essential for nights in the pleasure quarters or entertaining at home.
The tobacco merchant Seichūtei Shukushin captured the popular fascination with tobacco and investigated its history in his book The Wakeful Weed (Mesamashigusa), published in 1815. Though purporting to be a popular rendition of a scholarly work transcribed “for the benefit of women and children,” Seichūtei drew upon a broad range of sources including evidence from visual and material culture, folklore, etymology, and popular literature. This approach makes Seichūtei’s text more than a collection of tobacco lore. He offered a meditation on historical methods useful to exploring the medieval past, locate Japan’s place in world history, and gauge the development of his country’s distinct culture of smoking.
Japan’s entry into the early modern age accompanying the seismic transition from war to peace necessarily reconfigured the personhood and value of bushi (martial men). Now a definitive legal category, presiding atop other status groups, the bushi of the new age had little need and few opportunities to openly exhibit martial prowess in a major battle, which could result in personal injuries, mutilation and death. Instead, the bushi, albeit with the required two swords on their side, devoted time to routine guard duties, deskwork, and various other non-military pursuits. In this new context, they strove to recall and reestablish their historically certified and possibly essentialized source of pride, the warrior’s ability to battle fearlessly, bravely, and (sometimes) loyally. Legendary battles and heroic exploits of their ancestors, allies and, even foes, came to be “recorded” in order to enhance their person and manhood, which were deemed appropriate for the bushi status. In this paper, I explore how the bushi-in-peace envisioned a particular kind of manhood in actual flesh-and-blood warriors in combat situations. I focus, in particular, on the narrative technique that connects battle courage and sexual exploits with men or boys. Ōta Gyūichi’s Shinchō-kōki (17th c.) and Makishima Terutake’s (or Akitake, Kanhasshū kosenroku (18th c.) offer useful examples. How these writings, with the weight of historical veracity, may have added meaning to the prevailing practice of male-male sex among the bushi in the first half of the Tokugawa period is a topic for further consideration.
Few phenomena are more closely identified with the sixteenth century than warfare, for even some contemporaries referred to their era as one of “warring states.” Yet despite this emphasis, little is known about how even the most famous battles of the period were actually fought. Mobilization orders (saisokujō) and documents of praise (kanjō) provide some indication of the frequency and scale of conflict, but such sources are limited in number and generally lack more than the most cursory of descriptions. War tales (gunkimono), on the other hand, frequently contain vivid depictions of combat. Nonetheless, they are by no means reliable, as the vast majority of these works were produced during the seventeenth century, decades after the events they describe and by authors for whom maintaining historical accuracy was neither their primary motivation nor ultimate goal.
Nowhere is this contrast between the paucity of revealing firsthand evidence and the proliferation of elaborate, later retellings of dubious veracity more apparent than in surviving accounts of the multiple confrontations between the armies of Takeda Shingen and Uesugi Kenshin at Kawanakajima. For although poorly documented, these engagements provided not only inspiration for a host of subsequent stories, paintings and poems, but also fodder for debate among the seventeenth century’s leading schools of military studies. The aims of this presentation are thus twofold: first, to compare what is known of sixteenth-century battlefield practices with the descriptions contained in these later writings and, second, to explore how and why Kawanakajima became a touchstone for these schools.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, much of Japan’s maritime world was nonstate space governed by autonomous “sea lords,” often labeled pirates (kaizoku) in historical sources. However, in the Edo period, the state considered the sea territory bound to the land of daimyo domains. In order to maintain positions of influence in Edo-period Japan, former sea-lord families had to become part of those daimyo domains. They abandoned their nonstate characteristics: mercenarism, sea-based independence, and the ability to move freely across international borders as part of the cosmopolitan population of bandit-traders known as “Japanese pirates” (wakō). This transformation of sea lords had a significant historiographical dimension that reinvented and domesticated the medieval pirate to fit early modern ideologies and audiences. Early modern writers changed the medieval meaning of the word “pirate” to mean both “seafaring criminal” and “naval vassal” and retroactively applied it to medieval settings. Sea lords crafted genealogies and forged documents that worked in tandem with daimyo domainal chronicles and archival projects to teleologically tie the historical trajectory of once independent sea-lord houses to the destiny of their land-based, Edo-period daimyo. Other histories focused on the wakō, removed Japanese seafarers from the multi-ethnic cosmopolitan crews in which they sailed—often under the command of Chinese ringleaders—and regaled readers with tales of Japanese pirates leading the attacks on China. Modern historians accepted these images as true in order to provide precedents for imperial expansion overseas and to promote state-centered historical perspectives.
Kawabata family sources of the early modern period comprise two simple themes: a concern for family continuity and business success. A hagiographic approach depicts the founding ancestor and subsequent family heads as proceeding smoothly and never making mistakes. Thus it has, in Tokugawa period terms, an iemoto focus. In the family history especially, there is also heavy emphasis on the family’s historical and ongoing connection with the palace/emperor.
Regarding the second theme, it is important to remember that merchants generally have utilitarian concerns and are not focused on self-reflection. In the early modern Kawabata family sources, the emphasis is on transmitting business practices that in this case are both textual and visual (sketches) references to confections that they specialized in, particularly those that were delivered to the imperial palace on certain occasions. The identity shaped in these sources is “emperor’s baker,” and in that single sense the family version of its history has smooth continuity with the 16th century. What is gone from the record of the 17th c and beyond is the diversity of their earlier existence: freedom to hobnob with warlords, details of neighborhood self-governance, and their broader role in palace maintenance. In the seventeenth century the Kawabata shrank back to being baker boys, basically, an evolution that is very much in line with what happened to other merchants in Kyoto as well.
The story of the revenge of the two Soga brothers has been one of the best known dramas of all time in Japan since its historical roots in the early Kamakura period until today. Its popularity reached a climax on the kabuki and jōruri stages during the Edo period, where the earlier versions’ predilection for the tragic hero underwent important changes. Certain features in the story, especially amorous and humorous aspects, were altered and accentuated to speak to the new tastes of the urban audiences of the Edo period.
The two brothers, Gorō and Jūrō, were in this process transformed at the kabuki stage into more caricature-like characters with Gorō as an example of the rogue, violent and supernaturally strong hero (aragoto) and Jūrō as the more effeminate and composed warrior (wagoto). The younger brother, Gorō, is particularly interesting in this context since he is commonly portrayed as either an angry and courageous warrior with a demon-like presence, or he is transformed into an almost comical character with few traces of a violent and noble warrior disposition. In my presentation I will argue that these seemingly divergent images of the same character could be seen as epitomizing popular sentiments about Japan’s warrior past. Accordingly, the vendetta narrative and its characters were indicative of a sentimental and romanticized image of medieval warriors, coupled with a dissociating attitude towards “pre-modern” practices, and it will be argued that similar sentiments can be detected in other practices and narratives in the period as well.
The “enhancement” of the genealogy of the Tokugawa family to further Ieyasu’s political aspirations is well known: Forging a link to the main line of the Seiwa Genji was not only an improvement—whatever Ieyasu’s actual ancestry may have been—but an essential step in producing a pedigree fit for a shogun. Tokugawa Ieyasu, of course, was far from alone in manipulating the details of his familial history and identity. The regime founded by the Tokugawa, though, also played a central role other families’ recasting of their genealogies, by instructing warrior houses throughout the land to submit their family trees for inspection, collation, and eventual publication. These ambitious compilation projects ensured the preservation of copies of genealogical records that might otherwise have been lost—and in many cases these are the only documents that allow modern historians to weave continuous family narratives. The production (or even invention) of family histories by house elders and archivists across the country was aided and abetted, often unwittingly, but the Tokugawa compilers charged with verifying the authenticity of documents submitted to their attention. As a result, new pasts were officially sanctioned and published for a great number of families.
In this paper I examine not the genealogies of victors eager to provide themselves with a past worthy of their present, but rather those of losers and survivors—in particular, those of eastern families like the Uesugi, Nagao, Ōishi, Iwamatsu, Yura, for most of whom the sixteenth century ended worse than it had begun. I consider how, and for which ends, each in its own fashion, the new narratives served to disguise complex and uncomfortable pasts with reassuringly and fictitiously serene ones.
This paper uses the example of Tokugawa Ieyasu’s death and deification in 1616 and subsequent transformation into an object of cultic veneration in the mid seventeenth century to explore the relationship between visual and material culture, apotheosis, hagiography, and historiography. I examine three objects associated with Ieyasu during the Tokugawa period—a posthumous portrait, a sword, and a letter—to argue that the descendants of Ieyasu deployed visual, material, and textual culture to construct and disseminate a mythologized and highly ideological image of his life and age. I will read these three different types of primary sources to suggest that in the case of Ieyasu, as for much of the long sixteenth century, the line between hagiography and historiography was largely invisible in the seventeenth century and continues to be fuzzy today. The larger point that I hope to make is that the implications of the seventeenth-century reinvention of late medieval Japan extend well beyond early modern “classicism” or “historicism,” to use two terms that have appeared in some recent English-language publications on early modern Japanese culture. This paper will illuminate the fragility of the evidentiary base on which historians of the long sixteenth century build their arguments about the past.
Despite its neglect until recent years, the 17th century in Japan is arguably the most prolific and innovative period of pictorial narratives in the handscroll format. It is this format’s text and image combination which was perceived as the most authoritative site to recount legends and histories of the past. As such they served to legitimize individuals and their genealogies, as well as the karmic origins of shrines and temples. Myriad copies of medieval scrolls were produced in this century that roughly fall into three categories: exact reproductions; rough outlines; and free copies resulting in new interpretations.
This paper is concerned with the last category. A set of two scrolls dated to 1672, entitled Karmic Origins of the Hakosaki Hachiman (Hakosaki Hachiman engi emaki) elucidates the agency of such handscroll productions in two ways. The colophon lists all the scribes involved in writing the text passages for the scrolls thus offering the social and political background of its creation; and the painter at court of the Tokugawa rulers, Sumiyoshi Gukei’s signature and seal allow insights into his strategy of adapting styles and motifs of medieval engi scrolls.
Three aspects of these strategies pervade Gukei’s Hachiman scrolls in relation to past models and future impact: a knowledge and amalgamation of two separate traditions of Hachiman engi scrolls of the Nanbokuchō and Muromachi periods; the translation of specific iconographies into early modern expressions; and finally, new motifs and visual formulations of scenes, which were perpetuated in the following centuries.
Even before the Meiji restoration, the “flag of the rising sun” (hinomaru) was actually used by Japanese ships. Just how it became a national symbol is, however, far from clear. I will try to trace the extant visual and scarce textual sources to reconstruct the role of the “rising sun” during the Edo period and before. One centerpiece of evidence will be an anonymous manuscript called “Illustrations of Honorable Pennants and Pennants of the Various Provinces” (On-funajirushi narabi ni shokoku on-funajirushi no zu), compiled before the 1850s.
Today, Mt. Fuji appears in a wide range of contexts, very often as a symbol of “Japan” as a whole. Whether in tourist pamphlets, political propaganda, or religious tracts, it is frequently held up as a shining icon of the “essence” of Japan. When and how did this come to be? This paper considers this question through the lens of the art historical record, providing an overview of representations of the mountain from the eleventh to sixteenth centuries.
Fuji first appears in the extant visual record in the paintings of Prince Shōtoku’s life from 1069, and his illustrated biographies from the early 14th century on consistently include the episode of him riding his flying horse to the site. The mountain is also pictured in 13th-century illustrated handscrolls, Muromachi Period monochrome ink painting, and late medieval “pilgrimage mandalas.” These visual sources suggest that although seeds of Fuji as a symbol of a larger notion of “Japan” were clearly planted during the medieval period, the real flowering of both the popular cult and the broader identities associated with it can only be dated to early modern and modern times.
Scholars have often mistakenly viewed medieval representations of Mt. Fuji through the distorting lens of cultural developments of the 16th century and after. In order to understand the earlier works and their implications for the study of pre-modern trans-regional communal identities, historians must carefully analyze the medieval objects, their artistic progeny in later times, and the historiographical distortions caused by their interactions.
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