Book review: A Sense of Place
Jan. 13th, 2014 11:58![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Spafford, David. A Sense of Place: The Political Landscape in Late Medieval Japan. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2013. [read in manuscript as The Persistent Medieval: Land and Place in Eastern Japan, 1450-1525.]
Main Argument: Focusing not on the conflicts that took place in the Kantô plain (Musashino) in the time period but on the Kantô plain itself and "how that 'placeness' was constituted in writings about place" (2), Spafford argues that the sources, if freed from the teleological reading towards reunification, reveal the "persistent medieval," the "continuity, the perception of continuity, and the fiction of continuity" (12) of the medieval order, or at least "of a spatial syntax that was centuries old" (1), that magnates in the Kantô clung to amidst the shattering experience of decades of war and which conditioned their ("inadequate") responses to the changes that war wrought, directly and indirectly. "It is, in the best of Japanese traditions, a losers' history, although, ironically, defeat would only become apparent, and inevitable, in the decades that follow the end of this study" (17). Nor, Spafford insists, is his emphasis on continuities "meant to keep change at bay … both subtle shifts and cataclysmic displacement were part of the experience of regional elites" (28).
Historiographical Engagement: Very, very strongly influenced by Mary Elizabeth Berry's The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (as one might imagine from one of Prof. Berry's students) and heavily engaged in the "spatial turn" historiography that has overtaken work on premodern Japan over the last ten to twenty years, as well as with a good deal of historiography around comparable periods and concerns on the late medieval/early modern side in Europe.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The introduction, after introducing the argument of the book and the geography of the Kantô plain, Spafford goes into a frankly mind-numbing recitation of the events of the seventy-five years of warfare that his study takes place in and around. Far more easier to grasp is the directly opposite obligations of official postings and lordly obligations that major figures in the Kantô faced, and over which they fought, along with landholdings. Consolidating those landholdings was the rational choice in an age of warfare, but local magnates did not share the rational, hindsight perspective of the early modern settlement, and did not act according to its precepts. The medieval, Spafford notes, "could, and did, tolerate fragmentation, imbalance, and disorder to a degree that has long strained our ability to understand; as a system, if we can think of it as one, it was accommodating of change not because incremental change did not matter, but because the medieval derived whatever coherence it had ("in days of old"), from its availability to provide stability of meanings and expectations" (29).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines "some of the effects that the exodus of literati [from Kyoto after 1467], coupled with the ongoing state of civil war, had not only on the literary self-cultivation of provincials and on the unprecedented diffusion of courtly culture to the far reaches of the archipelago, but also on the very literary traditions that were now being disseminated so broadly" (32). Spafford traces the imagining of the Kantô plain and in particular one of its most enduring poetic topoi | utamakura, that of Musashino and its grasses, in terms of the patronage relationship between poets and elites, Poets structured their journeys in terms of these utamakura regardless of their actual purpose or experience in undertaking it, and "the spread of this Kyoto-centric poetic geography reiterated--or kept alive, for provincial elites--a meta-literary idea of the Kantô" (42), in defiance of the fragmentation and particularism that were the hallmarks of the Sengoku period.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the problems and pitfalls of disputes over land between four parties: absentee proprietors (mostly in the capital), local warriors, villagers, and the shoguns who had to mediate between them as well as satisfy their own vassals with grants of land. In the years after 1450, land disputes came to center around not on holding a title but on actually administering the land oneself, either directly or through a deputy. At the same time, Spafford argues, legal documents reveal a growing ambiguity in the nature of authority--in other words, as single individuals came to hold multiple public and private positions, the niceties of distinctions between these positions were less frequently observed. As a consequence of these developments, and of the constant strife that formed their backdrop after the outbreak of civil war in the Kanto in 1455, elites were forced to rethink centuries-old practices of land tenure and administration. Essentially, elites in the Kanto were forced to acknowledge that possession was nine-tenths of the law, even as they struggled to uphold a system of laws that unequivocally said otherwise, frequently via suits in courts whose actual power was slim, or by appeals to lords whose offices existed only on paper. The ambiguity was constructive, in Spafford's view, and the overall concern was to uphold the central mandate of the Muromachi regime (the rights of absentee proprietors, especially temples, to land holdings), even after the Muromachi regime was functionally dissolved. In the end, as Spafford summarizes, "private landholdings were insistently brought under the jurisdiction of officials of the regime; maintaining the peace, an explicitly official endeavor, was actually negotiated in prohibitions [and other pronouncements and communiques] as a form of private enterprise" (121). The sources for all of this are court documents, letters, in one case a diary, and copies of official prohibitions of the type that were posted in temple grounds by lords at temple request.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter uses the account of a land dispute mediated by the monk Shôin in the early 1470s, written down decades later in his memoir Shôin shigo, to argue that (returning to the theme of abandoning historiographical teleology) paying attention to the memoir's contemporary perspective allows historians "to replace the emphasis on structural change and rationalization with a greater willingness to take notice of conflict, indecision, and unintended outcomes" (126). The details are complicated and beyond the scope of these notes; suffice it to say that in the event the retainer family in question, the Iwamatsu, magnanimously traded claims to eighteen unattainable holdings in various parts of the country for the official sanction of their control of two estates that adjoined the center of their power, Nitta Estate. The outcome of this entire negotiation was to enable the Iwamatsu to consolidate their land holdings and family power, which positioned them well in the emerging new political order of the 16thC. The point of the memoir, however, is the great loss that this negotiation represented, because, as Spafford argues, "land was viewed and treated as a form of political currency and genealogy," doubly so given that "warrior families were, themselves, politically dependent on their lands" (156-57). Warrior families' ties to their lands were "a family's identity, its sense of familial continuity, and the evidence of its prestige" (157). Thus for the Iwamatsu alienating their ancestral holdings constituted a distinct loss of status, one the family had resisted for decades and which Shôin decades later is at pains to lament. That this alienation aligned their claims more closely with reality on the ground was the very problem; as Spafford puts it, "the burden of past splendor, real or imagined with retrospective fondness, acted as a constant diversion from any process of consolidation which, we now feel, was increasingly understood as the key to survival" (168).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers what Spafford terms, after Pierre Toubert, the "castellan revolution" of the latter half of the 15thC. Castles sprang up across the archipelago and the countryside they controlled was transformed into hinterland virtually overnight. But, as Spafford notes, "even as they commissioned the construction of new castles across the plain, and encouraged local magnates to build castles following their example, the great lordly families in the region preferred to reside in, and rule from, a succession of military encampments" (170). The proliferation of castles decisively transformed warfare along a number of axes, and along the way made sieges the predominant experience of armed conflict. Castles also transformed road networks and patterns of settlement as villages moved to concentrate around castles and roads shifted to connect them more directly. Moreover, new archaeological excavations have shown that, in contrast to the final forms surviving castles took in the late 16th and early 17thC, earlier castles were much less grand, and much less permanent, affairs: they were originally built as spaces of temporary resort, of the "non-quotidian," in contrast to the lightly fortified mansions where families expected to spend most of their time. This began to change in the 1450s, when the "new castles" became grander, much more permanent, and much more heavily defended. They retained, however, a crucial ambiguity as to whether they were mansions or castles, which makes sense given that the new castles were now spaces for daily life and administration in non-exigent circumstances. At the same time, the sprawling, fortified encampments from which prominent families governed for years at a time (20 and eight years, respectively, for the two major encampments of the Yamanouchi Uesugi), shows that the distinction of permanence versus non-permanence, or of military versus non-military, holds little water: "Clearly camps, however impermanent, functioned as loci of authority precisely because they lent themselves to the performance of functions both ritual and routinely administrative, for good management of the affairs of state, even at its most secular, was closely associated with and dependent on sacred spaces" (202). The trick is that, as Spafford says, "the most distinctive trait of camps was not that they were temporary, but that they were--rhetorically, at least--mobile" (210), because in medieval Japan power was conceptualized in terms of place, and authority and geography were conflated into a hierarchicized representation that put the imperial capital of Kyoto at the top and that put a lord at the top of wherever he was--and wherever he was could, by definition, move at his will. The Uesugi reliance on encampments, therefore, demonstrated their need for "a court that was in the fullness of its authority wherever they were" because they "needed to transcend the local because [their authority] drew on the prestige of the shogunate, whose claims, though little more than claims at this time, remained countrywide" (212). At the same time, the increasing fragmentation of the landscape, of which the new castles were the most visible sign, could not be overcome, only partially dispelled, by the Uesugi encampment strategy. This old form of suzerainty, based on distributed and parcellized landholdings, could not long endure.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Pointillist Plain," examines "passings and crossings--over the landscape and across boundaries" and finds "correlations between shifts in the configuration and conceptualization of boundaries, and ideas about rule over land" (218). Aside from a few references in poetic diaries, the material is once again surviving administrative documents. Briefly, the Kantô in this period saw an uncertainty between spheres of lordly authority and territorial domains familiar from medieval Europe. The "frontiers" between these areas were discussed in terms of passages between them, leading to the association of defensive structures with the passages (frontiers) themselves. The new possibilities that castles and frontiers posed can be seen in the actions of the Hôjô, who conquered the territory held by the Uesugi in the mid 16thC and retained the castles that were well positioned to hold militarily a contiguous and expanding territorial unit--in other words, a domain that encompassed several of the old imperial provinces, "a coherent political space that did not derive from the framework of the old imperial state" (257). This new polity may have looked, to the naked eye, quite similar to the old, but the conceptual framework underlying it had been revolutionized.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples This brief coda considers broadly the early modern period and the scholarship on it, concluding that the spatial imagination of the period in this book was radically different than the later one: "not only relentlessly classificatory but also cartographic" (260). The early modern sense of place was much more capacious, and also much less bound to tradition: "time was collapsed along with space, and the medieval, once so persistent, was not so much superseded as drowned out" (261).
Critical assessment: I want to say at the beginning that I marvel at Spafford's ability to convey the notoriously tortured histories of medieval institutions and historical figures with what has to be the maximum possible brevity and clarity. That a few passages remain convoluted is a testament to the labyrinthine nature of the historical record.
This is an excellent, very readable study that very much benefits from Spafford's familiarity with the literature on medieval Europe (indeed, lapsed classicists like me will be pleased by the more than garnish of Latin and Italian references), to say nothing of his familiarity with the Japanese literature on these topics. Although change over time is the historian's stock in trade, Spafford's inversion of that formula here pays off in spades. This is certainly one of the best books I have read about medieval Japan.
Further reading: Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government; Bruce Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions.
Meta notes: Don't make your acknowledgments too long.
Main Argument: Focusing not on the conflicts that took place in the Kantô plain (Musashino) in the time period but on the Kantô plain itself and "how that 'placeness' was constituted in writings about place" (2), Spafford argues that the sources, if freed from the teleological reading towards reunification, reveal the "persistent medieval," the "continuity, the perception of continuity, and the fiction of continuity" (12) of the medieval order, or at least "of a spatial syntax that was centuries old" (1), that magnates in the Kantô clung to amidst the shattering experience of decades of war and which conditioned their ("inadequate") responses to the changes that war wrought, directly and indirectly. "It is, in the best of Japanese traditions, a losers' history, although, ironically, defeat would only become apparent, and inevitable, in the decades that follow the end of this study" (17). Nor, Spafford insists, is his emphasis on continuities "meant to keep change at bay … both subtle shifts and cataclysmic displacement were part of the experience of regional elites" (28).
Historiographical Engagement: Very, very strongly influenced by Mary Elizabeth Berry's The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (as one might imagine from one of Prof. Berry's students) and heavily engaged in the "spatial turn" historiography that has overtaken work on premodern Japan over the last ten to twenty years, as well as with a good deal of historiography around comparable periods and concerns on the late medieval/early modern side in Europe.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The introduction, after introducing the argument of the book and the geography of the Kantô plain, Spafford goes into a frankly mind-numbing recitation of the events of the seventy-five years of warfare that his study takes place in and around. Far more easier to grasp is the directly opposite obligations of official postings and lordly obligations that major figures in the Kantô faced, and over which they fought, along with landholdings. Consolidating those landholdings was the rational choice in an age of warfare, but local magnates did not share the rational, hindsight perspective of the early modern settlement, and did not act according to its precepts. The medieval, Spafford notes, "could, and did, tolerate fragmentation, imbalance, and disorder to a degree that has long strained our ability to understand; as a system, if we can think of it as one, it was accommodating of change not because incremental change did not matter, but because the medieval derived whatever coherence it had ("in days of old"), from its availability to provide stability of meanings and expectations" (29).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter examines "some of the effects that the exodus of literati [from Kyoto after 1467], coupled with the ongoing state of civil war, had not only on the literary self-cultivation of provincials and on the unprecedented diffusion of courtly culture to the far reaches of the archipelago, but also on the very literary traditions that were now being disseminated so broadly" (32). Spafford traces the imagining of the Kantô plain and in particular one of its most enduring poetic topoi | utamakura, that of Musashino and its grasses, in terms of the patronage relationship between poets and elites, Poets structured their journeys in terms of these utamakura regardless of their actual purpose or experience in undertaking it, and "the spread of this Kyoto-centric poetic geography reiterated--or kept alive, for provincial elites--a meta-literary idea of the Kantô" (42), in defiance of the fragmentation and particularism that were the hallmarks of the Sengoku period.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the problems and pitfalls of disputes over land between four parties: absentee proprietors (mostly in the capital), local warriors, villagers, and the shoguns who had to mediate between them as well as satisfy their own vassals with grants of land. In the years after 1450, land disputes came to center around not on holding a title but on actually administering the land oneself, either directly or through a deputy. At the same time, Spafford argues, legal documents reveal a growing ambiguity in the nature of authority--in other words, as single individuals came to hold multiple public and private positions, the niceties of distinctions between these positions were less frequently observed. As a consequence of these developments, and of the constant strife that formed their backdrop after the outbreak of civil war in the Kanto in 1455, elites were forced to rethink centuries-old practices of land tenure and administration. Essentially, elites in the Kanto were forced to acknowledge that possession was nine-tenths of the law, even as they struggled to uphold a system of laws that unequivocally said otherwise, frequently via suits in courts whose actual power was slim, or by appeals to lords whose offices existed only on paper. The ambiguity was constructive, in Spafford's view, and the overall concern was to uphold the central mandate of the Muromachi regime (the rights of absentee proprietors, especially temples, to land holdings), even after the Muromachi regime was functionally dissolved. In the end, as Spafford summarizes, "private landholdings were insistently brought under the jurisdiction of officials of the regime; maintaining the peace, an explicitly official endeavor, was actually negotiated in prohibitions [and other pronouncements and communiques] as a form of private enterprise" (121). The sources for all of this are court documents, letters, in one case a diary, and copies of official prohibitions of the type that were posted in temple grounds by lords at temple request.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter uses the account of a land dispute mediated by the monk Shôin in the early 1470s, written down decades later in his memoir Shôin shigo, to argue that (returning to the theme of abandoning historiographical teleology) paying attention to the memoir's contemporary perspective allows historians "to replace the emphasis on structural change and rationalization with a greater willingness to take notice of conflict, indecision, and unintended outcomes" (126). The details are complicated and beyond the scope of these notes; suffice it to say that in the event the retainer family in question, the Iwamatsu, magnanimously traded claims to eighteen unattainable holdings in various parts of the country for the official sanction of their control of two estates that adjoined the center of their power, Nitta Estate. The outcome of this entire negotiation was to enable the Iwamatsu to consolidate their land holdings and family power, which positioned them well in the emerging new political order of the 16thC. The point of the memoir, however, is the great loss that this negotiation represented, because, as Spafford argues, "land was viewed and treated as a form of political currency and genealogy," doubly so given that "warrior families were, themselves, politically dependent on their lands" (156-57). Warrior families' ties to their lands were "a family's identity, its sense of familial continuity, and the evidence of its prestige" (157). Thus for the Iwamatsu alienating their ancestral holdings constituted a distinct loss of status, one the family had resisted for decades and which Shôin decades later is at pains to lament. That this alienation aligned their claims more closely with reality on the ground was the very problem; as Spafford puts it, "the burden of past splendor, real or imagined with retrospective fondness, acted as a constant diversion from any process of consolidation which, we now feel, was increasingly understood as the key to survival" (168).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter covers what Spafford terms, after Pierre Toubert, the "castellan revolution" of the latter half of the 15thC. Castles sprang up across the archipelago and the countryside they controlled was transformed into hinterland virtually overnight. But, as Spafford notes, "even as they commissioned the construction of new castles across the plain, and encouraged local magnates to build castles following their example, the great lordly families in the region preferred to reside in, and rule from, a succession of military encampments" (170). The proliferation of castles decisively transformed warfare along a number of axes, and along the way made sieges the predominant experience of armed conflict. Castles also transformed road networks and patterns of settlement as villages moved to concentrate around castles and roads shifted to connect them more directly. Moreover, new archaeological excavations have shown that, in contrast to the final forms surviving castles took in the late 16th and early 17thC, earlier castles were much less grand, and much less permanent, affairs: they were originally built as spaces of temporary resort, of the "non-quotidian," in contrast to the lightly fortified mansions where families expected to spend most of their time. This began to change in the 1450s, when the "new castles" became grander, much more permanent, and much more heavily defended. They retained, however, a crucial ambiguity as to whether they were mansions or castles, which makes sense given that the new castles were now spaces for daily life and administration in non-exigent circumstances. At the same time, the sprawling, fortified encampments from which prominent families governed for years at a time (20 and eight years, respectively, for the two major encampments of the Yamanouchi Uesugi), shows that the distinction of permanence versus non-permanence, or of military versus non-military, holds little water: "Clearly camps, however impermanent, functioned as loci of authority precisely because they lent themselves to the performance of functions both ritual and routinely administrative, for good management of the affairs of state, even at its most secular, was closely associated with and dependent on sacred spaces" (202). The trick is that, as Spafford says, "the most distinctive trait of camps was not that they were temporary, but that they were--rhetorically, at least--mobile" (210), because in medieval Japan power was conceptualized in terms of place, and authority and geography were conflated into a hierarchicized representation that put the imperial capital of Kyoto at the top and that put a lord at the top of wherever he was--and wherever he was could, by definition, move at his will. The Uesugi reliance on encampments, therefore, demonstrated their need for "a court that was in the fullness of its authority wherever they were" because they "needed to transcend the local because [their authority] drew on the prestige of the shogunate, whose claims, though little more than claims at this time, remained countrywide" (212). At the same time, the increasing fragmentation of the landscape, of which the new castles were the most visible sign, could not be overcome, only partially dispelled, by the Uesugi encampment strategy. This old form of suzerainty, based on distributed and parcellized landholdings, could not long endure.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "The Pointillist Plain," examines "passings and crossings--over the landscape and across boundaries" and finds "correlations between shifts in the configuration and conceptualization of boundaries, and ideas about rule over land" (218). Aside from a few references in poetic diaries, the material is once again surviving administrative documents. Briefly, the Kantô in this period saw an uncertainty between spheres of lordly authority and territorial domains familiar from medieval Europe. The "frontiers" between these areas were discussed in terms of passages between them, leading to the association of defensive structures with the passages (frontiers) themselves. The new possibilities that castles and frontiers posed can be seen in the actions of the Hôjô, who conquered the territory held by the Uesugi in the mid 16thC and retained the castles that were well positioned to hold militarily a contiguous and expanding territorial unit--in other words, a domain that encompassed several of the old imperial provinces, "a coherent political space that did not derive from the framework of the old imperial state" (257). This new polity may have looked, to the naked eye, quite similar to the old, but the conceptual framework underlying it had been revolutionized.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples This brief coda considers broadly the early modern period and the scholarship on it, concluding that the spatial imagination of the period in this book was radically different than the later one: "not only relentlessly classificatory but also cartographic" (260). The early modern sense of place was much more capacious, and also much less bound to tradition: "time was collapsed along with space, and the medieval, once so persistent, was not so much superseded as drowned out" (261).
Critical assessment: I want to say at the beginning that I marvel at Spafford's ability to convey the notoriously tortured histories of medieval institutions and historical figures with what has to be the maximum possible brevity and clarity. That a few passages remain convoluted is a testament to the labyrinthine nature of the historical record.
This is an excellent, very readable study that very much benefits from Spafford's familiarity with the literature on medieval Europe (indeed, lapsed classicists like me will be pleased by the more than garnish of Latin and Italian references), to say nothing of his familiarity with the Japanese literature on these topics. Although change over time is the historian's stock in trade, Spafford's inversion of that formula here pays off in spades. This is certainly one of the best books I have read about medieval Japan.
Further reading: Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century: Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government; Bruce Batten, To the Ends of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions.
Meta notes: Don't make your acknowledgments too long.