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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Akamatsu Toshihide and Philp Yampolsky. “Muromachi Zen and the Gozan System.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 313-30.
Argument, Sources, Examples The Gozan system, adopted from China, by which the Ashikaga shogunate managed and subordinated Rinzai Zen, quickly became "almost entirely bureaucratic in nature," and at the same time, "enthusiasm for Zen study waned" (319), possibly because Zen began to incorporate elements of an esoteric tradition and because in the 14thC (i.e. the Yuan dynasty) direct connections with China waned. Provincial (i.e. Soto) Zen gained in popularity after the Ônin War, "but it too changed radically in style. It was now a simplified and formalized teaching with numerous extraneous elements derived from other forms of Buddhism, both esoteric and Pure Land" (ibid). The leashing of Zen doubtless served the bakufu's interests, as did the generally tight links between the Zen temples and the bakufu itself.
Bibliographic Data: Itō Teiji with Paul Novograd. “The Development of Shoin-Style Architecture.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 227-40.
Argument, Sources, Examples The development of what later came to be called the "shoin style" of architecture in the Muromachi age is a modification of the Heian and Kamakura style of palace architecture "in adaptation to new social and cultural practices" (228). "The crumbling of the old rigidly stratified society, the spread of freer, more casual relations between members of the military aristocracy or between upper and lower levels of society, as well as the emergence of new cultural pursuits such as the tea ceremony, renga composing parties, and the rage for displaying Chinese art and artifacts led to new forms of architecture to accommodate these changing patterns in social behavior and cultural life" (227). It is only after the consolidation of the style as such in the Momoyama period that the last of the palace style features dropped out of shoin style; all Muromachi shoin style structures retain vestigial palace style elements, as architecturally speaking the Muromachi period was a transitional phase. Shoin elements include such stereotypically "Japanese" practices as tatami mats covering the floors, no distinction between central chamber and outer veranda, and the decorative or writing alcoves with shelves for display, as well as sliding door and wall panels.
Bibliographic Data: Kawai Masaharu with Kenneth A. Grossberg. “Shogun and Shugo: The Provincial Aspects of Muromachi Politics.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 65-86.
Main Argument: Kawai argues that to understand the relationship between shogun and shugo "requires an understanding of the interaction of two sets of political relationships: those at the center between shogun and shugo and those in the provinces between shugo and kokujin" (65). The shugo-shogun relationship falls into two distinct phases: from 1394 to the 1440s, "the shugo played an important supportive role in central government affairs," but the shugo were too bound up in the bakufu's authority to survive its gradual loss of power in the provinces (66). Almost all the Sengoku daimyo came from the ranks of kokujin, who "took advantage of their proximity to the local agrarian base to undercut shugo authority" (ibid).
Argument, Sources, Examples Kokujin, men of the province, were semi-independent local proprietors who essentially controlled the lands not held in shoên. Shugo, military governors, were essentially placed over everyone in the province, but they held very little land directly and thus were in competition with kokujin and with estate proprietors. In the first phase of the shugo--essentially the Nanbokuchô period--the shogunate most often gave the most powerful provincial family the office of shugo and exercised little if any restraint on the shugo once that office had been assigned. Thus most shugo took the opportunity to develop actual landed power bases, rather than continuing to act solely as military governors. In this first phase, moreover, shugo were de facto compelled to reside in Kyoto as a security measure to prevent revolts, but also because of political, economic, and cultural incentives for the shugo themselves. The capital still offered opportunities that the provinces could not. Moreover, shugo families formed the principals of the kanrei system and could veto the desires of individual shogun, which provided a powerful force for stability during the Ashikaga shogunate's second phase (and note, it is not coincidental that disputes within the kanrei houses precipitated the Ônin War). By the third phase, however, shugo who remained in Kyoto were losing wealth and power to their provincial deputies, often fatally for their continued political existence, just as the bakufu itself disintegrated. Provincial problems were exacerbated by uneven shugo control over kokujin, which was structured by existing kokujin/government relationships. The Ôuchi of Suo and Nagato, who successfully transitioned from shugo to daimyo, were one of the few shugo families who were able to establish complete personal control over kokujin, not coincidentally, although they later lost out to the Môri, Sengoku daimyo who had been kokujin. (Other shugo families who survived had been highly peripheral to bakufu politics in the center, again not coincidentally.) Most kokujin who became daimyo, however, did so through forming and eventually becoming pre-eminent in ikki (leagues) of kokujin, which initially organized on an ad hoc basis but gradually came to be more permanent institutions as provincial order disintegrated. These leagues acted in concert, and their leaders were gradually transformed into Sengoku daimyo.
Bibliographic Data: Miyagawa Mitsuru with Cornelius J. Kiley. “From Shōen to Chigyō: Proprietary Lordship and the Structure of Power.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 89-106.
Main Argument: Miyagawa argues that understanding the dual role of shugo is paramount for understanding both Muromachi politics and the fate of the shugo after the demise of the bakufu: a shugo was both "the chief political authority in the provinces to which he was appointed, and, at the same time, he was also a lord of certain domains in the sense that shôen proprietors or kokujin were lord of domains" (89). Crucially, however, a shugo's domains were not coterminous with his political authority, and thus he was constantly striving to put local kokujin into vassalage relationships with him through grants of various kinds, a task made easier after the kokugaryô offices and lands came to be administered by shugo. However, kokujin were themselves striving to expand their networks of holdings and entered vassal relationships only to that end, so shugo/kokujin bonds remained quite weak. For Miyagawa, kokujin lordship was the foundation of the Muromachi political structure; "the bakufu, or the bakufu-shugo structure, must be seen as the guarantor of kokujin lordship at the local level" (99).
Argument, Sources, Examples Shugo held their lands as shiki, which were not what they had been in the mature shôen system before the Nanbokuchô period caused chaos in that system: "as the structure of the vertically stratified tenures broke down, a shiki-holder within a shô or gô generally came to enjoy complete proprietary control over his jitô or ryôke, free from superior tenures" (90). Kokujin, moreover, were continuously attempting to cement their control over their holdings, both through acquiring auxiliary rights necessary for control of agriculture (water, etc) and through the sôryô system, which shugo also used, in which the "chief heir" of the main branch lineage exercised total control over cadet branches by means of redistributing (rights to) property holdings, although when kokujin did this cadet branches actually physically resettled. Kokujin at the same time were struggling most often against villagers themselves--hence the growing number of disturbances in this period, as peasants attempted to resist kokujin assertions of control. They did this through dogô, rural chiefs, who entered into vassal relationships with kokujin "to acquire security against such pressure from below" and "emerged as a new class of militarized village chiefs" (101). Thus, the kokujin who emerged as Sengoku daimyo stood at the apex of a three tiered feudal structure with dogô at the bottom and kokujin in the middle; "the mainstay of the sengoku-daimyo's control over his domain was the chigyô system, whereby the daimyo had paramount lordship over all land in his domain including the power to confirm fiefs," although kokujin's prior holdings were generally exempt from the daimyo's powers beyond that of confirmation, as confirmation was the whole point of kokujin agreeing to serve (ibid).
Bibliographic Data: Nagahara Keiji with Kozo Yamamura. “Village Communities and Daimyo Power.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 107-24.
Main Argument: Nagahara argues that the "emergence of the village community as an active participant in the political struggles of the period" (i.e. Nanbokuchô to Sengoku) was "particularly significant" in the institutional/political history of these years, in which the shôen system deteriorated absolutely and the political structure of Sengoku daimyo evolved in its place (107). Village communities were organized "to further the economic well-being of each member of the community; to exercise the social and political functions necessary to resist the lord's authority and to improve each member's social and political status; and to defend the community against intrusion by outside powers, whether political or military" (107-08). Because lords and peasants "viewed the village community from quite different perspectives as a result of the conflicting and mutually exclusive relationship between their interests…village communities constituted areas of conflict between them" (ibid).
Argument, Sources, Examples Village communities secured a number of institutional prerogatives during this period: limited self-government, the ability to petition higher authorities directly, first through letters and then through "petitioning with the threat of violence," which evolved into ikki (peasant revolts). At the same time, more and more villages created village codes, which governed members' behavior and stipulated punishments for various transgressions. This evolving village unity actually worked against villages' efforts to secure independence from proprietary authority in that growing exclusive mindedness often acted as a brake against attempts to organize collectively among villages--although villages in the capital region were able to to do so. Peasant resistance became pervasive in the archipelago in the 16thC, with the result that "these struggles had a real effect on the coercive power of the daimyo," as well as on their effective tax rates, which were not high. Daimyo responded by attempting "to integrate the various institutional arrangements for village self-government into their own system of local administration" and by attempting to act as mediators in intercommunity disputes (122). Only when they had succeeded in institutionalizing both roles and subsuming village communities under their control "was the Tokugawa political system made possible" (123).
Bibliographic Data: Satō Shin’ichi with John W. Hall. “The Ashikaga Shogun and the Muromachi Bakufu Administration.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 45-52.
Main Argument: "Perhaps the outstanding feature of the Ashikaga system of government was that, except in the purely administrative offices of the bakufu, the shogun's regional vassals served both as high officials of government and as local military governors (shugo). …the Ashikaga shogun was essentially a hegemony placed over a collation of shugo houses. Outside of the capital it was the shugo who 'governed the country' in the name of the shogun" (45).
Argument, Sources, Examples The shugo fell into three camps: those of the Kantô, subject to the Kamakura office; those of Kyushu, subject to a deputy shogun appointed from among them, and the 20 shugo responsible for the 45 central provinces, who were obliged to live in Kyoto. Shogunal administration fell into three phases: first, ending in 1352, the shogunal brothers exercised authority in different spheres, an inherently unstable arrangement. After the younger brother's death by poisoning, the bakufu was reorganized to put the office of kanrei at the top of the hierarchy, serving as the "chief coordinating agent among the several organs of the bakufu administration and as the voice of policy consensus among the shogun's vassals" (49). In the third phase, after the Ônin War, the significance of the kanrei diminished in favor of the "corps of administrators," whose offices were increasingly "heredified" along with those of other low-level bakufu functionaries even as the effective authority of the shogunate as a whole diminished precipitously. Moreover, "group monopoly of certain functions around the shogun" revealed that the bakufu was not immune from this tendency towards cliques present in Muromachi society as a whole (51). Ironically, it was the shogun's attempts to increase his personal authority over the shugo, by minimizing the kanrei, that resulted in the waning of his personal authority in particular and of the shogunate as a whole, as greater personal shogunal authority was not acceptable to the shugo as a group.
Bibliographic Data: Toyoda Takeshi and Sugiyama Hiroshi with V. Dixon Morris. “The Growth of Commerce and the Trades.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 129-44.
Main Argument: "The wars which attended the destruction of the Kamakura regime were themselves a reflection of the new economic vigor and entrepreneurial drive among the provincial military aristocracy. As for the fighting, the movement of troops and their posting in distant areas stimulated rather than hindered the circulation of goods. … Thus the early Muromachi age in fact saw a spurt in the production of goods and the exchange of commodities, with Kyoto and the several river and seaport towns linked to it as the center of this activity" (129).
Argument, Sources, Examples Factors contributing to commercial growth: "the consumer economy formed by the old civil aristocrat and religious institutions" (129); "the military aristocracy and their retainers who gathered about the Muromachi bakufu" after Kyoto again became the seat of government (130); the creation of linkages between the capital and the provinces through the employment of ton'ya by men of the shugo class (in a sign of the times, merchants were even sometimes formal vassals of shugo), who themselves strove to create links with their fellow merchants in the capital; and also the bakufu fiscal policy that "deemphasized land and actively sought to develop commercial income, either through taxation or through participation in commercial ventures" (131). The bakufu also monopolized foreign trade and with it Japan's currency supply (remember: currency as a bulk good, not as a modern "balance of payments"). The bakufu also encouraged the growth of guilds (za) and attempted to control the growth of toll barriers. Moreover, the growth of za was part of "a steady growth in the quantity of trade and commercial production and in their freedom from proprietary control," a situation that was mirrored among merchants and artisans, as formerly service relationships became purely economic and za increasingly became mutual associations independent of patrons altogether (138). Finally, the warrior aristocracy were quite willing to use Buddhism as a status-elevating institution, inviting members of the kawaramono (including, famously, Kan'ami and Zeami) into their entourages via taking orders if the kawaramono excelled at their art. By the mid-15thC even retired sovereigns were employing former kawaramono, confirming "a general trend toward the gradual improvement of the social status of the shokunin class as a whole" (144).
Critical assessment: This book is a wealth of interesting, critical, and relevant material; I've only covered only about half of it. Even the stuff that isn't ground-breaking is interesting. Medieval Japan was far more interesting than those who talked about "the Dark Ages" would think.
Further reading: Tonomura, Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan; Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State; Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan; Mass, Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History
Meta notes: Everyone had more fun in the medieval period.
Argument, Sources, Examples The Gozan system, adopted from China, by which the Ashikaga shogunate managed and subordinated Rinzai Zen, quickly became "almost entirely bureaucratic in nature," and at the same time, "enthusiasm for Zen study waned" (319), possibly because Zen began to incorporate elements of an esoteric tradition and because in the 14thC (i.e. the Yuan dynasty) direct connections with China waned. Provincial (i.e. Soto) Zen gained in popularity after the Ônin War, "but it too changed radically in style. It was now a simplified and formalized teaching with numerous extraneous elements derived from other forms of Buddhism, both esoteric and Pure Land" (ibid). The leashing of Zen doubtless served the bakufu's interests, as did the generally tight links between the Zen temples and the bakufu itself.
Bibliographic Data: Itō Teiji with Paul Novograd. “The Development of Shoin-Style Architecture.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 227-40.
Argument, Sources, Examples The development of what later came to be called the "shoin style" of architecture in the Muromachi age is a modification of the Heian and Kamakura style of palace architecture "in adaptation to new social and cultural practices" (228). "The crumbling of the old rigidly stratified society, the spread of freer, more casual relations between members of the military aristocracy or between upper and lower levels of society, as well as the emergence of new cultural pursuits such as the tea ceremony, renga composing parties, and the rage for displaying Chinese art and artifacts led to new forms of architecture to accommodate these changing patterns in social behavior and cultural life" (227). It is only after the consolidation of the style as such in the Momoyama period that the last of the palace style features dropped out of shoin style; all Muromachi shoin style structures retain vestigial palace style elements, as architecturally speaking the Muromachi period was a transitional phase. Shoin elements include such stereotypically "Japanese" practices as tatami mats covering the floors, no distinction between central chamber and outer veranda, and the decorative or writing alcoves with shelves for display, as well as sliding door and wall panels.
Bibliographic Data: Kawai Masaharu with Kenneth A. Grossberg. “Shogun and Shugo: The Provincial Aspects of Muromachi Politics.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 65-86.
Main Argument: Kawai argues that to understand the relationship between shogun and shugo "requires an understanding of the interaction of two sets of political relationships: those at the center between shogun and shugo and those in the provinces between shugo and kokujin" (65). The shugo-shogun relationship falls into two distinct phases: from 1394 to the 1440s, "the shugo played an important supportive role in central government affairs," but the shugo were too bound up in the bakufu's authority to survive its gradual loss of power in the provinces (66). Almost all the Sengoku daimyo came from the ranks of kokujin, who "took advantage of their proximity to the local agrarian base to undercut shugo authority" (ibid).
Argument, Sources, Examples Kokujin, men of the province, were semi-independent local proprietors who essentially controlled the lands not held in shoên. Shugo, military governors, were essentially placed over everyone in the province, but they held very little land directly and thus were in competition with kokujin and with estate proprietors. In the first phase of the shugo--essentially the Nanbokuchô period--the shogunate most often gave the most powerful provincial family the office of shugo and exercised little if any restraint on the shugo once that office had been assigned. Thus most shugo took the opportunity to develop actual landed power bases, rather than continuing to act solely as military governors. In this first phase, moreover, shugo were de facto compelled to reside in Kyoto as a security measure to prevent revolts, but also because of political, economic, and cultural incentives for the shugo themselves. The capital still offered opportunities that the provinces could not. Moreover, shugo families formed the principals of the kanrei system and could veto the desires of individual shogun, which provided a powerful force for stability during the Ashikaga shogunate's second phase (and note, it is not coincidental that disputes within the kanrei houses precipitated the Ônin War). By the third phase, however, shugo who remained in Kyoto were losing wealth and power to their provincial deputies, often fatally for their continued political existence, just as the bakufu itself disintegrated. Provincial problems were exacerbated by uneven shugo control over kokujin, which was structured by existing kokujin/government relationships. The Ôuchi of Suo and Nagato, who successfully transitioned from shugo to daimyo, were one of the few shugo families who were able to establish complete personal control over kokujin, not coincidentally, although they later lost out to the Môri, Sengoku daimyo who had been kokujin. (Other shugo families who survived had been highly peripheral to bakufu politics in the center, again not coincidentally.) Most kokujin who became daimyo, however, did so through forming and eventually becoming pre-eminent in ikki (leagues) of kokujin, which initially organized on an ad hoc basis but gradually came to be more permanent institutions as provincial order disintegrated. These leagues acted in concert, and their leaders were gradually transformed into Sengoku daimyo.
Bibliographic Data: Miyagawa Mitsuru with Cornelius J. Kiley. “From Shōen to Chigyō: Proprietary Lordship and the Structure of Power.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 89-106.
Main Argument: Miyagawa argues that understanding the dual role of shugo is paramount for understanding both Muromachi politics and the fate of the shugo after the demise of the bakufu: a shugo was both "the chief political authority in the provinces to which he was appointed, and, at the same time, he was also a lord of certain domains in the sense that shôen proprietors or kokujin were lord of domains" (89). Crucially, however, a shugo's domains were not coterminous with his political authority, and thus he was constantly striving to put local kokujin into vassalage relationships with him through grants of various kinds, a task made easier after the kokugaryô offices and lands came to be administered by shugo. However, kokujin were themselves striving to expand their networks of holdings and entered vassal relationships only to that end, so shugo/kokujin bonds remained quite weak. For Miyagawa, kokujin lordship was the foundation of the Muromachi political structure; "the bakufu, or the bakufu-shugo structure, must be seen as the guarantor of kokujin lordship at the local level" (99).
Argument, Sources, Examples Shugo held their lands as shiki, which were not what they had been in the mature shôen system before the Nanbokuchô period caused chaos in that system: "as the structure of the vertically stratified tenures broke down, a shiki-holder within a shô or gô generally came to enjoy complete proprietary control over his jitô or ryôke, free from superior tenures" (90). Kokujin, moreover, were continuously attempting to cement their control over their holdings, both through acquiring auxiliary rights necessary for control of agriculture (water, etc) and through the sôryô system, which shugo also used, in which the "chief heir" of the main branch lineage exercised total control over cadet branches by means of redistributing (rights to) property holdings, although when kokujin did this cadet branches actually physically resettled. Kokujin at the same time were struggling most often against villagers themselves--hence the growing number of disturbances in this period, as peasants attempted to resist kokujin assertions of control. They did this through dogô, rural chiefs, who entered into vassal relationships with kokujin "to acquire security against such pressure from below" and "emerged as a new class of militarized village chiefs" (101). Thus, the kokujin who emerged as Sengoku daimyo stood at the apex of a three tiered feudal structure with dogô at the bottom and kokujin in the middle; "the mainstay of the sengoku-daimyo's control over his domain was the chigyô system, whereby the daimyo had paramount lordship over all land in his domain including the power to confirm fiefs," although kokujin's prior holdings were generally exempt from the daimyo's powers beyond that of confirmation, as confirmation was the whole point of kokujin agreeing to serve (ibid).
Bibliographic Data: Nagahara Keiji with Kozo Yamamura. “Village Communities and Daimyo Power.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 107-24.
Main Argument: Nagahara argues that the "emergence of the village community as an active participant in the political struggles of the period" (i.e. Nanbokuchô to Sengoku) was "particularly significant" in the institutional/political history of these years, in which the shôen system deteriorated absolutely and the political structure of Sengoku daimyo evolved in its place (107). Village communities were organized "to further the economic well-being of each member of the community; to exercise the social and political functions necessary to resist the lord's authority and to improve each member's social and political status; and to defend the community against intrusion by outside powers, whether political or military" (107-08). Because lords and peasants "viewed the village community from quite different perspectives as a result of the conflicting and mutually exclusive relationship between their interests…village communities constituted areas of conflict between them" (ibid).
Argument, Sources, Examples Village communities secured a number of institutional prerogatives during this period: limited self-government, the ability to petition higher authorities directly, first through letters and then through "petitioning with the threat of violence," which evolved into ikki (peasant revolts). At the same time, more and more villages created village codes, which governed members' behavior and stipulated punishments for various transgressions. This evolving village unity actually worked against villages' efforts to secure independence from proprietary authority in that growing exclusive mindedness often acted as a brake against attempts to organize collectively among villages--although villages in the capital region were able to to do so. Peasant resistance became pervasive in the archipelago in the 16thC, with the result that "these struggles had a real effect on the coercive power of the daimyo," as well as on their effective tax rates, which were not high. Daimyo responded by attempting "to integrate the various institutional arrangements for village self-government into their own system of local administration" and by attempting to act as mediators in intercommunity disputes (122). Only when they had succeeded in institutionalizing both roles and subsuming village communities under their control "was the Tokugawa political system made possible" (123).
Bibliographic Data: Satō Shin’ichi with John W. Hall. “The Ashikaga Shogun and the Muromachi Bakufu Administration.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 45-52.
Main Argument: "Perhaps the outstanding feature of the Ashikaga system of government was that, except in the purely administrative offices of the bakufu, the shogun's regional vassals served both as high officials of government and as local military governors (shugo). …the Ashikaga shogun was essentially a hegemony placed over a collation of shugo houses. Outside of the capital it was the shugo who 'governed the country' in the name of the shogun" (45).
Argument, Sources, Examples The shugo fell into three camps: those of the Kantô, subject to the Kamakura office; those of Kyushu, subject to a deputy shogun appointed from among them, and the 20 shugo responsible for the 45 central provinces, who were obliged to live in Kyoto. Shogunal administration fell into three phases: first, ending in 1352, the shogunal brothers exercised authority in different spheres, an inherently unstable arrangement. After the younger brother's death by poisoning, the bakufu was reorganized to put the office of kanrei at the top of the hierarchy, serving as the "chief coordinating agent among the several organs of the bakufu administration and as the voice of policy consensus among the shogun's vassals" (49). In the third phase, after the Ônin War, the significance of the kanrei diminished in favor of the "corps of administrators," whose offices were increasingly "heredified" along with those of other low-level bakufu functionaries even as the effective authority of the shogunate as a whole diminished precipitously. Moreover, "group monopoly of certain functions around the shogun" revealed that the bakufu was not immune from this tendency towards cliques present in Muromachi society as a whole (51). Ironically, it was the shogun's attempts to increase his personal authority over the shugo, by minimizing the kanrei, that resulted in the waning of his personal authority in particular and of the shogunate as a whole, as greater personal shogunal authority was not acceptable to the shugo as a group.
Bibliographic Data: Toyoda Takeshi and Sugiyama Hiroshi with V. Dixon Morris. “The Growth of Commerce and the Trades.” In Japan in the Muromachi Age, ed. John W. Hall and Toyoda Takeshi. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 2001 [1977]: 129-44.
Main Argument: "The wars which attended the destruction of the Kamakura regime were themselves a reflection of the new economic vigor and entrepreneurial drive among the provincial military aristocracy. As for the fighting, the movement of troops and their posting in distant areas stimulated rather than hindered the circulation of goods. … Thus the early Muromachi age in fact saw a spurt in the production of goods and the exchange of commodities, with Kyoto and the several river and seaport towns linked to it as the center of this activity" (129).
Argument, Sources, Examples Factors contributing to commercial growth: "the consumer economy formed by the old civil aristocrat and religious institutions" (129); "the military aristocracy and their retainers who gathered about the Muromachi bakufu" after Kyoto again became the seat of government (130); the creation of linkages between the capital and the provinces through the employment of ton'ya by men of the shugo class (in a sign of the times, merchants were even sometimes formal vassals of shugo), who themselves strove to create links with their fellow merchants in the capital; and also the bakufu fiscal policy that "deemphasized land and actively sought to develop commercial income, either through taxation or through participation in commercial ventures" (131). The bakufu also monopolized foreign trade and with it Japan's currency supply (remember: currency as a bulk good, not as a modern "balance of payments"). The bakufu also encouraged the growth of guilds (za) and attempted to control the growth of toll barriers. Moreover, the growth of za was part of "a steady growth in the quantity of trade and commercial production and in their freedom from proprietary control," a situation that was mirrored among merchants and artisans, as formerly service relationships became purely economic and za increasingly became mutual associations independent of patrons altogether (138). Finally, the warrior aristocracy were quite willing to use Buddhism as a status-elevating institution, inviting members of the kawaramono (including, famously, Kan'ami and Zeami) into their entourages via taking orders if the kawaramono excelled at their art. By the mid-15thC even retired sovereigns were employing former kawaramono, confirming "a general trend toward the gradual improvement of the social status of the shokunin class as a whole" (144).
Critical assessment: This book is a wealth of interesting, critical, and relevant material; I've only covered only about half of it. Even the stuff that isn't ground-breaking is interesting. Medieval Japan was far more interesting than those who talked about "the Dark Ages" would think.
Further reading: Tonomura, Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan; Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State; Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan; Mass, Antiquity and Anachronism in Japanese History
Meta notes: Everyone had more fun in the medieval period.