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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Mass, Jeffrey P. Yoritomo and the Founding of the First Bakufu: The Origins of Dual Government in Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Main Argument: "It is the central contention of this book that, thanks to the policies fashioned by Yoritomo in the period before 1200, the traditional order in Japan was extended for another century" (10). Moreover, both the Taira and the Minamoto were not the titans familiar from the literary record; rather, in the case of Kiyomori, his power peaked at the end of his life rather than earlier, and in the case of both, their achievements were not "military" in character. Yoritomo's achievement was "more modest" than Mass first thought when he began writing, though it "is still hugely impressive given the constraints and obstacles that confronted him" (xi). Similarly, the Kamakura bakufu was "an organization that mostly repudiated the use of force, stressing mediation, persuasion, and procedure instead. …In a sense, Kamakura waged a war of words against violence and aggressive behavior throughout the era, as it sought to transmute what it saw as the most threatening forms of juan competition into verbal exchanges in the courtroom" (x). This is not anything like a "warrior government."
Historiographical Engagement: This is a top to bottom rewrite of Mass's first book, which was itself based on his dissertation; he read all the scholarship on medieval Japan in both Japanese and English in the interim.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Mass reviews the history of the Heian period, characterizing it by the privatization of the central bureaucracy in which "common goals and a common background precluded any involuntary seepage of real authority to social inferiors" outside the capital (2). By the 12thC, two categories of administration over land were in place: shôen and kokugaryô, "which were now acknowledged as the increasingly private spheres of provincial governors" (3). Both these forms of administration were conducted through "a concept of local hierarchy that favored those who were highest on the imperial scale" and furthermore, "a majority of the leading families in the provinces bore clan names that became a further impediment to their autonomy" (5). The Taira and the Minamoto in particular played a "bridging them" which "thus helped to narrow the gulf between Japan's two spheres, making them one of the ultimate buttresses for the Heian order" (6).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Far from the picture of the Taira tyranny, looking carefully at the sources reveals that "in terms of time and space, the Taira's field of operations was narrower than once thought" (30-31). Virtually until the late 1170s, Kiyomori remained beholden to Go-Shirakawa in a junior partnership, and until 1179 his principal strategy to gain influence at court was to displace the Fujiwara of their position and wealth. After 1179 and his unprecedented actions, he found that "his backing and his resources were insufficient to meet the threat" of the Minamoto (23). Furthermore, his egregious actions beginning with the movement of the capital to Fukuhara in 6/1180 are markers of his weakness, not his strength, further corroborated by his difficulties raising the men and resources needed to wage war on the Minamoto. Unlike them, "Kiyomoro could neither alter the central structure on which his authority depended nor rush to convert the land system into a resource for war" (35). The Taira worked through, and were stymied by, traditional agencies.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Just as reports of the hegemony of the Taira have been greatly exaggerated, the same goes for the "Minamoto east" and the supposedly uniform control "the Minamoto" (who did not in fact exist as such, given the weak lateral integration of kin groups in general and the Minamoto in particular) exercised over the Kantô was anything but. Rather, the Minamoto were central aristocrats just like the Taira, albeit ones whose fortunes had fallen very far. Prior to the 1180s, their achievements were modest and ephemeral. Indeed, according to Mass, "the 12thC not only failed to produce warrior autonomy; it experienced a heightened search for protection by traditional means" (53), leading to the surge in provincial commendations leading to (new, "mature") shôen emerged. Moreover, until the Genpei War, despite rising local instability, the central command structure remained in control, and "contention over land rights remained very much within a legal framework" (58). Additionally, the system remained weighted towards those at the center, and even the most powerful provincial families were unable to secure immune control over full-size estates, since central aristocrats were still necessary for legitimacy. Thus any alliance, even military, was temporary and unstable, because provincials lacked autonomous control over the land system. That the Minamoto were dependents of the Fujiwara, whose star was in the eclipse, and that they were not a single kin group but rather a disunified group of lineages, did not help their cause; unlike the Taira, who were a unified family and whose patrons were retired emperors.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter traces the events of the Genpei War, which Mass characterizes as "a civil war of mostly small engagements" (7). In Mass's telling, it is Yoritomo who was the actual radical: "what he decided on ultimately was unprecedented: to construct a regional military lordship under himself, to be supported by a patronage system whose summit would lie in the provinces" (69). Thus, "for the first time, the concerns of men who were not at the top of the social ladder would be placed at the top of a new hierarchy of priorities" (71). Mass offers a different narrative of the Genpei War, which emphasizes that after 10/1180 the Taira and the Minamoto were essentially barricaded from each other while Yoritomo took steps to confirm his own paramountcy in his family and in the Kantô, leaving his two cousins Kiso no Yoshinaka and Yukiie to conduct military operations in western Japan; it was Yoshinaka's pretensions, rather than the Taira threat, that drew him out of the east. After disposing of Yoshinaka offered Yoritomo the opportunity to make peace with the court, he sought to create himself as a war maker and a peacekeeper throughout the archipelago, significantly beginning to issue edicts of confirmation on behalf of central estate owners, marking the first time that "writs bolstered by force began to supplement those issued by a weakened court" (87). Thus Kamakura found itself in the position of needing to guarantee and provide order as its responsibilities around the country increased. On the subject of "the Genpei War" itself, Mass remarks,
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the emergence of shugo and jitô after 1185. Both titles predate the Heian period, but came to be used in radically different ways at different times--no shugo existed as such until after 1200, for example. Neither seems to have evolved at the same time as the bakufu; jitô predate Yoritomo by nearly a half century. During the war years, "the phenomenon of self-styled and privately-appointed jitô eventually pointed the way" to the solution for "the problem of finding an institutional basis upon which the authority of Kamakura might be perpetuated" (124). The eventual jitô system, which gave Kamakura a way to reward its loyalists and punish the troublesome while maintaining the shiki system, emerged as well from Yoritomo's rivalry with Yoshitsune; Yoritomo eventually secured the right to appoint jitô from the court from Go-Shirakawa, and which he began to do in numbers in 1186. Central figures continued to dominate the shiki system, "in other words, the traditional aristocracy remained the country's all but exclusive landed proprietors, whereas provincial men, as before, managed their estates" (129). However, Kyoto's sovereignty had been weakened in two ways: first, "the policing of the countryside continued to require Kamakura's involvement" and second, although jitô were in the middle of the shiki system, the fact that Kamakura held total authority over them created a breach in the overarching system that eventually became the crack in the dam.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Yoritomo's efforts to consolidate his power base and legitimacy in Kamakura as a dual center of government, principally by waging military campaigns (against the Ôshû Fujiwara) without Kyoto's approval and by seeking to place "men of Kamakura" as jitô throughout the realm, with the qualified exception of Kyushu, where many jitô were natives of the island. Policing the conduct of these men soon became the bakufu's raison d'être and its bete noire.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the evolution of the Kyoto/Kamakura dyarchy. Mass notes, speaking of the jitô, that "the notion of a countrywide network of estate stewardships under a single authority violated every precedent of the individualized shiki system" (168). As Yoritomo and his regime matured, his initially inchoate responsibilities stabilized and narrowed, and "he encouraged a division of responsibilities as the core of a new reality, which led in time to the emergence of more or less distinct tracks of authority" (169). Thus, the divisions were not east/west but "parallel, estate-based jurisdictions across the entire country" in which Kyoto and Kamakura were independent of each other unless they held interests in each other's base areas in a given place. The bakufu mediated between them when the two could not be kept separate. Yoritomo's policies of retrenchment and restraint in the immediate aftermath of the war, moreover, reflect the fact that his authority was not sufficient to bridge the gaps in authority which existed throughout the realm, with the result that he moved "in the direction of seeking to bolster traditional hierarchies and sanctions" (172). Both Kyoto and Kamakura, then, saw benefits in restoring such relationships, but to do that effectively, Kamakura's authority over the jitô had to be absolute. Unfortunately for Kamakura, however, the competing needs of proprietors, Kamakura, and the jitô themselves led to a high degree of churn in jitô placements, as well as the placement of an absolute separation between the formerly all but indistinguishable jitô and gesu, which "became the jurisdictional fulcrum of the new age"--a fulcrum, however, the Kamakura was left alone to balance (187).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the emergence of shugo; contrary to later popular recollection, before Yoritomo's death only "pre-shugo" were appointed, and most of these were purged upon his death, beginning a pattern that was to endure as long as Kamakura. Eventually shugo were given a small slice of provincial governors' authority, and not every province had a shugo assigned every year, mirroring the insecurity of the occupants in their office, which "itself was viewed as a provincial magistracy to be administered by nonnatives" (219) and which did not originally included 'office lands' (thus offering no source of profit). Shugo, thus, were "consigned to a perpetual adjunct's role in the judicial process" (220). In this period, shugo remained "a network of provincial officers who represented the Bakufu" (223) and did not develop much autonomy; that would have to wait for the upheavals of a later age.
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "the indiscipline of jitô," who in many ways were the quintessential Kamakura institution, being absorbed into the category of "kokujin" after its fall. In Mass' view, "the jitô may thus have been unprecedented in breaking the jurisdictional stranglehold of estate holders, but not in achieving one of their own" (225). Jitô were able to manipulate current conditions to position themselves as constables and tax collectors in many situations, but in terms of disputes, absentee proprietors matched them toe-to-toe in legal wrangling, which drew in the bakufu (somewhat unwillingly) in a judicial role to adjudicate such claims. Although over time jitô were able to slowly expand their authority, "neither side could ever seize victory in the subsequent sparring and bargaining," and the "piecemeal process" by which they worked "had no realistic end," since Yoritomo had originally wanted a reward vehicle that did not actually give away very much (242, 252). Thus, somewhat perversely, "absentee authority, far from being destroyed by the appearance of these elite managers, was given an extended life by them for at least another century" (250). Only the end of the bakufu could reconfigure the jitô office sufficiently, taking the need for the jitô along with it.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Mass argues against the "many Japans" or "east/west division" thesis, stating that "government and society were similarly organized in both the east and west" in 1185 (254). Indeed, because Japan was "still very much one country," Yoritomo was able to leverage those national structural identities to "find some workable basis for a permanent national authority" (254). Thus Yoritomo positioned himself "as a bulwark of the old order" and "devised policies of a mostly resuscitative nature," committing himself to organization and law rather than violence (255). In Mass' view, moreover, the violence and disorder of the countryside before 1185 is overplayed; "men of the provinces were not seeking to bring about the collapse of the social hierarchy, rather only to obtain more within the accepted limits of what they had always been eligible for" (257). The bakufu functioned to contain warrior aspirations more than to fulfill them.
Critical assessment: This is a very nicely written book, and I think that Mass, who after all basically knew best, is right in most of what he says here. That said, he is not a counter of things (most of the documentation of all of these phenomena is very, very slight), and I also don't endorse the idea that Yoritomo created a "dyarchy." What he did create was a new branch of government that essentially did some duty as military police but, more fundamentally, created an administrative need by inaugurating the jitô and then filled it by managing them. It's quite a neat trick, really, but all the samurai wanted central/courtly preferment and offices, not simply "military honors," the Heike monogatari not withstanding.
Meta notes: Counting things is important.
Main Argument: "It is the central contention of this book that, thanks to the policies fashioned by Yoritomo in the period before 1200, the traditional order in Japan was extended for another century" (10). Moreover, both the Taira and the Minamoto were not the titans familiar from the literary record; rather, in the case of Kiyomori, his power peaked at the end of his life rather than earlier, and in the case of both, their achievements were not "military" in character. Yoritomo's achievement was "more modest" than Mass first thought when he began writing, though it "is still hugely impressive given the constraints and obstacles that confronted him" (xi). Similarly, the Kamakura bakufu was "an organization that mostly repudiated the use of force, stressing mediation, persuasion, and procedure instead. …In a sense, Kamakura waged a war of words against violence and aggressive behavior throughout the era, as it sought to transmute what it saw as the most threatening forms of juan competition into verbal exchanges in the courtroom" (x). This is not anything like a "warrior government."
Historiographical Engagement: This is a top to bottom rewrite of Mass's first book, which was itself based on his dissertation; he read all the scholarship on medieval Japan in both Japanese and English in the interim.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples Mass reviews the history of the Heian period, characterizing it by the privatization of the central bureaucracy in which "common goals and a common background precluded any involuntary seepage of real authority to social inferiors" outside the capital (2). By the 12thC, two categories of administration over land were in place: shôen and kokugaryô, "which were now acknowledged as the increasingly private spheres of provincial governors" (3). Both these forms of administration were conducted through "a concept of local hierarchy that favored those who were highest on the imperial scale" and furthermore, "a majority of the leading families in the provinces bore clan names that became a further impediment to their autonomy" (5). The Taira and the Minamoto in particular played a "bridging them" which "thus helped to narrow the gulf between Japan's two spheres, making them one of the ultimate buttresses for the Heian order" (6).
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Far from the picture of the Taira tyranny, looking carefully at the sources reveals that "in terms of time and space, the Taira's field of operations was narrower than once thought" (30-31). Virtually until the late 1170s, Kiyomori remained beholden to Go-Shirakawa in a junior partnership, and until 1179 his principal strategy to gain influence at court was to displace the Fujiwara of their position and wealth. After 1179 and his unprecedented actions, he found that "his backing and his resources were insufficient to meet the threat" of the Minamoto (23). Furthermore, his egregious actions beginning with the movement of the capital to Fukuhara in 6/1180 are markers of his weakness, not his strength, further corroborated by his difficulties raising the men and resources needed to wage war on the Minamoto. Unlike them, "Kiyomoro could neither alter the central structure on which his authority depended nor rush to convert the land system into a resource for war" (35). The Taira worked through, and were stymied by, traditional agencies.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Just as reports of the hegemony of the Taira have been greatly exaggerated, the same goes for the "Minamoto east" and the supposedly uniform control "the Minamoto" (who did not in fact exist as such, given the weak lateral integration of kin groups in general and the Minamoto in particular) exercised over the Kantô was anything but. Rather, the Minamoto were central aristocrats just like the Taira, albeit ones whose fortunes had fallen very far. Prior to the 1180s, their achievements were modest and ephemeral. Indeed, according to Mass, "the 12thC not only failed to produce warrior autonomy; it experienced a heightened search for protection by traditional means" (53), leading to the surge in provincial commendations leading to (new, "mature") shôen emerged. Moreover, until the Genpei War, despite rising local instability, the central command structure remained in control, and "contention over land rights remained very much within a legal framework" (58). Additionally, the system remained weighted towards those at the center, and even the most powerful provincial families were unable to secure immune control over full-size estates, since central aristocrats were still necessary for legitimacy. Thus any alliance, even military, was temporary and unstable, because provincials lacked autonomous control over the land system. That the Minamoto were dependents of the Fujiwara, whose star was in the eclipse, and that they were not a single kin group but rather a disunified group of lineages, did not help their cause; unlike the Taira, who were a unified family and whose patrons were retired emperors.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter traces the events of the Genpei War, which Mass characterizes as "a civil war of mostly small engagements" (7). In Mass's telling, it is Yoritomo who was the actual radical: "what he decided on ultimately was unprecedented: to construct a regional military lordship under himself, to be supported by a patronage system whose summit would lie in the provinces" (69). Thus, "for the first time, the concerns of men who were not at the top of the social ladder would be placed at the top of a new hierarchy of priorities" (71). Mass offers a different narrative of the Genpei War, which emphasizes that after 10/1180 the Taira and the Minamoto were essentially barricaded from each other while Yoritomo took steps to confirm his own paramountcy in his family and in the Kantô, leaving his two cousins Kiso no Yoshinaka and Yukiie to conduct military operations in western Japan; it was Yoshinaka's pretensions, rather than the Taira threat, that drew him out of the east. After disposing of Yoshinaka offered Yoritomo the opportunity to make peace with the court, he sought to create himself as a war maker and a peacekeeper throughout the archipelago, significantly beginning to issue edicts of confirmation on behalf of central estate owners, marking the first time that "writs bolstered by force began to supplement those issued by a weakened court" (87). Thus Kamakura found itself in the position of needing to guarantee and provide order as its responsibilities around the country increased. On the subject of "the Genpei War" itself, Mass remarks,
As we have seen the war never involved all people and places. A disparateness of motivations meant a disparateness of roles and degrees of commitment. Yet the sense of a national upheaval must have been very real by the start of 1185, with novelty pressing tradition even as both characterized the ear. A substantial number of courtiers, clerics, and warriors were now engaging in activities previously unknown to them. In that sense, the expectations of appropriate behavior were changing before people's eyes, though no rules for the future had yet been set. (95)Mass emphasizes that the demise of the Taira at Dannoura was actually an artificial denouement in the sense that it "allowed a multidimensional clash of interests over a five-year period to become, ever after, the 'Genpei War'" (96).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the emergence of shugo and jitô after 1185. Both titles predate the Heian period, but came to be used in radically different ways at different times--no shugo existed as such until after 1200, for example. Neither seems to have evolved at the same time as the bakufu; jitô predate Yoritomo by nearly a half century. During the war years, "the phenomenon of self-styled and privately-appointed jitô eventually pointed the way" to the solution for "the problem of finding an institutional basis upon which the authority of Kamakura might be perpetuated" (124). The eventual jitô system, which gave Kamakura a way to reward its loyalists and punish the troublesome while maintaining the shiki system, emerged as well from Yoritomo's rivalry with Yoshitsune; Yoritomo eventually secured the right to appoint jitô from the court from Go-Shirakawa, and which he began to do in numbers in 1186. Central figures continued to dominate the shiki system, "in other words, the traditional aristocracy remained the country's all but exclusive landed proprietors, whereas provincial men, as before, managed their estates" (129). However, Kyoto's sovereignty had been weakened in two ways: first, "the policing of the countryside continued to require Kamakura's involvement" and second, although jitô were in the middle of the shiki system, the fact that Kamakura held total authority over them created a breach in the overarching system that eventually became the crack in the dam.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at Yoritomo's efforts to consolidate his power base and legitimacy in Kamakura as a dual center of government, principally by waging military campaigns (against the Ôshû Fujiwara) without Kyoto's approval and by seeking to place "men of Kamakura" as jitô throughout the realm, with the qualified exception of Kyushu, where many jitô were natives of the island. Policing the conduct of these men soon became the bakufu's raison d'être and its bete noire.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the evolution of the Kyoto/Kamakura dyarchy. Mass notes, speaking of the jitô, that "the notion of a countrywide network of estate stewardships under a single authority violated every precedent of the individualized shiki system" (168). As Yoritomo and his regime matured, his initially inchoate responsibilities stabilized and narrowed, and "he encouraged a division of responsibilities as the core of a new reality, which led in time to the emergence of more or less distinct tracks of authority" (169). Thus, the divisions were not east/west but "parallel, estate-based jurisdictions across the entire country" in which Kyoto and Kamakura were independent of each other unless they held interests in each other's base areas in a given place. The bakufu mediated between them when the two could not be kept separate. Yoritomo's policies of retrenchment and restraint in the immediate aftermath of the war, moreover, reflect the fact that his authority was not sufficient to bridge the gaps in authority which existed throughout the realm, with the result that he moved "in the direction of seeking to bolster traditional hierarchies and sanctions" (172). Both Kyoto and Kamakura, then, saw benefits in restoring such relationships, but to do that effectively, Kamakura's authority over the jitô had to be absolute. Unfortunately for Kamakura, however, the competing needs of proprietors, Kamakura, and the jitô themselves led to a high degree of churn in jitô placements, as well as the placement of an absolute separation between the formerly all but indistinguishable jitô and gesu, which "became the jurisdictional fulcrum of the new age"--a fulcrum, however, the Kamakura was left alone to balance (187).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the emergence of shugo; contrary to later popular recollection, before Yoritomo's death only "pre-shugo" were appointed, and most of these were purged upon his death, beginning a pattern that was to endure as long as Kamakura. Eventually shugo were given a small slice of provincial governors' authority, and not every province had a shugo assigned every year, mirroring the insecurity of the occupants in their office, which "itself was viewed as a provincial magistracy to be administered by nonnatives" (219) and which did not originally included 'office lands' (thus offering no source of profit). Shugo, thus, were "consigned to a perpetual adjunct's role in the judicial process" (220). In this period, shugo remained "a network of provincial officers who represented the Bakufu" (223) and did not develop much autonomy; that would have to wait for the upheavals of a later age.
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "the indiscipline of jitô," who in many ways were the quintessential Kamakura institution, being absorbed into the category of "kokujin" after its fall. In Mass' view, "the jitô may thus have been unprecedented in breaking the jurisdictional stranglehold of estate holders, but not in achieving one of their own" (225). Jitô were able to manipulate current conditions to position themselves as constables and tax collectors in many situations, but in terms of disputes, absentee proprietors matched them toe-to-toe in legal wrangling, which drew in the bakufu (somewhat unwillingly) in a judicial role to adjudicate such claims. Although over time jitô were able to slowly expand their authority, "neither side could ever seize victory in the subsequent sparring and bargaining," and the "piecemeal process" by which they worked "had no realistic end," since Yoritomo had originally wanted a reward vehicle that did not actually give away very much (242, 252). Thus, somewhat perversely, "absentee authority, far from being destroyed by the appearance of these elite managers, was given an extended life by them for at least another century" (250). Only the end of the bakufu could reconfigure the jitô office sufficiently, taking the need for the jitô along with it.
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Mass argues against the "many Japans" or "east/west division" thesis, stating that "government and society were similarly organized in both the east and west" in 1185 (254). Indeed, because Japan was "still very much one country," Yoritomo was able to leverage those national structural identities to "find some workable basis for a permanent national authority" (254). Thus Yoritomo positioned himself "as a bulwark of the old order" and "devised policies of a mostly resuscitative nature," committing himself to organization and law rather than violence (255). In Mass' view, moreover, the violence and disorder of the countryside before 1185 is overplayed; "men of the provinces were not seeking to bring about the collapse of the social hierarchy, rather only to obtain more within the accepted limits of what they had always been eligible for" (257). The bakufu functioned to contain warrior aspirations more than to fulfill them.
Critical assessment: This is a very nicely written book, and I think that Mass, who after all basically knew best, is right in most of what he says here. That said, he is not a counter of things (most of the documentation of all of these phenomena is very, very slight), and I also don't endorse the idea that Yoritomo created a "dyarchy." What he did create was a new branch of government that essentially did some duty as military police but, more fundamentally, created an administrative need by inaugurating the jitô and then filled it by managing them. It's quite a neat trick, really, but all the samurai wanted central/courtly preferment and offices, not simply "military honors," the Heike monogatari not withstanding.
Meta notes: Counting things is important.