Bibliographic Data: Najita, Tetsuo. Hara Kei in the Politics of Compromise, 1905-1915. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

Main Argument:

…the growth of the parties in Japan was the result of a crucial transformation among party men from an ideological to a strategical orientation; or, from an attitude of uncompromising opposition to the government based on the ideal of a single, unified, popular party (mintô gôdô) to that of realistic compromises within the government structure. In particular the successes of one party, the Seiyûkai, under Hara Kei, in pursuing this course of action were decisive in steering party politics in Japan away from multiparties toward two major competing party alignments. (xii)

Historiographical Engagement: Mostly the question of the end of "Taisho democracy," in Japanese

Preface: Argument, Sources, Examples Najita argues that at the time he was writing (47 years ago!), studies of the party era in prewar Japanese politics were generally captive to two fallacies: 1) giving too much weight to documentary evidence written "through the eyes of these idealists who believed that compromises within the political order indicated submission to 'absolutism' and that those in power could be quickly and decisively overthrown (daha) if the parties remained firmly united"; and 2) "to see the parties as the major cause for the political dislocations underlying Japan's steady drift in the 1930s toward a disastrous war" (ix, x). Hence, according to Najita, "an analytical distinction must be made between first, the sustained struggle by the parties (which, while no doubt causing political discontent along the way, changed their status from groups of marginal significance into powerful elites in the government) and second, those driving forces accompanying rapid modernization which generated political dislocations of the sort described by Maruyama. …the casual lines between the two should be treated with considerable care" [if, indeed, they exist at all] (xi).

Important points
# Hara effected a transformation in the regional political structure "from the system of 'self-government' [sic] planned by Yamagata into a pervasive, party-oriented interest structure" (78)
# By the so-called "Taisho political crisis" in 1913, "the systematic expansion of Seiyûkai power had resulted in the steady erosion of the bases of the ruling cliques" and had "made a multiparty system in Japan a practical impossibility" (121)
# Katsura forming the Dôshikai in January 1913 was a direct reaction to the Seiyûkai's power and brought about an end to the Hara/Katsura compromise that "had dominated politics since 1905, an alliance that had provided a working relationship between the major centers of power--the House of Peers, the Lower House, and the bureaucracy--and had stymied the growth of a second party" (140)
# The reforms that were enacted under the Yamamoto cabinet of 1913 were a triumph for the "politics of compromise" in that they struck down barriers to party government and reduced the influence of the Yamagata faction
# The Seiyûkai created its enemies by stimulating the growth of a rival anti-Seiyû coalition

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Najita argues, among other things, that "by enhancing its power the Seiyûkai, in fact, from 1905 on, prevented this Meiji elite from perpetuating itself and the style of rule commonly called transcendental government" (215). He also argues that the parties' ties with the general public were "tenuous and vague" and that the elite politicians of the parties distrusted the masses and viewed them solely instrumentally (214). In summary, "the crisis of 1912-1913 dramatically reaffirmed the overall trend of parties to move steadily into the mainstream of power relationships in the Meiji constitutional order" and "the politics of compromise was [sic] intended to overcome the structural disadvantages of the Meiji political order and the Yamagata faction imbedded in it" (219).

Critical assessment: Shockingly enough, dear readers, I don't actually think that the achievement(s) of imperial democracy can be laid solely at the feet of one Hara Kei, who was if nothing else a smooth operator--indeed, he seems rather like Itô Hirobumi in this regard, with the important difference that Itô eschewed creating a faction or a reliable patronage network and Hara lived for politics and for attaining political power. We might also add that both of them were nonetheless assassinated on railway platforms; make of that what you will. More fundamentally, I think Najita is wrong about what happened in the 1930s (see Young and Gordon, below) and I think that he recommits the mistake of the elite party politicians themselves by seeing in the riots of the era of agitation for imperial democracy (1905-18) as apolitical, uninformed rabble-rousing. I leave filling in the details of my objections to that view as an exercise for the reader.

Further reading: Gordon, Imperial Democracy; Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire

Meta notes: It's not (only) politicians who make history.

Bibliographic Data: Bowen, Roger W. Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan: A Study of Commoners in the Popular Rights Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

Main Argument: This study attempts to take the people who participated in the violent incidents (gekka jiken) of the Freedom & Popular Rights era seriously, arguing that they "were rebellions, not only in the sense that their goal was 'liberation' from certain economic and political injustices, but also in the sense that they were less than revolutionary in effect (as opposed to intent), or, from another perspective, they were revolutions which failed in the attempt to establish a 'foundation of freedom'" (5).

( Freedom & Popular Rights )

Critical assessment: This is a massive book, perhaps needlessly so, but it's quite good, particularly considering the period in which it was written. Bowen does an excellent job of restoring agency and intelligence to the farmers who rose up to demand their rights in the 1880s, whose actions should not be consigned to the category of "failure," or lightly forgotten.

Further reading: Gordon, Imperial Democracy; Kim Kyu Hyun, The Age of Visions and Arguments

Meta notes: But the human microphone will find a voice/And a change is gonna come/Said the signal to the–

Bibliographic Data: Jansen, Marius B. Sakamoto Ryôma and the Meiji Restoration. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.

Main Argument: "Within Japan the Meiji Restoration leaders also served as examples of a new and ideal type in politics: that of the idealistic, individualistic, and courageous patriot who gave his all for the imperial cause--the shishi. …the idealism, dedication, and courage of the shishi was usually combined with a practicality and desire for self-attainment that made for something of a pattern of response to the challenge that was brought by the West" (x-xi).

Historiographical Engagement: E.H. Norman, Japan's Emergence as a Modern State

Useful points

The Tosa scene, in turn, was one variant of a national picture in which bakufu policies, internal bureaucratic rivalries, and social and economic tensions made for contrasting and contradictory policies followed by the great fiefs. The han authorities alternately utilized and repressed the activities of their subordinates according to the way in which they read the signs of the times. In many respects the years after 1860 were remarkable for the degree to which samurai from different fiefs worked together, often in continuation of patterns of conspiracy that had begun in the Edo fencing academies. A comparable sense of common interest and danger produced cooperation between a number of great lords who saw in the slogan kôbu gattai, reconciliation of court and camp, an opportunity to improve their own positions relative to those of the bakufu and its other vassals. Not that national interests were beginning to predominate for the daimyo; the regional advantage might be interpreted in various ways, but it was never ignored. After 1860 all groups looked for allies and claimed the support of tradition, with the result that the court nobles were drawn into the political picture once again. The loyalist years were remarkable for the boldness with which some of the Kyoto aristocrats turned to national politics. (94)

# That said, "bakufu policies determined the political alternatives available to the great lords and court nobles" to a large extent (ibid)

# The shishi were young, idealistic, romantic, classist jerks, by and large, often fatally naive, at least initially; by the mid-1860s, however, "they had a new understanding of the complexity of the problems their country faced. They begin to emerge from their papers and letters as confident and dedicated men, tempered by danger. They had shown and seen enough courage to take it for granted, and they were now concerned with other qualities--generosity, foresight, prudence" (205)

# NB: class division within the samurai legal status--lords and upper level retainers whose positions were not threatened by economic problems tended to remain conservative, partly because reform was associated with lower, poorer samurai; and vice versa

# By 1867 things had changed drastically--despite the ability of the new shogun, his position was shown to be very weak, and the loyalists now planned to overthrow the bakufu by force. Moreover, "the day for intrigue and secrecy was giving way to one of formal alliances and high-level discussions. The free-wheeling rônin were no longer as necessary to the alliances formed, for self-interest among the domains provided all the spur that was needed" (311). Unsurprisingly, many of them including Ryôma sought a rapprochement with their home fiefs as part of this turn, and in Ryôma's case and others, succeeded.

# Jansen argues that "Sakamoto's ideas about the government that was to follow the shogun's resignation deserve careful study, for they provide the link between the vague doubts about feudalism of his early years and the dramatic reforms of the early Meiji period in which he did not live to take part" (312).

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Jansen argues again that "the outstanding intellectual and political experience in the formative years of the Restoration activists was the discovery that their society was incapable of successful resistance to the Western threat" (347). We confront again the question of class interest, which Jansen does not see in Tosa; for him the division is between loyalists and reformers among the samurai status group, which to some extent is also an urban/rural divide. Jansen also argues that "the individual purpose and daring of the late Tokugawa shishi tended, in the overwhelming majority of cases, to be set in an atmosphere of broad agreement on goals, though not on methods" (377), which he attributes to the vitality of Tokugawa values even as he notes that the shishi tradition was open to being appropriated by others ranging from Sun Yat-sen to the assassins of 1930s Japan; "the self-confidence, conviction, and arrogance that made the shishi such formidable antagonists were something new. … Self-motivated, they established a tradition of dissent and personal intervention that survived to become one of the most dynamic aspects in modern Japanese politics" (376).

Critical assessment: It's trippy to read a book written before the Economic Miracle. That said, I don't think Jansen is wrong about the Restoration or Ryôma's role in it, though his overarching arguments do smack somewhat of impact-response theory in a way that I would want to investigate further. I do think he totally ignores some aspects of what was going on, such as the domestic context and the ee ja nai ka flash mobs. (I just really like the flash mobs, okay?)

Further reading: Beasley, The Meiji Restoration

Meta notes: "海の向こうに、世界が広がっている。"

Bibliographic Data: Ching, Leo T. S. Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Main Argument:

…the problem of Japanese colonialism lies not only in political and economic exploitation, but also in its imposition of Japanese culture and customs onto the Taiwanese and the aborigines. … By formulating the problem of Japanese colonialism solely in terms of of the violent imposition of Japaneseness onto the colonized, it remains oblivious to the gap between cultural identification and political discrimination, between becoming Japanese and not having the rights of a Japanese citizen. … I argue that Japanese or Japaneseness, Taiwanese or Taiwaneseness, aborigines or aboriginally, and Chinese or Chineseness--as embodied in compartmentalized national, racial, or cultural categories--do not exist outside the temporality and spatiality of colonial modernity, but are instead enabled by it. (7, 11)

( Identity in coloniality )
Critical assessment: This was not the book I wanted or was entirely expecting, which leads me to conclude that there is still at least one book to be written about the Japanese colonization of Taiwan. It's not that I think Ching is wrong about anything that he says; it's just that I actually wanted a book about the actual process of colonizing Taiwan, and this isn't it.

Bibliographic Data: Bradley, Keith. Slavery and Society at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Main Argument: Slavery was a fundamental part of Roman society, and Bradley lays down its various fundamental aspects. As a slave society, Rome cannot be understood without considering slavery, and what it was like to be a slave at Rome.

( Slavery and society at Rome )

Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples Slaves were subject at all times to indignity, violence, and caprice, and the fact that it was possible for freedmen to rise high in Roman society does not render the institution any less brutal.

It is a historical, objective reality that slavery was an evil, violent and brutalizing institution that the Romans themselves, across a vast interval of time and space, consciously chose to maintain, for which they themselves were responsible, whose justification they never seriously questioned and for which no apology or exoneration can now be offered. Slavery for the Romans was not a peculiar institution but the standard by which all else in society was measured and judged: it was a way of thinking about society and social categorization. To recognize this is not to depreciate the successes of elite culture or even to assign blame; it is only to bring into proper historical and intellectual focus the incalculable degree of human misery and suffering those successes cost, and to guarantee that a sanitized and distorted version of the past does not prevail. (181)

Critical assessment: By and large this book does what it says on the tin, with the added bonus of refusing to be deceived by romanticism about the Romans and their slaveowning practices. It also does a nice job of bringing out the fact that, although slaves shared the same legal status, they were in fact of vastly differing classes--i.e. the slaves in the familia Caesaris versus agricultural laborers, for example.

Further reading: Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World; Hopkins, Conquerors and Slaves

Bibliographic Data: Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Main Argument:

This circulation of media content--across different media systems, competing media economies, and national borders--depends heavily on consumers' active participation. I will argue here against the idea that convergence should be understood primarily as a technological process bringing together multiple media functions within the same devices. Instead, convergence represents a cultural shift as consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content. This book is about the work--and play--spectators perform in the new media system. (3)

( Convergence culture )
Critical assessment: Damn, this book is full of dudes. Also, it's super trippy reading this book now because Jenkins was so right that everything he says in here feels so self-evident as to be axiomatic. There are critiques that could be made--see the entries by Steinberg and by myself in the "Further Reading" section--but by and large Jenkins deserves his position as the prophet of convergence culture, in my opinion. That said, a look at the problems "the Wikipedia" has developed as it has matured shows that new media are not arising in a new environment, but rather are, to some extent, shaped by preexisting structures of oppression and control even as they challenge them. Ah, the post-post-Fordist post-postmodern dilemma.

Further reading: Marc Steinberg, Anime's Media Mix; Alex Leavitt and Andrea Horbinski, "Even a Monkey Can Understand Fan Activism"; Lisa Gitelman, Always Already New; Anne Allison, Millennial Monsters; Andrea Horbinski, "After Henry Jenkins: Transmedia Fandom"

Meta notes: Convergence and divergence are two sides of the same coin.

Bibliographic Data: Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005.

Main Argument: Moretti is arguing for a literary history that is based on "distance reading," "where distance is however not an obstacle, but a specific form of knowledge" (1), and in which one moves from texts to models so as to get a sense of the interconnectedness of general elements. Rather than high theory, he draws on the natural sciences as an inspiration.

( Graphs, Maps, Trees )

Critical assessment: Give me a lever long enough and I'll move the world; the lever need not be particularly long if it is a book. It's sort of hard to critique a revolutionary text, and so it is with this one. One can only take what it says to heart in whichever way one pleases.

Further reading: Anne Burdic et al., Digital_Humanities; Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines; Patrik Svensson, "The Landscape of Digital Humanities"

Meta notes: Don't miss the forest for the trees.

Bibliographic Data: Jongman, Willem M. “The Early Roman Empire: Consumption.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 592-618. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( Consumption )

Bibliographic Data: Kehoe, Dennis P. “The Early Roman Empire: Production.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 543-69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( Production )

Bibliographic Data: Lo Cascio, Elio. “The Early Roman Empire: The State and the Economy.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 619-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( The State and the Economy )

Bibliographic Data: Morley, Neville. “The Early Roman Empire: Distribution.” In The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, ed. Walter Scheidel, Ian Morris, and Richard Saller, 570-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

( Distribution )

Critical assessment: I am highly suspicious of Kehoe's overall argument, but the rest of these articles seem pretty solid. (See future posts for caveats about the generally optimistic tone of being able to know the Roman imperial economy in toto, however.)

Meta notes: It's the economy, stupid.

Bibliographic Data: Lurie, David B. Realms of Literacy: Early Japan and the History of Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011.

Main Argument: "This study is, first and foremost, a history of writing in early Japan, but as the subtitle suggests, it also aims to rethink the wider history of writing in general" (2). "By insisting on the multilingual nature of the 'Chinese' script, which crossed and complicated language boundaries in real time as well as over long periods, this book presents an unfamiliar picture of writing in Japan and the wider region around it. Attention to the history of reading, and to the varied ways in which writing has been linked to language, shows that there are overlaps and intersections between uses of writing that have traditionally been separated into categories like foreign and native or Sinitic and vernacular" (vii).

Historiographical Engagement: History and theory of writing and history of writing in Japan.

Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples "Deeper understanding of early Japanese inscription will transform comparative discussions of literacy and reading practices, and remake our sense of the wider patterns of the world history of writing systems" (1). Lurie discusses the difficulty of defining what it means to say that writing ever "begins," and he argues that the explosion of writing in Japan in the 7thC, although obviously connected to accelerating state formation, is in fact quite varied: "Rather than a uniform transition from orality to literacy, these materials reveal different modes of writing appearing around the same time and coexisting in a variety of configurations. …different social groups are simultaneously using texts in radically different ways" (4). Lurie also criticizes the implicit "alphabetism" of scholars of writing, who, he says, "should do more to avoid teleological assumptions about progress towards photography, assumptions that are often implicitly linked to claims about the (Greek) alphabet as a guarantor of cultural superiority" (5). He argues, moreover, that the process of kundoku, "reading by gloss," "dominated all modes of literacy in early Japan, from at least the mid-seventh century on. This means that we cannot describe texts arranged in accordance with Chinese vocabulary and syntax as being written 'in Chinese' (no matter what their origins, a conclusion that has profound implications for Japanese cultural history, which has been framed by a linguistic opposition between Chinese and Japanese" (ibid). Moreover, considering Chinese writing as the "East Asian writing system," for example, and early Japanese reading and writing systems, "threatens widely held assumptions about the place of phonographic adaptation in the world history of writing" (6). The history of these questions assumptions about the "historical development of inscription and also more technical discussions of the relations between script and language" (7).

( Literacies and writing systems )

But the broader point remains: in terms of their functioning in society and development over time, it is difficult to find deep, qualitative differences across various systems of writing. As visually and structurally distinctive as many features of Japanese writing are, it seems that they neither produced, nor were determined by, sharp cultural or social differences. In a sense, this means that although writing in Japan (and to some extent, writing in general) does not work quite in the way that has often been assumed, that difference itself turns out to be less consequential than might be expected. Many scholars and theorists have taken an integral developmental logic of writing to be a key to the history of humanity; but such a logic may not even be a key to the history of writing itself. … Writing's connection to natural language and its catalytic effect on so many other historical developments make it seem to be a special case. Perhaps it is. But in its multifariousness and malleability, it is as resistant as any other human practice to monocausal, deterministic explanation. (363-64)

Critical assessment: This is a really excellent book that I am sure these notes have not fully captured. I need to think about everything that Lurie says some more, but I think a lot of his arguments could be profitably applied to technologies other than writing in Japan, such as states. And of course, there's the arguments about the history of writing, which seem to me, from what I know about it (I did some research on the development of the Greek alphabet for a while once, so I know some things; in fact, when it comes to the Greek alphabet, I actually know many things), to be right on the money.

Further reading: Tom Lamarre, Uncovering Heian Japan; Tomiko Yoda, Gender and National Literature

Meta notes: Techno-determinism is as much at work in how we think about writing as it is in how we think about computers.

Bibliographic Data: Sato, Elizabeth. “The Early Development of the Shōen.” In Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History, ed. John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1974]: 91-108.

Main Argument: Shôen emerged beginning in the 8thC CE; most early shôen, however, came from the ritsuryo category of "land available for reclamation," in which the reclaimer's nominal right of proprietorship for two to three generations was granted in perpetuity. Although they emerged at the same time as the ritsuryo government began to revert to patrimonial power and extra-legal customs began to supersede the state's laws on paper, shôen were not initially part of this process. Those early shôen that did become later shôen did so through the commendatory process, in which original proprietors commended the estate to a central proprietor so as to avoid encroachment from the state's provincial officers.

Argument, Sources, Examples Two factors are crucial in analysis of the shôen: when they were developed and the land itself. "Although in later times rights to income from land became more important than the land itself, in the early stages of shôen development, the reverse was true: in order to produce income, land first had to be developed" (95). The early shôen, moreover, was "a relatively compact unity that could be handled by a simple administrative structure" (96). Finally, "tax immunity, then, was not necessarily a defining characteristic of the early shôen, although most entities that were called such by their holders eventually received at least a partial exemption from taxation. Those that did not simply failed to survive" (ibid). The point, however, is that "lands were granted for reclamation before they received tax immunity" (ibid). Beginning in the early ninth century, however, as landholding rights on the ground changed, shôen emerged as an institution for proprietary control over the land, which became complete when an estate's proprietor acquired not only tax immunity but also immunity to entry by government officials. The shôen survived as an institutional form because it offered a great deal of flexibility--different rights and privileges could be granted to different members at all levels (shômin-shôke-ryôke-honke) based on their particular circumstances, and "it was possible for changes to take place at one level without substantially affecting the other levels" (107). Moreover, "it was possible for the income of the shôen to be widely distributed. Shiki [income rights] could change hands through sale, inheritance, or donation without disturbing the function of the shôen as an economic unit" (ibid). This flexibility was reciprocal, in that cultivators and proprietors could change without disturbing the others without threat to the shôen itself: "as an economic system, the shôen offered advantages to all of its constituents" (108).

Bibliographic Data: Kiley, Cornelius J. “Provincial Administration and Land Tenure in Early Japan.” In The Cambridge History of Japan vol. 2, ed. Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 236-340.

Main Argument: Kiley traces the transition from, essentially, the ritsuryô to the shôen system from the 9th to 12thC. This transition can be roughly divided into three phases; in the first, in the 9th and 10thC, rural notables of a type that Kiley calls "petty gentry" inserted themselves into the ritsuryô state as, essentially, tax farmers, acting as intermediaries between official tax collectors and the tax renderers themselves [though communal rendering of tax goods was not new; see Yoshie]. In the second, in the 11thC, "provincial governments were, without permission from the capital, beginning to license certain holdings as the specially chartered possessions of their 'cultivators,' endowed with specific tax preferences" (243). In the third, in the 12thC, what are known as "mature shôen" began to emerge, partly through the administration of Shirakawa, who as retired emperor promulgated many edicts ostensibly registering and curbing shôen but in actuality mostly confirming their rights of immunities in toto (since at this point the imperial house too was trying to get in on the tax-immunity game).

Argument, Sources, Examples One important point to note in this story is the tenacious survival of the office of the provincial governments; although governors themselves did not much travel to their bailiwicks after the high Heian period, but instead entrusted the administration of their provinces to custodians known as zuryô, "the provincial governments themselves proved to be among the most durable of ritsuryô institutions, probably because from the beginning they served to integrate the interests of local elites, capital officials, and court nobility" (253). The fact that more and more authority was entrusted to resident officials meant that they assumed more and more autonomy from the capital, strengthening provincial governments in general. In the second phase, "a domainal landholding system evolved and, by about the year 1100, the subject populace had also been reorganized, bringing whole communities of cultivators under the patrimonial control of domainal lords or proprietary officeholders" (253). Through the process of commendation which led to the consolidation of mature shôen as three-level institutions--original local proprietors (geshi or azukaridokoro), the lord (ryôshu or ryôke) and the principal in the capital (honjo)--both territory and people were divided between the provincial domains and shôen in the third phase. It is important to note, however, that through this entire period and into the medieval era, what was actually important was not the land itself but rather shiki ("commission") rights to income from the land--whether in kind or in labor, both of which were tax goods by the third phase of this progression. However, the emergence and enforcement of shiki, by which de facto title to land was effectively consolidated, was also related to what Kiley calls "the rapid militarization of the 11thC rural elite" (245). These developments spelled the end of the zuryô system, which Kiley argues "had within it the seeds of its own destruction; increasingly, the newly consolidated (and militarized) local elites could deal with the capital nobility directly, without the governor as intermediary" (248). Remember that these militarized rural elites were the people who fought in, and in some senses caused, the Gempei Wars. But also, shôen were not the sole form through which land was held at this point: there still remained land that was designated kokugaryô in each province at this point, held by the state and administered by those working in the provincial government offices.

Critical assessment: I've had complaints about Kiley in other contexts, but this chapter seems very solid; it also fits well with what we know about the early shôen from Sato, whose analysis likewise seems quite solid. I don't envy either of these scholars combing through documents, or the scholarship, about the shôen; they are famously complicated and famously somewhat boring once you descend from any but the most general level.

Further reading: Nagahara, "Landownership under the Shôen-Kokugaryô System"; Mass, "Jitô Land Possession in the 13thC"; Kawai, "Shogun and Shugo"; Miyagawa, "From Shôen to Chigyô"; Chris Wickham, Framing the Early Middle Ages

Meta notes: It is totally correct to call medieval Japan "feudal." The problem is that most people don't understand what that means.