Bibliographic Data: Tonomura, Hitomi. “Black Hair and Red Trousers: Gendering the Flesh in Medieval Japan.” The American Historical Review 99:1 (February 1, 1994): 129–154.
Main Argument: Tonomura is looking at the
Konjaku monogatari to provide "analysis of the kinds of social scripts that probably influenced the perceptions of gendered relations, especially in areas of sexual practices and sexuality" (132). In other words, she is reading these tales to detect traces of the process by which patriarchy was instantiated in Japan over the course of several centuries, in effect trying to diagnose where that process was at in the early (12thC) medieval period.
Argument, Sources, Examples Although the KM stories are more even-handed in their treatment of gender relations, gendered bodies, and sexual mores than might be thought, Tonomura notes that "the compiler's comments attached to the narratives frequently reduce women to an essentialized category and set up boundaries within which female sexuality must remain" (133). Marriage is still an amorphous institution, and was not necessarily male-centered; at this time there was also apparently no concept of rape as a crime, not even against a woman's male family members, let alone against the woman herself; when assaults occur, the crime is in how the victim's clothes (symbolic of her social position) are treated. Similarly, there is no concept of adultery, and the impropriety of men "taking" women is directly related to their class; "high-ranking aristocratic men seem incapable of violating women" (152). At the same time, patriarchy is visible in the fact that male characters' faults are theirs alone while the faults of female characters engender pontificating on the flawed nature of women. Even this is not a complete process, however, as Tonomura notes; "in these tales, 'the feminine' is problematized and sometimes negatively coded, but it is not yet established as a consistent, uniform, and stable category" (138). Although there is no discourse of virginity or purity, it is noteworthy that men are desirable in toto while the desirable female body is discussed in parts. Relatedly, Tonomura observes that "a sense of collective male identity is reinforced through the sharing of a common male culture centered on the penis," surely the ancestor of the phallocentric culture of the Edo period (144). Indeed, phallocentrism is already visible in the fact that "the text privileges the male sex organ and makes it the cornerstone of a sexual system for both sexes," meaning that "female desire and pleasure disconnected from men fall outside the range of epistemological possibilities" (148). And while men's bodies share in the collapse of power and vulnerability in the genitalia that female characters also experience, "female bodies are inscribed with clearly chaining values and significance according to their age," and they serve, when decomposing "as a pedagogical symbol, a medium through which to convey the Buddhist messages of impermanence" (144, 145). Similarly, female desires are internally generated while men are lured into desire by women; conveniently enough, desire for women "can be a gateway to greater achievement in the Way of the Buddha" (147). Tonomura concludes that
Women in the Konjaku, however, are burdened with the task of managing both their own sexuality and men's basic instincts, not because women are associated with reason but because they have the power to entice men. Consequently, cultural construction rests heavily on the female's shoulders, complicating the anthropological metanarrative that equates men with culture and women with nature. (154)
Bibliographic Data: Colcutt, Martin. “The Zen Monastery in Kamakura Society.” In
Court and Bakufu in Japan: Essays in Kamakura History, ed. Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995 [1982]: 191-220.
Main Argument: This paper attempts to elucidate the cause of Zen's meteoric rise in Japan in the Kamakura period "by focusing on the sponsorship of Rinzai Zen, especially the monasteries of Kenchôji and Engakuji" (192). That patronage was mainly from the warrior elite for several reasons relating to their new position vis-a-vis old power holders such as the temple complexes and the imperial court, but it is important to note that their interest was not purely in enlightenment: Zen was attractive partly because it was controllable, and warrior elites did not patronize it exclusively.
Argument, Sources, Examples In terms of the question of who patronized Zen in the Kamakura period, "it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that its growth in Japan was due largely to sponsorship by the elite: the Hôjô and the powerful warriors heading the Kamakura Bakufu, the upper echelons of provincial warrior society, and emperors and members of the Imperial Court," partly because Zen studies demanded a high degree of education (199), especially initially. Why? Zen was socially stable (i.e. its adherents had no complaints against the current political order), and for the Hôjô and the warrior elite, its very newness (i.e. not entwined with older aristocratic power structures) was also favorable. It also offered greater chances for advancement to the scions of those warrior elite than did the established temple complexes. Finally, it was a conduit for the transmission of the culture of the Song literati, the mastery of which could also give warriors cultural cachet equal to the members of the aristocracy. And because the Zen monasteries adopted wholesale the highly developed administrative systems of Chan monasteries in China, they were able to make effective use of the rights within the shôen system that their official patrons procured for them.
Bibliographic Data: Mass, Jeffrey P. “Jitō Land Possession in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of Shitaji Chūbun.” In
Medieval Japan: Essays in Institutional History, edited by John W. Hall and Jeffrey P. Mass. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988 [1974]: 157-83.
Main Argument: "…beginning in the 1180s the country's non-military absentee proprietors ere forced to absorb into their estates management-level warrior-officers over whom they had no direct control. It was this immunity of the jitô as a vassal of Kamakura that set the stage for the thirteenth century's endemic central-local struggles over land" (157).
Argument, Sources, Examples There were two types of jitô: "those who were longtime residents in their appointment areas, and those who were newly intruded from the outside" (157). Many "confirmatory" jitô were local myôshu who had been invested as "shôen officers" (shôshi); at the same time, most of the great warrior families of the East held their lands outside the shôen system of immunities and so were willing to participate in the bakufu's new system of stewardship, which did confer immunity. In the West, however, things were different; "the basic clash of interests that highlights the 13thC thus became one between Kantô-born jitô and central proprietors of western province estates" (160), often in the form of their personally appointed azukari dokoro, a kind of local deputy. This led to a situation in which "the traditional hierarchy of more or less vertical tenures had now flattened out and divided into two roughly parallel tracks of authority" (163). By the middle of the 13thC, the Kyoto proprietors were on the defensive, evolving such practices as wayo (compromise) and ukesho (receipt guarantees) to try to stanch the bleeding, with the ultimate effect that central powers of proprietorship began to devolve back to the land. Shitaji chûbun, estate division, was a last-ditch strategy to fend off jitô predations. When divisions did occur, moreover, they often did so synthetically rather than naturally, as the shôen as a unit was resistant to such easy territorial breakup. By the end of the 14thC, shugo had totally displaced proprietors and jitô as the final authority at the provincial level, rendering shitaji chûbun obsolete. Sources: Documents. All the documents.
Bibliographic Data: Shapinsky, Peter D. “With the Sea as Their Domain: Pirates and Maritime Lordship in Medieval Japan.” In
Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed.y Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal, and Kären Wigen. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003: 221-38.
Main Argument: Shapinsky argues that the "sea lords" of the 15th and 16thC "became integral elements of the 16thC Japanese political and economic order and came to play a vital role in the functioning of the maritime networks of violence and exchange that connected Japan to the wider East Asian maritime world" (224). These sea lords did so by exercising "sea tenure," namely "control over access to the sea and the tools of maritime production such as ships, salterns, and fishing gear" (223). However, they did so in competition with traditional land-based authorities, with the result that "modes of sea tenure thus included both the regulations of state-level entities and the customary practices of local littoral inhabitants" (ibid).
Argument, Sources, Examples Shapinsky argues that the "terracentric" biases of historians and sources have heretofore masked the activity of sea lord-bands in lord-vassal binaries, but that a better rubric is patron-client relationships, which "allows the historian to represent both the autonomy and agency of the sea-lord bands and the land-based patrons' expectations for loyal service" (226). Sea lords thus appropriated and manipulated land-based discourse to gain recognition of their status as equal to that of warrior elites. It is important to recognize that the activities of sea lords were enabled by the disintegration of traditional political authority in the archipelago at the same time as a medieval commercial revolution occurred, rendering the sea a vastly faster and more reliable means of transporting goods and conducting commerce. Sea lords took advantage of this fact to profitably exercise sea tenure: among other activities, they set up fortified toll barriers at various maritime chokepoints and charged tolls to pass; they charged for escort by members of bands or by ships; they charged for safe passage; and in the final half of the 16thC, they sold safe passage flags outright, as their authority at sea eclipsed even that of the unifiers. These practices were productive for commerce as well as predatory. After 1600, however, the new national government brought them to heel, and their day passed.
Bibliographic Data: Nagahara Keiji. “Landownership under the Shōen-Kokugaryō System.”
Journal of Japanese Studies 1:2 (April 1, 1975): 269–96.
Main Argument: The shôen-kokugaryô system began to emerge from the ritsuryô system in the 11thC as a multi-layered system of ownership over land. By the C13, difficulties in maintaining cadastral surveys meant that more and more "public" paddies fell into private hands, becoming the basis for peasant landownership. "The multi-layered shiki formed the basis of positions and of rights for both the higher level proprietary lords and the lower level proprietary lords in shôen and in kokugaryô" (287). Under this system, higher level proprietary lords received the lion's share of the profits. Shiki, however, were distributed geographically and did not confer the power to command persons, indicating their limited development. Under this system, however, peasants held cultivation rather than landowning rights, reflecting their underdevelopment, mirroring that of local lords; thus, the shiki were supported by the authority of the central government during this period. The system foundered because local proprietary lords grew in power, because peasant landholding rights strengthened, and the shiki system disintegrated.
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( Kajii is not rational about Norakuro )
