The establishment of Japan's first warrior government, the Kamakura bakufu, represented both a culmination and a beginning. Since the tenth century, an increasingly professionalized class of mounted fighting men had served in local areas as estate administrators and policemen and as officials attached to the organs of provincial governance. By the twelfth century, warriors had come to exercise a dominant share of the total volume of local government, but even after two hundred years they remained politically immature. The most exalted warriors were still only middle-level figures in hierarchies dominated by courtiers and religious institutions in and near the capital. The bakufu's founding in the 1180s thus represented an initial breakthrough to power on the part of elite fighting men, but the fledgling regime was scarcely in a position to assume unitary control over the entire country. What evolved was a system of government approximating a dyarchy. During the Kamakura period, Japan had two capitals and two interconnected loci of authority. The potential of warrior power was clear enough to those who cared to envision it, but the legacy of the past prevented more than a slow progress into the future.

Until quite recently, studies of Kamakura Japan have tended to overstate the warriors' achievement, by equating the creation of a new form of government with the simultaneous destruction of the old. As is now clear, not only was the Heian system of imperial-aristocratic rule still vigorous during the twelfth century, but also it remained the essential framework within which the bakufu, during its lifetime, was obliged to operate.

INTRODUCTION

The Muromachi bakufu, the second of the three military governments that held power in Japan from 1185 to 1867, was founded between 1336 and 1338 by Ashikaga Takauji (1305–58). The name Muromachi was taken from the district in Kyoto where the Ashikaga residence and administrative headquarters were located after 1378. The end of the regime is dated either 1573, when the last Ashikaga shogun was ousted from Kyoto, or 1597, when the ex-shogun died in exile.

The period in Japanese history defined by the existence of the Muromachi bakufu has been judged in two quite contradictory ways. Measured on the basis of effective centralized rule, it has been seen as a time of political weakness and social unrest. Yet in cultural terms it has been recognized as one of Japan's most creative periods of artistic achievement. There is, of course, no necessary contradiction between political instability and cultural brilliance. And modern historians have tended to play down the apparent paradox. They stress instead the significant social and institutional changes of the time: when military government (the bakufu system) came into its own, when the military aristocracy (the buke or samurai estate) became the real rulers of the country, and when profound changes were wrought in the distribution of rights over land and in the organization of the cultivating class. Recent assessments have suggested that even with respect to government effectiveness, the Ashikaga should not be dismissed too lightly. After all, the Muromachi bakufu lasted for more than two hundred years.

THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF MEDIEVAL PROVINCES

In the opening chapter Jeffrey P. Mass discusses the establishment of warrior government in medieval Japan under the Kamakura bakufu. In an agrarian society the shoguns, regents, and warriors throughout the country – like the emperor and nobles in Kyoto – depended primarily on land and its produce for their support. Thus, to understand early medieval society it is essential to understand the nature of the land system and the subtle but far-reaching changes that were taking place on the land.

The medieval land system is sometimes categorized as a system of private estates, shōen, and public domain, kokugaryō. The public domain had existed since the Nara period (710–94) when all lands throughout the provinces were subject to the fiscal and administrative authority of the imperial court. During the Heian period (794–1185) absentee proprietors, including nobles, temples, and shrines, and members of the imperial family acquired collections of private rights, shiki, in reclaimed or commended holdings scattered throughout the provinces. These holdings, known as shōen, were gradually sealed off from the taxing power and administrative supervision of state officials. Thus by the twelfth century most provinces in Japan had complex patterns of landholding in which public and private holdings were intermingled. This chapter will examine the shifting interaction of shōen and kokugaryō in the Kamakura period, the structure and management of shōen, the relations between shōen proprietors and their holdings, and the impact of the political emergence of warriors on the control of shōen.

THE KAMAKURA PERIOD AND THE END OF BUDDHIST LAW

This laconic statement came from the brush of the Buddhist priest Jien (1155–1225), the author of Gukanshō, an early-thirteenth-century history of Japan. Jien was a member of the ascendent northern branch of the Fujiwara and wrote Gukanshō in part to justify the historical success of his family as regent-rulers at the Heian court. But Jien is probably best remembered as the first historian in Japan to view the past in distinct terms of cause and effect and as a progression from one stage to another. Although earlier writers had not been totally oblivious to historical causality, none had sought to analyze Japanese history, as Jien did, within an overall, interpretive framework.

Jien's emphasis on the progress of history was not an aberrant view but, rather, emerged from a heightened awareness of the momentous historical changes that he himself witnessed. As observed in Gukanshō, Japan in the late 1100s was transformed from a comparatively peaceful and tranquil country under the rule of the imperial court to a tumultuous, strife-filled “age of warriors.” Yet the anguish that Jien and other members of the courtier elite experienced as a result of this transition was accepted fatalistically because of a belief in its inevitability: They were convinced that the period of mappō, or “the end of the Buddhist law,” had already begun a century before.

In this chapter I shall describe and analyze Japan's relations during the Kamakura and Muromachi periods with various countries of East Asia and their governments, including the Sung, Yüan, and Ming dynasties of China, the Koryŏ and Yi dynasties of Korea, and the Ryūkyū Islands. My descriptions and analyses focus primarily on Japan's international political relations, particularly Japan's relationship with its Asian neighbors, the effect of this relationship on Japan's internal political developments, and, conversely, the influence of Japan's internal politics on its international relations. Because my research interests lie mainly in the Kamakura period, I shall discuss developments of that period more extensively than those of the later Muromachi period.

JAPAN'S INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS IN EAST ASIA

Around the tenth century the motive force in East Asia shifted from the Han People of China to the northern nomadic tribes, often called the conquest dynasties. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, East Asian history centered on the rise and fall of the Mongol Empire. The Southern Sung (1127–1279) was reestablished after China's territory was reduced by the consecutive invasions of the Liao and Chin, which generated a financial crisis owing to the massive military expenses. The Southern Sung, whose resources and level of productivity were lower than those of northern China, inherited the developments that took place in various industries during and following the dominance of the Northern Sung (960–1127) and vigorously promoted foreign trade in hopes of resolving its financial crisis.

INTRODUCTION

In contrast with that of the Kamakura bakufu, the authority of the Muromachi bakufu expanded rapidly following its establishment in 1336, and the Ashikaga shogun became almost an absolute monarch. In the provinces, shugo (military governors) were installed in sixty-six administrative units, or provinces. In Kyushu and in the area from the Kantō eastward, shogunal authority was delegated to regional bakufu headquarters with administrative control over large areas, called the Kantō kubō and the Kyushu tandai. An intermediate area encompassing the Kinai, or central provinces, was under direct shogunal rule. The authority of the shugo, in addition to their three major duties inherited from the Kamakura period – punishing murderers, putting down rebellions, and providing men for guard duty – was enhanced by the addition of jurisdiction over land-related matters. Besides holding nearly all military and administrative authority over the provinces, the shugo organized local overlords, called kokujin, into retainer bands. This process, called vassalization, progressed as the shugo gradually suppressed kokujin resistance. In an attempt to contain the increasing power of the shugo, the bakufu used control measures such as appointing members of the shugo's collateral family to the shogun's army to serve as captains of the shogun's bodyguard, but from the time of the Onin War (1467–77), the shugo's increasing separation and independence from the bakufu became undeniable, and the decentralization of local authority proceeded apace. Most of the sengoku daimyo, great sixteenth-century local warriors who controlled their own territories, could trace their lineages back to the Muromachi shugo or to their retainers, the deputy shugo (shugodai).

Historians generally date the medieval period in Japanese history as starting at the end of the twelfth century when the Kamakura bakufu was established, marking the emerging dominance of warrior government over aristocratic rule. In peasant history, however, the latter half of the eleventh or early twelfth century, however, is a more appropriate point of division between the ancient and medieval periods. The shōen system of land control had extended throughout Japan around that time, bringing entirely new conditions for the peasants and making them henceforth truly “medieval.” The introduction and development of the shōen system had a much greater impact on the living conditions of peasants in Japan than did the founding of the Kamakura bakufu nearly a century later. The shōen system, therefore, is of great significance in peasant history and is the central defining characteristic of the medieval period.

The momentous changes for the peasants brought about by the shōen system must be understood in the context of the earlier conditions pertaining to the land of the ritsuryō system in the eighth century. Under the ritsuryō system, the central government claimed ownership of all land; cultivators were allotted paddies on an equitable basis; and taxes were collected according to specific categories of goods; for example, grain, labor, and silk. But these conditions began to break down rapidly early in the tenth century and had disintegrated entirely by the time the shōen system had spread throughout Japan in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries.

The shōen system of landholding, one of the most important institutions for organizing the economic life of medieval Japan, was transformed at the end of the eleventh and the beginning of the twelfth centuries. The transformation occurred when Minamoto Yoritomo, who established the Kamakura bakufu, created the offices of shugo (military governor) and jitō (military estate steward), introducing a new layer of tenurial rights into the shōen hierarchy in 1185. Following the Jōkyū disturbance of 1221, the shogunate confiscated the lands of the nobles and warriors who had taken part in the incident and appointed its loyal retainers (gokenin) as jitō to these lands. Both of these events served to establish firmly a lord–vassal relationship within the proprietary rights structure of the shōen system and marked the beginning of a long process that saw the emerging dominance of warrior authority and the declining power of the central proprietor over the land, its revenues, and inhabitants.

The appointment of jitō by the Kamakura bakufu was intended to supplement rather than supplant the land rights and political authority of the shōen proprietors who traditionally possessed full fiscal and administrative power over these “private lands.” This policy did not completely deny the shōen as a form of land proprietorship, nor did it mean that the jitō acquired exclusive proprietary rights on the shōen to which they were appointed. In fact, the Kamakura bakufu struggled to preserve the shōen system and to prevent the jitō from extending their authority beyond the scope intended by the bakufu.

Adab, the general term used in modern Arabic for literature or belles-lettres, is often also applied by Arab and western scholars to a body of medieval writings (such as those described in chapters 2 to 6 of this volume) which has come to be regarded as constituting a specific literary genre. At the same time, the term adab is frequently encountered among medieval Arab writers in a variety of applications, and, though some of these have literary connotations, none corresponds exactly to either of the modern meanings of the word adab. C.A. Nallino first noted these divergencies and attempted to outline the development of the term. Adab was widely used in the Middle Ages in the sense – among others – of “philology”, “literary scholarship”, “literary culture”, and perhaps it was this use of the word that led nineteenth-century translators to adopt the plural ādāb to designate European works of literature. In so doing, they lent the word an added dimension, since the new application coincided with the introduction of new notions of what constituted literature and literary studies. Nevertheless, Nallino argues convincingly that there are medieval precedents for the use of adab to designate something like the modern concept of literature (taken, in the limited sense, as comprising verse, prose and historiography); thus we find the word applied to “witticisms, aphorisms, anecdotes, elegant verse” “pieces of poetry, curious tales”; philologists, meanwhile, used adab in the more precise sense of poetry and artistic prose. More recently, Charles Pellat has questioned the appropriateness of Nallino's acceptance of adab as a term for “literature” on historical grounds.

BACKGROUND AND UPBRINGING

Abū Firās al-Ḥārith b. Saʿīd was a grandson of Abū ʾl-ʿAbbās Ḥamdān b. Ḥamdūn al-Taghlibī, founder of the Hamdanid dynasty. The Banū Ḥamdān were a distinguished Arab family of bedouin origin and Shīʿī inclination which played a leading role in the affairs of the declining ʿAbbasid caliphate from near the end of the third/ninth century until about the end of the following century; al-Thaʿālibī, in his Yatīmat al-dahr (written sometime before the close of the fourth/tenth century), calls them “kings and princes, comely of face, eloquent of tongue, liberal of hand, weighty of mind”, describing the amir Sayf al-Dawlah as “the centre-jewel of their necklace”. Into this princely and distinguished line Abū Firās was born in the year 320/932 or 321/933, at the time when the fortunes of his family were approaching their zenith; when he died in 357/968 their hour of glory had already passed. His mother was of Greek origin, and, although she would have been classed as umm walad (a slave freed on giving birth to her master's son), yet Abū Firās speaks of himself as the son of a free-born woman, ibn ḥurrah, showing his pride in his mother's origin in defiance of taunts and innuendoes from other kinsmen.

The ʿAbbasid period was the golden age of Arabic story-telling: it was between the second/eighth and fourth/tenth centuries that the Arabic romantic tale was cast into an individual mould and took on its classical forms. Romances which were essentially ʿAbbasid in imagery and vocabulary, adopted by popular writers and bards, were to continue in Arabic literature for centuries; a pseudo-ʿAbbasid style remained the vogue long after the fall of Baghdad to the Mongols in 656/1258, and it is sometimes difficult to tell whether a version of a legend or romantic tale originated in ʿAbbasid Iraq or Syria or was composed much later in Mamluk Cairo.

Mia Gerhardt has suggested that Arabic popular literature of the early ʿAbbasid period drew its inspiration from three main sources: Persia, the bedouin society of the Arabian peninsula and the Baghdad of Hārūn al- Rashīd (170–93/786–809) and al-Maʾmūn (198–218/813–33). From Persia came the idea of the attainment, marriage or capture of an unknown beloved: the hero, usually a prince, falls in love with a girl from a distant land, having heard her description or simply her name; after many adventures borne with great steadfastness, he woos and liberates her, and the couple found a dynasty which is blessed with good fortune. By contrast, bedouin Arabia contributed tales of the sad fate of sundered lovers. Often these evoke the pre- or early Islamic life of Arabia, but sometimes the bedouin setting is transformed into the life of an Iraqi village or city.

PRE-ISLAMIC POETRY

The difference between the formal ode (qaṣīdah) and the occasional poem (qiṭʿah) seems to have been already fairly well established in pre-Islamic poetry. Despite the difficulties inherent in discussing the texts of pre- Islamic poems – which were transmitted and perhaps in some cases composed orally, so that there is some degree of fluidity in their structure and wording – and despite the fact that in many instances we cannot be absolutely sure that what has come down to us as a qiṭʿah was not originally part of a qaṣīdah, it can be said, with due caution, that stylistically there is a discernible difference between the two types of composition. Apart from its obvious freedom from the relative external structural rigour of the polythematic qaṣīdah, the qiṭah is generally marked by the simplicity of its language. Examples are Imruʾ al-Qays's elegies on his father or ancestors, composed in a language considerably simpler than that of his Muʿallaqah or his “Umm Jundab” qaṣīdah, with its elaborate descriptions of his mistress Umm Jundab and of his horse, or Labīd's elegies on his half-brother Arbad, which may be contrasted with the much more formal and recondite diction of his Muʿallaqah. This simplicity of language is not just a feature of elegies, although these understandably tend to be closer to spontaneous and direct utterances of grief; it is also to be found in other types of poetic expression, as in Labīd's well-known lines on his old age or in the “religious” pieces attributed to Umayyah b. Abī ʾl-Ṣalt.

BASIC ISSUES AND PRINCIPLES

Writing in 274/887, the ʿAbbasid poet and literary theorist Ibn al-Muʿtazz expressed the feeling that he was exploring a new territory of literary enquiry by identifying a new “poetics” which had emerged with the “modern” poets (muḥdathūri) of the second and third centuries of Islam. The term al-badīʿ by which he characterized this poetics had been used before by al-Jāḥiẓ in a brief reference attributing the actual coinage of the term to the transmitters (rāmīs) of poetry. The time gap between the first appearance of the term and its usage to designate a distinct trend in Arabic poetry might well span a whole century. Yet when Ibn al-Muʿtazz wrote, delimiting its boundaries and identifying its constituents, he did so with an obvious degree of tentativeness. His work, he said, represented a personal choice and allowed for the possibility of others defining the new poetics and identifying its elements in different ways. A few decades later, another critic of a very different temperament and education, Qudāmah b. Jaʿfar, wrote on poetry with an equal feeling of being a pioneer, asserting that, despite much work on various aspects of poetry, nobody had produced a book on its critical evaluation. Moreover, Qudāmah felt that his was a new territory unmapped by critics and thus lacking a specialized terminology which could furnish the necessary background for his discussion.