Book by Mass, Jeffrey

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This pioneering collection of fifteen essays proposes to change the way we think about fourteenth-century Japan and what preceded and followed it. Most notable is the search for Japan’s medieval beginnings, which are found not in the developments flowing from the establishment of the first shogunate in the 1180’s, but rather in the shogunate’s collapse 150 years later.In this admittedly controversial interpretation, the Kamakura age becomes the final episode in Japan’s late classical period, with the courtier and warrior regimes of that era together seeking to maintain the traditional order. But under the leadership of Japan’s first truly “medieval men” (the emperor Go-Daigo and Ashikaga Takauji), the old order was dramatically transformed. In the editor’s words, “the rules changed, new behavior was everywhere, the past was only one of several competing influences. After the better part of a millennium, the spell cast by courtiers was finally broken.”Among the topics treated are the strange new partnerships within the social hierarchy, the impact of sustained warfare on societal values, the new subservience of women in the post-Kamakura environment, the unprecedented emergence of warriors as the moralists and spokesmen of a new age, and the appearance of a new, more sharply partisan religious sectarianism.In addition, we are shown the fragility of a history now dependent on battlefield success, the assumption of control of imperial poetic anthologies by warriors, the condition of the old and new Buddhist establishments, the paradox of warrior flamboyance and warrior stolidity, and the imposition of enduring village names. (view table of contents)

This collection of essays is built around a major but previously unstudied theme in Japanese history - the extent to which the exaggeration of antiquity has distorted historical understanding.

The Kamakura period, 1180-1333, is known as the era of Japan's first warrior government. This book shows that the period was notable for the coexistence of two centres of authority, the Bakufu military government at Kamakura and the civilian court in Kyoto, with the newer warrior government gradually gaining ascendancy.

This volume analyzes the recurring form of warrior government known as the Bakufu (or shogunate) that ruled Japan for nearly 700 years. All the essays in this collection clarify aspects of Japanese political tradition that have been neglected by Western writers, and point out alternatives to already stated views. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This text on medieval Japan covers topics such as: the early development of the Shoen; estate and property in the Late Heian period; the emergence of the Kamakura Bakufu; Jito land possession in the 13th-century - the case of Shitaji; and the economic and political effects of the Mongol Wars...read more

Product Description: An examination of a formative period in medieval Japanese history, this study analyzes the origins and consequences of the Jokyu War of 1221, a struggle of modest military proportions but of major political and legal importance. In defeating the traditional Court at Kyoto, the warrior government at Kamakura became the dominant national power; it subsequently created a highly efficient administration that gave Japan a century of social and political stability...read more