Search results for ""Author Jeffrey P. Mass""

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

A Stanford University Press classic.

Read more less

A Stanford University Press classic.

Read more less

This book is a much expanded and wholly rewritten treatment of the subject of the author's first book, Warrior Government in Early Medieval Japan, published in 1974. In this new version, the "warrior" and "medieval" character of Japan's first shogunate is significantly de-emphasized, thus requiring not only a new title, but also a new book. The author's new view of the final decades of twelfth-century Japan is one of a less revolutionary set of experiences and a smaller achievement overall than previously thought. The pivotal figure, Minamoto Yoritomo, retains his dominant role in establishing the "dual polity" of Court and Bakufu, but his successes are now explained in terms of more limited objectives. A new regime was fit into an environment that was still basically healthy and vibrant, leading not to the substitution of one government for another, but rather to the emergence of a new authority that would have to interact with the old. The book aims to present a dual perspective on the period by juxtaposing what we know against our best possible estimate of what Yoritomo himself knew. It is deeply concerned with the multiple balancing acts introduced by this ever nimble experimenter in governing, who was forever seeking to determine, and then to promote, what would work while curtailing or eliminating what would not. The author seeks to recreate step-by-step the movement from one historical juncture to another, whether this means adapting already available information, building anew, or working with combinations of materials. Throughout, the book addresses new topics and offers many new interpretations on subjects as wide-ranging as the 1189 military campaign in the north and the phenomenon of delegated authority.

Read more less

A Stanford University Press classic.

Read more less

A Stanford University Press classic.

Read more less

A Stanford University Press classic.

Read more less