The Vicissitudes of a Medieval Japanese Warrior

Extract

In standard accounts of medieval Japanese society, enormous stress is put on the conflicts between local landholders (zaichi ryōshu) and absentee proprietors. Fuelled by the debate on feudalism that divided scholars up until the early 1990s, these conflicts have widely been recognised as proof of the diminishing powers of the central elite in, or near, Kyoto and of the increasing absorption of power by warriors in both the countryside and in the administration of the military government, the bakufu. The conflicts were, in other words, seen in the structural context of a system of huge landed estates (shōen) owned by court nobles or large religious institutions, which were gradually replaced by much smaller proprietary units controlled personally by individual warrior families.