The two failed Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 launched a new phase in the history of Sino-Japanese trade, during which religious institutions played an even more important role. This chapter shows that despite the occasional conflicts between Chinese officials and merchants from Japan, Sino-Japanese trade continued on a large scale with the direct participation of prominent Japanese monasteries in both Kyoto and the newly developed political and religious center of Kamakura. Monasteries directly sending trade ships to China, often in the name of financing monastery construction, constituted a further development in the integration of religious and trade networks predating the Mongol invasions. In the mid-fourteenth century, increasing piracy and the changing political environment in both China and Japan prompted monasteries to adopt precautionary procedures to secure their profit, including signing contract-like documents with the merchants they commissioned.

The judicial landscape in thirteenth century Japan was highly complex with multiple stakeholders in local conflicts. Court nobles, temples, governors, and warrior families all had vested interests in provincial affairs, yet official institutions for conflict management were often lacking or imperfect. The reach of the political centers was limited, and local officers in charge of law enforcement were rarely reliable in mitigating or de-escalating local conflicts. Local communities therefore had to develop their own conflict strategies on a continuum from evasive strategies to violent confrontations with estate owners, warriors, and neighboring communities. With the threat of a Mongol invasion in the second half of the thirteenth century, central powers sought to increase their control over the periphery. This process led to increasing resistance from locals who saw their traditional or recently acquired privileges and autonomy coming under pressure, and many of them resisted through violent means. This chapter argues that local communities developed armed organizations to manage inter-community disputes and as protection against violent, exterior threats, while such organizations were often described by central elites as banditry and predatory violence.

The containment of violence was central to the mission of medieval Japan’s warrior governments, the Kamakura (1185-1333) and Muromachi (1336-1573) shogunates. It was also vital to the survival of the warlords who vied for supremacy in the war-torn sixteenth century. The two shogunates received their mandate to govern from the imperial court. They became, therefore, keepers of public order; the violence of political adversaries was by definition criminal and partisan; the force with which the shogunates responded was an act of peacemaking. With growing political turmoil in the fourteenth century, the shogunate attempted to finesse distinctions between intolerable aggressive warfare and acceptable defensive warfare. The second shogunate collapsed in the sixteenth century and the frequency and pitch of armed confrontations grew dramatically throughout the provinces. The most successful among the rising warlords began to claim the right to legislate on the sole strength of their success. Relying on noexternal source of legitimacy, their laws drew power from the much greater severity of their punishments and the much fuller delegitimisation of all violence other than their own, as seen in the abolition of all distinction between offensive and defensive violence.