To ask what state-sanctioned violence meant in medieval Japan (1185-1615) is to be confronted with two attendant questions: what counted as violence; and what counted as state-sanctioned?

There is no single, overarching word for violence in Japanese during this period. Violence was instantiated in specific actions: disorders; outrages; cutting down and wounding; offensive or defensive warfare; quarrels and disputes; battles.

Answers to what constituted state sanction are, in some ways, even more elusive. Contemporaries tended to identify state-sanctioned and thus legit­imate conduct as ‘public'. It was, most explicitly and simply, the legitimation conferred by office and, by extension, by membership in the ruling regime. All actions performed by an office holder were public acts, but ‘the public' was seldom invoked explicitly; more often legitimacy was claimed by profes­sing not to have ‘private' (as in selfish, narrowly partisan or factional) motives.

Yet most of the regimes that governed Japan between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries found themselves relying, whether they recognised it or not, on the private and familial as much as on the public and official. Office holders, in other words, realized their public claims to authority through personal and intensely factional networks of lordly patronage and loyalty. For roughly 300 years, two warrior regimes (known as bakufu, or shogunates) functioned or claimed to function within the framework of the pre-existing imperial state, even as they developed increasingly adversarial relations with the very authorities that granted them the public status needed to govern. The foundering of central authority, at the end of the fifteenth century, brought about a new class of regional warlords who, in dispensing with the sanction of office, needed to forge new ideas about what might constitute the public, that is to say, the unselfish and legitimate.

Previous scholarship has explored the ritualised violence that typified intra-elite conflict within the imperial state between the eleventh and four­teenth centuries, and the judicial violence exercised by the third and last shogunate in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.¹ This chapter focuses on the regimes that dominated the country between the twelfth and six­teenth centuries, and on the way in which the suppression of violence - from petty crime to unauthorised military action - was central to the creation of a mandate to rule. In particular, it analyses legislative output as symptomatic of shifting ideas about the bounds of acceptable - and indeed, necessary - judicial and military violence, and explores the ways in which the wartime escalation of violence revealed by successive laws is also a marker of changing claims to public and state authority.

The warrior class emerged historically as part of a broader phenomenon of privatisation and personalisation of rule, which came to a head in the twelfth century, when the imperial court's reliance on the military services of warriors led to the transformation of ‘hired swords' (historians' characterisa­tion of warriors under imperial rule) into political actors in their own right.^{[215] [216]} During the first 400 years of warrior ascendancy, lawful violence went from being that which was deployed by the state, to that which was deployed on behalf of the state by private actors, to that which was deployed in the service of one's immediate overlord by his followers (as least as long as that overlord was successful and able to retain the mantle of legitimacy for himself).

Each of the first two shogunates (a third would emerge from the civil war and rule Japan from roughly 1600 to 1867) issued a legal ‘formulary' (shikimoku) outlining the guiding legal principles that informed its governance: the Kamakura regime (1185-1333) issued the Joei shikimoku (officially entitled Goseibai shikimoku, or Formulary on Judicature) in 1332; its successor, the Muromachi regime (c. 1336-1573), produced the Kenmu shikimoku (Kenmu Formulary) in 1336, explicitly invoking the earlier code as a model. Each of the formularies was then followed over the years by a steady stream of ‘additional articles' (tsuikaho) that addressed new circumstances as they arose and demanded political and legal attention.

When warlords (daimyo) emerged in the sixteenth century who made no pretence of relying on any source of external validation, the personalistic nature of rule only heightened the value of military success in determining the right to govern. In responding to breaches of the peace, warlords increasingly ignored the distinction between political disagreement and criminal behaviour. Having risen to prominence by ignoring once-revered chains of command and venues of adjudication, these new lords found their still precarious positions threatened by the ubiquity of self-redress. As a solution, they attempted to monopolise the exercise of violence and, at the same time, to escalate its brutality in an effort to dissuade actors other than themselves from challenging their monopoly. To distinguish themselves from their subjects, warlords promoted a new conception of ‘public author­ity' - one based not on investiture from above but on the seemingly undeni­able merit of survival and success; they negated the personal, private character of violence and subjected it once again to the sanction of a ‘state' (kokka, that is, the warlord's domain) conceived as above the fray. However novel their conception of authority, warlords too turned to the promulgation oflaws - both as instruments of governance and as legitimising tools.³ Several

in Donald H. Shively and William H. McCullough (eds.), The Cambridge History ofJapan, vol. ii, HeianJapan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 644-709.

3 Katsumata Shizuo with Martin Collcutt, ‘The Development of Sengoku Law', in John Whitney Hall, Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura (eds.), Japan before Tokugawa: Political Consolidation and Economic Growth, 1500 to 1650 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 101-24.

daimyo houses went so far as to issue comprehensive codes: the Imagawa (in 1526 and 1553), the Date (in 1536), the Takeda (in 1547 and 1574), the Yuki (in 1556), the Chosogabe (in 1596), to name but a few.