Background

In the transition from the classical imperial order to what we can call the early medieval period in the tenth to twelfth centuries, the centralised imperial bureaucracy gradually gave way to new ways of organising society and government.

The political and managerial segmentation resulted in a much weakened state structure, where the government possessed very few economic resources or means of coercion.⁶ This system of decentralised administra­tion also led to severe competition for resources, not least among peers at the same tier in the hierarchy. Landed wealth became one of the most important means of political influence, as private estates provided not only resources for the individual family but also the means for engaging with people from the other tiers and establishing a relationship of clientele.

The competitive nature of the state was given added impetus as scores of professional warriors began to make their presence felt in both provincial and capital affairs by the second half of the Heian period. I will not go into a more detailed discussion of the rise of warriors to national power here, but only note that the appearance of new, military families of great coercive power only added to the competition amongst the elites in all tiers. It did not significantly alter the state. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the warrior government in Kamakura had assumed many of the judiciary and administrative functions of the state, besides of course the responsibility of all military and police matters. Still, the Kamakura regime never tried to replace the imperial court and chose instead to utilise the prestige of the court to

bolster its own authority, thus embedding itself in the court-centred national state system as one among other oligarchic groups.^[375]

Although the Kamakura regime on the surface looked all-powerful, it was not the sole judiciary agent in the realm, nor did it enforce or even claim a monopoly on violence. The imperial court continued as the most important arbiter of conflicts, and only in cases where retainers of Kamakura were involved would Kamakura take over the mediation of conflict. Both capital centres thus developed effective systems of justice, each with its own court­rooms and jurisdictions.^[376] The landholding elites in the capital, consisting of the imperial family, court nobles, temples and shrines, maintained control over extensive estates and their resources and the power naturally derived from these.^[377] In large part due to their ‘monopoly on prestige distribution’, as one historian has labelled it, the capital elites succeeded in maintaining some degree of control over their landed assets, even if most of these elites were more interested in a steady stream of revenue than in actual managerial control.^{[378] [379]} Although it can be said that violence suffered ‘almost universal condemnation’ in the Kamakura period,¹¹ this was only true in the official version of society.