Bibliographical Essay

Few works have focused primarily on violence in premodern Japan, although frequent low-level conflict and increasingly protracted, full-scale warfare feature prominently in any account of the twelfth to sixteenth centuries.

The back-to-back publication of Karl F. Friday's Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) and William Wayne Farris's Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan's Military, 500-1300 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1993) represented the beginning of study of the origins of the warrior class, analysed for the first time in their military rather than lordly or institutional capacity. Both studies considered the development of warriors as a class of loosely organised provincial landholders out of the original eighth-century structure of a centralised conscript army, and this class's slow emergence as a political force. Friday followed with a study of cultural, political and military characteristics of samurai warfare between roughly the tenth and the thirteenth centuries: Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (New York: Routledge, 2004). A similar holistic approach to warfare characterises Thomas D. Conlan's State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003), which endeavors to show the ways in which the pressure to succeed and survive, and the demands of mobilisation, generated social and political change during the conflict between imperial loyalists and the Ashikaga shoguns.

The body of works exploring the political uses of violence has not been united by an equally exclusive concern with the warrior class. Rather, running through these works is an interest in the ways in which more or less ritualised outbreaks of violence, as well as the threat of violence, were used by a variety of state or elite groups to further political agendas. In The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto (Berkeley: University of California, 1994), Mary Elizabeth Berry explores a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century phenomenon she calls the ‘politics of witness and demonstration' - the unsanctioned and occasionally lawless and violent mobilisations of both elite warriors and urban commoners to seek redress for their grievances and proclaim the legitimacy of their demands. In a similar vein, Michael S. Adolphson, in The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2000), analyses the so-called ‘forceful demonstrations' (goso) carried out by elite monastic establishments in the late classical and early medieval periods, arguing that these much-feared displays of divine displeasure (which took the form of threatening processions of monks and monastic warriors though the streets of the capital) were not disruptions of the lawful order but rather recognised avenues for promoting and defending the Buddhist establishment's political and economic agenda. Returning to the topic of monastically sponsored violence, in The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sohei in Japanese History (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007), Adolphson demonstrates that just as ‘forceful demonstrations' were far from aberrations, so too the great monasteries' employment of armed men was not a sign of the degeneration of the Buddhist establishment.

Oldest but least numerous (especially in English-language scholarship) are studies centred on judicial violence - understood both as the violence inherent in the judicial system and as the ways in which the judicial system sought to curb violence. Much work has been conducted on the subject by Japanese scholars specialising in the sixteenth century and the legal output of the vying warlords of the age. In English, the landmark study remains an essay by Katsumata Shizuo, ‘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), itself a condensation of an earlier essay in Japanese, which places warlords' self­definition as arbitrators and judges of violent disputes at the centre of our understanding of their rise to power. Thomas Conlan has devoted a chapter to judicial violence in his State of War, focusing on the less-studied fourteenth century, but the most in-depth contribution to this line of inquiry, and perhaps the most systematic reappraisal of judicial violence, remains David Anthony Eason's unpublished dissertation ‘The Culture of Disputes in Early Modern Japan, 1550-1700' (UCLA, 2009), which seeks to move beyond formal analysis of the judicial process to focus instead on the often violent culture of grievances and disputes that was central to conflict resolution.