Bibliographical Essay
Very little has been written in English on medieval Japanese banditry, or akuto. In fact, there are only a handful of articles on this topic. The first one to be published was Lorraine F.
Harrington, ‘Social Control and the Significance of Akuto', in Jeffrey P. Mass (ed.), Court and Bakufu in Japan: Essays in Kamakura History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 221-50. She rightly argues that bandit narratives in the Kamakura period were not necessarily indicative of predatory groups in the provinces but rather reflected legal discourses. This point was later taken up and elaborated upon by Morten Oxenboell in two articles, ‘Images of Akuto', Monumenta Nipponica 60.2 (2005), 235-62, and ‘The Vicissitudes of a Medieval Japanese Warrior', Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Third Series 17.1 (2007), 43-54. In a third article, ‘Mineaiki and Discourses on Social Unrest in MedievalJapan', Japan Forum 18.1 (2006), 1-21, he made a critical analysis of one of the most vivid accounts of banditry in the period, the chronicle Mineaiki. Recently, Philip Garrett has made a detailed study of how the large temple complex on Koyasan wielded judicial authority as estate proprietor and dealt with crime in the territory under its control, in his article ‘Crime on the Estates: Justice and Politics in the Koyasan Domain', Journal of Japanese Studies 41.1 (2015), 79-112.Although there is no monograph-length discussion of banditry, there are excellent works on rural conflicts and violence, although most of them focus on the period following the Kamakura period as the country descended into the civil wars of the fourteenth century. Foremost among these is Thomas Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), a detailed investigation of the conflict opportunities available to peasant communities in the late fourteenth century.
Peter Shapinsky's Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014) provides a fascinating account of the tactics and political role of rural, sea-going warriors in the Japanese Inland Sea in the sixteenth century.A much larger body of scholarship exists on the violence of elite groups of warriors and the history of warfare in the medieval period. Although the following works deal only in passing with rural communities and peasant conflicts and violence, they are crucial for an understanding of warfare and violence in the period under consideration here. William Wayne Farris, Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan's Military, 500-1300 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993) outlines the development ofJapanese warfare from the imperial conscript system of the prehistoric and classical period to the development of a warrior class by the early medieval period. Karl Friday's two books, Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992) and Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (New York: Routledge, 2004), both focus on the rise of the samurai class and how their expertise as violent specialists propelled them from rural landholders and managers into de facto rulers of the realm during the early medieval period (c. eleventh to thirteenth centuries). Chronologically following on from the works of Farris and Friday, Thomas Conlan has given a detailed picture of the organisation of warfare and the mobilisation of fighting men during the wars of the fourteenth century in his monograph State of War: The Violent Order of FourteenthCentury Japan (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). Finally, through two monographs, The Gates of Power: Monks, Courtiers, and Warriors in Premodern Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000) and The Teeth and Claws of the Buddha: Monastic Warriors and Sohei in Japanese History (Honolulu:University of Hawai'i Press, 2007), Mikael Adolphson has traced the military role of monastic institutions in the early medieval period.