Conclusion

In contrast with the modern pop-cultural image of samurai as almost preternaturally self-disciplined and reliably - even blindly - obedient to authority, for much of its history Japan's warrior class was neither particularly restrained in its recourse to violence nor especially unquestioning of authority.

Indeed, each of the warrior regimes that alternated in power rose to prominence by winning victories on the field of battle against the country's previous lawful authority. Each of the new regimes then proceeded to obtain the imprimatur of the imperial court, which came to be seen as dispenser of the mandate to rule rather than as a ruling institution in its own right. Sanction from the imperial court served retrospectively to invert the competing parties' respective characterisations as legitimate government and disloyal subject/bandit. Each of the new regimes, finally, embraced public authority's prerogative to legislate. The very claims to continuities with previous regimes' laws served to underscore each new shogunate's institutional character, drawing attention away from the personal (that is, private and therefore antisocial) character of the crisis that led to its founding. The pattern, which we have seen for the first and second shogunates, was repeated at the turn of the seventeenth century, when a third shogunate was founded by Tokugawa leyasu (1542-1616). In the opening clause of an oath leyasu extracted from all daimyo in 1611 as part of his efforts to consolidate his house's hold on the country, he had the great warlords swear: ‘We will respect the laws and formularies established by the bakufu for generations since the time of the General of the Right (Yoritomo); out of concern for our own interest, we will strictly obey any regulation which may be issued by Edo hereafter.'^{^[256]} leyasu's reference to Yoritomo's legal precedents echoes the one found in Ashikaga Takauji's Kenmu Formulary, forcing the daimyo to participate in the inscription of the newly established Tokugawa regime in an unbroken tradition of shogunal legislation.

In this sense, the oath displaces Tokugawa Ieyasu as the focus of obedience; the daimyo were submitting not to him but to an institution, the shogunate, which had existed almost without interruption for over 400 years. Indeed in the oath, as in subsequent legal codes, the Tokugawa concentrated on keeping the peace with a determination that far outstripped any precedent.^{^[257]}

Yet the second part of the clause - to obey by the dictates of leyasu's government (located in Edo) ‘out of concern for our own interest' - cannot fail to evoke a less remote model as well: the codes of sixteenth-century warlords, with their threatening demands of compliance. And in evoking the sternness and expansiveness of daimyo houses' codes, leyasu's oath also draws attention to differences that separated it from its models. Most important here are the differing understandings of what constituted public authority. Following in the footsteps of the earlier shogunates, Ieyasu was content to demonstrate his legitimacy through legislation. The seal of the public is provided by his, and his descendants', appointment as shogun. This was a conception of legitimation that construed the public and the private as not only antithetical but easily distinguished. It ignored the obvious reality that the shogun, the daimyo, and every official in his as in previous regimes, held office as a member of a warrior house: the public was constituted through the investiture of that most private (as in familiar, partisan and particularistic) of institutions.

Sixteenth-century warlords, by contrast, had been forced by their rejection of central authority to contend more actively with the problem of the public- as-legitimate. Having gained power as members of warrior houses, and having maintained it at least as much through the cultivation of personal ties of loyalty and service as they had through the trappings of public authority, the daimyo were unable to create a wholly new conception of rule. Yet in dismissing the precedents set by shogunal law, codes like the Imagawa kana mokuroku laid claim to an authority that was not only demonstrated, but also created, through legislation.

In this light it is possible to see how laws of the Warring States period were more aggressive in both their containment and their exercise of violence. Laws punishing with equal severity both parties to a dispute were not only expressing the violence of the society that produced them; they were discarding legal approaches to the unauthorised use of force - such as the distinction between offensive and defensive warfare - that had long been associated with centrally legitimised regimes and that no doubt were widely associated with those regimes' inability to contain violence.

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Source: Gordon Matthew, Kaeuper Richard, Zurndorfer Harriet (eds.). The Cambridge World History of Violence. Volume 2: AD 500-AD 1500. Cambridge University Press,2020. — 696 p.. 2020

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