On an early spring day in 1295 in the eastern parts of the Harima province in Japan, the Obe Estate was invaded by a large group of bandits.
They pillaged and stole everything they could get their hands on, including farming tools, horses, cows, crops and money, and even added humiliation to injury by tearing the clothes off the back of several of the residents.
Apparently not satisfied with their gains, the invaders then kidnapped wives and children and pretended to torture and kill them in order to blackmail the residents into raising an unknown sum of money.1 The managers appointed to the estate by the absentee owner were quick to flee, leaving the residents to face the invaders by themselves.The leader of the gang was Tarumi Shigemasa, who had recently been removed from his position as manager of the same estate he was now pillaging. When reinforcements from the owners - the powerful temple Todaiji - finally reached the estate some time after Shigemasa had already left the area, the temple deputies demanded so much fodder and provisions from the unlucky villagers that it placed an additional burden on the already devastated community.[370] [371] In this case the invading force of Shigemasa was too large and brutal to be countered by military means and the residents had to buy their way out of further troubles. However, villagers in medieval Japan were far from always as docile or victimised as this incident might indicate.
Many if not most medieval societies were characterised by the reluctance or incapacity of central powers to intervene actively in local disputes and conflicts, and the power and initiative of negotiation were often left to the contesting parties themselves. The lack of trust in the willingness or capabilities of the central powers or estate proprietors to protect individuals and groups in the provinces forced the latter to organise and use violence as a conscious conflict strategy. Yet, studies of these societies, and in particular of medieval Japan, are still to a large degree focused on the study of central institutions and thereby neglect to discuss peripheral conflict mechanisms and local violence as something more than subversive or anti-social acts.
People disturbing the peace or violating managerial rights have often been discussed as predatory groups, whether they were government-licensed warriors (commonly known later as ‘samurai') or estate residents. Violent reactions and encounters have been seen as disrupting and anomalous elements in the attempts of the military government (shogunate) in Kamakura to secure peace in the realm. Violence in the countryside has therefore often been associated with the later breakdown of the central powers and of the Kamakura shogunate, and local violent conflicts have been used as indicators of a failing government.
However, local violence and the functioning of a medieval government are not as mutually exclusive as they may be in modern nationstates, where the state's monopoly on institutions of arbitration of violent conflicts is of paramount importance to the stability of society and to the legitimacy of the power of the state over its citizens. A study of local conflicts in the Kamakura period (1186-1333) therefore does not show a state under attack from unruly and socially ill-adapted denizens but a more complex picture of conflicting parties acting in accordance with local standards and motives.