HITOMI TONOMURA
Equivocal and ubiquitous in modern usage, ‘violence' is a term that has no premodern Japanese counterpart. I employ the vocabulary of violence as a conceptual framing tool to probe the possible meanings that underlie descriptions of injured, dismembered or lifeless bodies, perhaps the most legible and emotive evidence of warfare violence.
The images I examine emerged during the War of Northern and Southern Courts (c. 1331-92), a seminal conflict that shookJapan's medieval world and charted a new trajectory for the country's relations of power. In this war, hitherto rare or unseen representations of dismembered bodies and mutilating acts proliferated. Approaching these images as consciously crafted gendered embodiment of the character of this war, I localise an understanding of violence as expressions of the specific political, philosophical and economic circumstances.The chapter is divided into four sections. First, I establish the historical context for the War of Northern and Southern Courts by explaining how, in the fourteenth century, Japan had two legitimate governments - the imperial court and the warrior government, or the bakufu. I then describe the court's succession disputes, the bakufu's involvement, and the eventual rebellion by Emperor Go-Daigo against the bakufu. I point to a factor I consider important for decoding the images of ruptured bodies: a deeply rooted sense of shared spiritual and moral space governing warriors and aristocrats, despite the status differences and armed conflicts.
The second section introduces and analyses two types of sources, the administrative document and the military tale. I explain how they both present dismembered bodies in unprecedented clarity and detail and, despite the differences in format and purpose, synchronically reinforce and mutually support the value accorded to the mutilated body images.
I then search for the reasons for these representations by focusing on the narrative set up of the tale in relation to the actual political conditions.The third section isolates and analyses a recurring theme in the tale: the iconic image of seppuku or disembowelment, possibly the most potent and enduring legacy of the entire panoply of representations from the war. I ask why this war in particular suddenly induced seppuku images and what narrative and symbolic purposes they are intended to serve. I also question the gendered meaning of seppuku and the construction of masculinity through the act of self-mutilation.
Expanding on the gendered analysis of the images of injured bodies, the fourth section examines the depictions of women in war and violence. In different ways, the two sources expose women's disqualification from official recognition of martial valour, while granting immunity from battlefield violence in the discursive space of a military tale.
A brief summary follows. While being determined by the economic, political and moral contexts in which they reside, the depicted images also offer us a possible portal for rethinking ‘violence', a near universal concept that is as obfuscating as it is revealing.