Judiciary Violence

When discussing the judiciary meanings of violence in medieval Japan, we run into several problems. The structure of the fragmented state created multiple centres of authority, as seen above, and it is therefore very hard to establish a core set of rules for appropriate violent behaviour.

Law codes do not necessarily equal justice. As the Kamakura shogunate began to enforce its laws with more fervour in the second half of the thirteenth century in the very real fear of a Mongol invasion, many people resisted the overtures of the state and its policies that were seen as being unjust.^[382] Laws were increasingly enforced through violence, or threat of violence, and they were resisted by many through violence. Concepts of legitimacy and illegitimacy were rather diffuse, especially when it came to using extra-legal means of violence, and the difference between vigilantism and banditry was in many cases blurred and merely depended on the degree of official recognition. This mistrust made it necessary for individuals and groups to organise and use violence, regardless of whether such violence was considered bad and ‘illegal' from the viewpoint of the central power holders.^[383]

Violence in medieval Japan was not unrestrained or meaningless and often developed according to local expectations of propriety and legitimacy. To the central powers and their elite members, however, local power seekers or power holders were essentially regarded as a potential threat, not only to their political power, but also to their values and norms. This especially surfaced when peripheral powers overstepped their invisible boundaries and became a nuisance for central elites.

In documents produced by members of the religious, military or political elites, rural violence was to a high degree condemned as illegal and deviant behaviour. Documents produced by local political actors, on the other hand, often show a more pragmatic view on the use of private violence and on extra-judicial conflict mediation.^[384] In these different discourses we can thus get information on how norms and the legitimation of violence were nego­tiated between asymmetrical powers with vastly different political capital at the centre and periphery in the medieval period.

Villages in medieval Japan employed a number of strategies in their negotiations with the absentee proprietors who for the most part consisted of aristocratic families or large monastic institutions in the capital area of Kyoto. Mirroring what Charles Tilly has called dissimulation in late medieval Europe, estate residents often used the strategy of conceding just enough of one's autonomy and/or proprietary rights to meet the demands of the rulers and thereby evade close control or expropriation.^{[385] [386]} This was done through cooperation with the local administrative institutions of the proprietors in the estates, which would leave them just enough room for manoeuvring in daily affairs without severe restrictions from the centre. As James C. Scott has also shown in his study of Malay villages for a later period, rights could be achieved through time, not by open defiance or rebellion, but through effective erosion in a multitude of ways.1⁸ This is very close to what happened from the early stages of the estate system and it was not ‘necessary' for the peasants openly to defy the proprietors. Only later in the thirteenth century does the strengthening of temple power over their properties become so oppressive that peasants were unable to avoid direct confrontations for which they would often be vilified as bandits. Such network strategies illustrate perfectly the system of mutual dependency, yet inherent antagonism, between the estate communities and the proprietors.