Kamakura and the Joei Formulary
From its very establishment, the first warrior regime took as its central mandate the regulation of lawlessness and violence. Created in the wake the Genpei War (1180-5) by the victorious Minamoto no Yoritomo (1147-99), the first shogunate developed piecemeal as a series of offices and courts designed to curb the widespread post-war unrest.
Members of the winning coalition intent on settling scores with rivals or expanding their local influence by encroaching on the lands of absentee proprietors caused much of the unrest. The fledgling regime soon established that it would adjudicate disputes over tenurial rights that involved its followers. It would also appoint trustworthy followers to serve as land stewards (jito) in manorial estates where conflict had disrupted management or the forwarding of rents.[217]Yet the prerogatives claimed by the rulers in Kamakura foregrounded both their own private character and the limitations of their scope. Subject to Kamakura's directives and eligible to seek its arbitration were two groups only: members of the Minamoto warrior band - its honourable housemen (gokenin) - and the newly appointed land stewards. Honourable housemen followed Yoritomo in his capacity as head of the Minamoto family; land stewards answered to the new regime as recipients of a title (and an income) that it had the exclusive right to grant. Nominally distinct, the two groups in fact overlapped to a considerable degree, as meritorious housemen were often rewarded with appointments as land stewards. The rulers in Kamakura, then, used their imperial (and thus unquestionably ‘public') investiture to bolster their management of followers as an extended network of patronage, blurring from the outset the distinction between public and private, official and lordly.
In the aftermath of the Jokyu Disturbance of 1221, in which retired Emperor Go-Toba led disgruntled warriors and noblemen in an abortive attempt to overthrow the shogunate, the Kamakura regime expanded its reach considerably: politically, by rewarding its supporters and punishing the insurgents (including Go-Toba); geographically, by appointing loyalists to new jito posts in western Japan, where its followers were fewer.
It also began the tentative exercise of legislative authority, with the fifty-one articles of the Joei Formulary of 1232 (Joei shikimoku), which for the first time sought to articulate the scope, priorities and procedures of its courts. The promulgation was hardly meant to serve as a new law of the land; civil courts in Kyoto continued to function as they had before the war.[218] Still, along with restating the regime's commitment to restraining its own men (in nine articles), the Joei Formulary also codified (in four articles) Kamakura's nationwide right to investigate and punish sedition against the state - with which the new regime identified itself, even against a retired emperor.Much of Kamakura's legislative output after the Joei Formulary was concerned with tenurial rights and probate. Only about 10 per cent of the more than 600 laws issued in the century between the Formulary and the fall of the regime are concerned with the definition and punishment of violent acts. About a third of these are concentrated in the decade surrounding the Mongol attacks.
The attempted Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, which led Kamakura to assume responsibility for Japan's defence, clearly exposed the contradictions inherent in the regime's conflation of a public mandate with a private exercise of authority. As the only countrywide institution capable of mustering forces for the protection of Japan's coasts, the warrior regime unquestionably exercised the shogun's full formal mandate as a ‘great barbarian-subduing general' (sei'i taishogun). Yet mobilisation occurred locally in westernJapan, drawing on networks of honourable housemen rather than the warrior population at large. ‘Enlisted' troops were expected to provide their own equipment (from arms and armour, to horses and even attendants) and cover their own travel and living expenses for the duration of the campaign. Each warrior was also required to bring along a complement of fighting men - typically relatives and retainers - commensurate with his resources.
Only lightly directed by the regime's provincial constables (shugo), such small warrior bands became the core of the Kamakura's fighting force, which therefore retained a strongly particularistic and familial character.[219]Indeed, even the incentives the shogunate was able to provide to its army remained predicated on long-standing expectations of private service and lordly reward. One particularly industrious warrior, Takezaki Suenaga, participated in both campaigns, but could neither prove to have killed any enemies, nor claim to have been wounded himself or to have suffered casualties among his followers. Those being the established yardsticks of merit, Takezaki was denied a request for reward on the grounds that his appeal was without precedent.[220] If the regime used defence against the foreign threat as a way to expand its martial and peacekeeping prerogatives, Takezaki's case suggests, it did so only gradually, and less than programmatically. (Tellingly, contact with the great power of the age did not bring about a reconsideration of ideas of legitimate violence: in a series of laws relating to the defence of Japan's south-western coast, Mongols are referred to as pirates and bandits, relying on the long-established equation between threats to the established order and crime.)
The problem ran deeper than reliance on precedent. Despite Kamakura's success in repulsing the invader, the attempted Mongol invasions represented a mixed blessing for shogunal authority. Its lordly (private) approach to controlling followers required not only honours but also tangible rewards to offset the crippling costs of long-term mobilisation, yet no such rewards could be forthcoming, as victory had yielded few spoils and no conquered territories to divide among the meritorious.[221]