Hideyoshi) in 1592–1598, bands of Korean Buddhist monks still played a

prominent role in waging fierce guerrilla resistance.

Warrior Japan: Late Heian ([794–] Tenth

Century–1185), Kamakura (1185–1333),
and Muromachi (1333–1568)
The Rise of the Warriors
From Japanese literature of the Heian period (794–1185), it is easy to get
the impression that the aesthetically refined aristocrats of the capital, Heian
(modern Kyōto), were scarcely even aware of life beyond the outskirts of
the city. The aristocracy lived off taxes collected in the provinces, but was
otherwise not much interested in them. Parallel to this elite inattention, the
central government’s ability to exercise actual administrative control over
the countryside also progressively diminished. In the beginning, the
performances of provincial governors had been carefully audited by their
successors. By the eleventh century, however, it was rare for governors
even to visit their assigned provinces at all – local administrative
responsibilities were instead passed to deputies.
In the meantime, out in the provinces, new types of local strongmen
were emerging. A major intention of the sweeping reorganization of the
Japanese state that had followed the Taika coup d’état in the late seventh
and eighth centuries had been to create a Chinese-style centralized empire,
not the least of whose enhanced capabilities would be to mobilize a large
army – like the huge continental armies that had fought the seventh-century
wars for the unification of the Korean peninsula. Military conscription was
introduced in Japan, and an army of peasant foot soldiers was created,
armed with crossbows and organized into provincial units under the
command of governors. But the threat of an invasion from the continent
quickly receded. Military conscription put a heavy burden on ordinary farm
families, and the draft was abandoned by as early as 792.
Japan would not face another serious foreign enemy for many years,
but external peace did not eliminate the need for internal, domestic armed
forces. For one thing, non-Japanese people called the Emishi still lived in
the extreme northeast of the main island. These Emishi raided Japanese
settlements, and significant conflict with the Emishi did not end until 811.
In addition, local security – law and order – was always a concern. Even at
its height in the eighth century, the conscript peasant infantry had already
been supplemented by mounted warriors drawn from elite rural families.
The art of mounted archery had been practiced in Japan since about the fifth
century, and especially in eastern Japan, there was a long tradition among
the local elite of hunting from horseback and of bearing arms.
The Japanese warriors who began to emerge at this time were not yet
quite the familiar samurai. The word samurai originally only meant
“attendant,” and in the eighth century, it typically referred literally to
household servants. By the early Heian period, the word had begun to be
applied to armed household guards in attendance on court nobles. Such
private guards had become necessary because of the deteriorating security
situation even in the capital. Another relatively familiar term for the
warriors, bushi, or “military gentleman,” did not come into use until about
the twelfth century. In the early period, Japanese warriors were most
commonly called tsuwamono. The evolution of these relatively rustic
warrior farmers into the familiar hereditary elite samurai class was not
completed until as late as the sixteenth century.47
Early Japanese warriors were most especially mounted archers. The
Way of the Warrior was “the way of the bow and horse.” The cult of the
sword was a later development. In the eighth century, Japanese peasant
infantry armies had made the crossbow their principal weapon. But, though
a crossbow is relatively easy to point and shoot, it is difficult to
manufacture. By the ninth century, the crossbow had largely been
abandoned in Japan. The longbow, by contrast, is easier to make but
requires very much more skill to use effectively, especially from
horseback.48 At least if we can believe the Japanese warrior tales, single
mounted combat became the preferred style of fighting. Combat would
begin with a ritualized exchange in which the names, age, rank, and
genealogy of the combatants were announced to establish suitable
adversaries. A warrior’s reward was then calculated by his taking of enemy
heads.
Initially, Japanese warriors were only part-time warriors and part-time
farmers who joined into relatively unstable rural armed bands. Warriors in
the east began fortifying their homes with ditches and palisades, and in the
late eleventh century, these eastern warriors also began forming groups
aligned, notably, with either the Taira or Minamoto families. The Taira and
Minamoto families were junior branches of the imperial line. The Japanese
imperial family was quite large: as of the early tenth century, there were
roughly seven hundred members who were entitled to public support.49 To
help reduce the strain on diminishing central government resources, in the
ninth century junior descendants of emperors began being reduced from
imperial to merely noble status, and given new family names such as
Minamoto or Taira. (The Japanese imperial family does not have a family
name.) Although no longer royalty, these new houses still enjoyed immense
prestige, especially in rural areas outside the capital.
At roughly the same time that warrior bands began to form around the
Taira and Minamoto families in the countryside, the domination of the
imperial court by the Fujiwara family, which had endured for nearly two
centuries, was also challenged by the institution of the Retired Emperor;
that is, the hold that had been exerted over emperors by their Fujiwara
mother’s father or brother was now replaced by that of their own fathers. In
1068, the first emperor in 170 years whose mother was not a Fujiwara took
the throne. For roughly a century thereafter, a succession of three emperors
each abdicated early and then established administrative offices out of their
households as Retired Emperors, from which they exercised effectively
supreme power. Emperor Shirakawa (1053–1129, r. 1072–1086), for
example, abdicated the throne in 1086 but did not die until 1129. These
Retired Emperors took Buddhist orders, and are also therefore sometimes
referred to as Cloistered Emperors. Between 1068 and 1180, there were ten
reigning emperors, but a mere three Retired Emperors were the truly
dominant figures for most of that period. This institution of the Retired
Emperor proved to be an effective device for enhancing the economic and
political position of the imperial family, but it naturally also created a
potential for tension between the officially reigning emperor and the Retired
Emperor.
In the early twelfth century, one branch of the Taira family
demonstrated its military capability by quelling piracy on the Inland Sea,
and became attached to the Retired Emperor as his personal armed escort.
In 1156, for the first time in centuries, military force was called in to settle a
dispute within the imperial family. A Taira family leader named Kiyomori
(1118–1181) backed the reigning emperor Go-Shirakawa (1127–1192, r.
1155–1158) against a Retired Emperor, whose own armed forces were
largely drawn from the Minamoto family. Although in practice battle lines
were never precisely drawn into separate family camps – it was quite
normal for some family members to fight against other members of their
own family – a great rivalry between the Taira and Minamoto clans began,
which was destined to change forever the course of Japanese history.

The Gempei War (1180–1185)

In the conflict of 1156, the Taira-backed Emperor Go-Shirakawa prevailed.
He then abdicated in 1158, becoming Retired Emperor himself. Following
yet another armed dispute in 1159–1160 (see Figure 5.3), the principal
remaining Minamoto family leader was treacherously murdered in his bath.
The lives of two of his sons were unexpectedly spared, however. One was
spared, the story goes, because Taira Kiyomori was captivated by his
mother’s beauty, while the other, the older brother, Minamoto Yoritomo
(1147–1199), was spared because Taira Kiyomori’s stepmother was
sentimentally reminded by him of her own lost son. Although Minamoto
Yoritomo’s life was spared, he was banished to a peninsula in the distant
east, where he spent the next two decades in exile. The east – the great
Kantō plain surrounding what is now Tōkyō – would become his permanent
new home.
 Figure 5.3. Detail from one of the Heiji Scrolls, illustrating a Japanese
warrior tale narrating the story of the Heiji conflict, 1159–1160.
Kamakura period, 1185–1333.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Werner Forman/Art Resource, New

York.

Taira Kiyomori now commanded an almost unchallengeable military

force at the Heian capital. Although he long remained a client attached to
the authority of the Retired Emperor, by 1167 Kiyomori had risen to the top
court office. In 1171, Kiyomori engineered the marriage of his daughter to
the emperor, and after this daughter bore the emperor a son, in 1180, that
grandson of Taira Kiyomori himself became the reigning emperor (Antoku,
r. 1180–1183). At the peak of Taira Kiyomori’s power, his family seemed to
exercise a stranglehold over the entire court. “Altogether more than sixty
governors of provinces, military zones, and districts, as well as sixteen
nobles and more than thirty courtiers, derived from his clan. It seemed that
the whole world was ruled by his kinsmen alone.”50
 The one remaining restraint on Taira Kiyomori’s power had been
eliminated by a coup in 1179, during which the Retired Emperor Go-
Shirakawa was dismissed and placed under house arrest. This proved to be
one coup too many, however, because it aroused opposition within the
imperial family. In 1180, Go-Shirakawa’s son issued a call to arms against
the Taira. This imperial prince had been deprived of his own chance to
become emperor because of Kiyomori’s maneuvering to put a Taira
grandson on the throne. Although the rebellious prince was soon killed, his
call was answered by a now adult Minamoto Yoritomo from the remote
eastern Kantō region.
Yoritomo declared the Kantō independent, and local warriors eagerly
stepped in to replace officials appointed from the imperial capital. By
rewarding his warrior followers with land confiscated from the enemy or
confirming their existing land titles, Minamoto Yoritomo was able to raise a
huge army. He soon established his headquarters at a place called
Kamakura, at the base of a peninsula in the Kantō. The war that was now
unleashed between the Minamoto warriors of the east and the court-based
Taira forces in the west is known as the Gempei War (1180–1185). (The
name Gempei derives, confusingly enough, from alternate Japanese
pronunciations of the Chinese characters with which Minamoto and Taira
are written.) The story of this war unfolds in what may be the greatest of all
the Japanese warrior tales, the Tale of the Heike, a book that developed out
of a tradition of oral storytelling by blind itinerant monks in the thirteenth
century.
Almost immediately, the Taira launched an expeditionary probe into
the Kantō to suppress the Minamoto-led rebellion. The Taira troops were
spooked by the noise made by some birds at night, however, which they
mistakenly thought indicated an imminent surprise attack, and the Taira
forces fled without even joining battle. For the next three years, then, there
was something of a phony war, as Minamoto Yoritomo preoccupied himself
with consolidating his hold over the Kantō. For a time, it even seemed
possible that Japan might be divided between east and west. In the twelfth
century, the Kantō plain in the east and Japan’s other great plain in the west
near the capital, between them, together held about 40 percent of the total
population of the Japanese islands.
In 1183, the war finally resumed in earnest as Minamoto Yoritomo
now took the offensive, although Yoritomo personally remained behind in
Kamakura and allowed others to assume tactical command on the
battlefield. Taira Kiyomori had meanwhile died of a fever at the outset of
the war in 1181. The Taira were quickly dislodged from the capital and
retreated slowly west to the farthest tip of the main island, where, in a
climactic naval battle from a multitude of small craft in 1185 at a place
called Dan no Ura, the last remnants of the Taira were wiped out and the
boy emperor drowned. The winner, Minamoto Yoritomo, then did a
remarkable thing: he stayed in Kamakura and did not move to the imperial
capital.51

The Kamakura Shogunate (1185–1333)

The Gempei War proved to be a great turning point in Japanese history. The
victor, Minamoto Yoritomo, remained in his eastern headquarters at
Kamakura, which came to be known as a bakufu, or military “tent
government.” The imperial court remained far away to the west, in the old
capital Kyōto (Heian). Yet Japan was not divided between them – at least,
not into two separate parts, although the erosion of central government
power continued. Yoritomo claimed direct authority only over his own
network of vassal warriors, or “housemen.” He solidified his hold over
these warriors by also claiming the right to reward them with appointments
as estate stewards throughout Japan. But the emperor, in Kyōto, remained
the font of legitimate government.
In 1192, Yoritomo received from the emperor the title Sei-i tai-shōgun,
or “Great General Pacifying the Barbarians.” This is commonly shortened
simply to shogun (shōgun). Yoritomo was Japan’s first shogun. It is clear
that in the last decades of the twelfth century, Japan had crossed some
important threshold, moving from the Heian age of centralized, civilian,
aristocratic rule to a time of increasingly decentralized military rule in the
age of the shoguns. As a sign of the radically changed times, between 1200
and 1840, no Japanese emperor appears to have actually held what we think
of now as the standard imperial title, Tennō.52
These changes were not necessarily perceived at the time as what we
might call “progress.” Quite the contrary: there was a pervasive feeling of
decline. It became common for Buddhists to speak of having entered the
“last age of the law,” when the Buddha’s teachings had reached a final
stage of human decay. The melancholy theme of the Tale of the Heike was
of the victory of rough eastern warriors over the culturally sophisticated
Taira of the imperial court. Japanese warriors still had no special privileged
monopoly over the carrying of arms or the riding of horses, and were often
still quite rustic fellows. Court nobles still epitomized cultural polish and
social prestige. Minamoto Yoritomo owed his own towering stature more to
his imperial descent than to any particular abilities as a warrior.
 Perceptions are not necessarily realities, though. There were also signs
of more positive developments in the Kamakura period, including a
narrowing of the gap between elite high culture and that of ordinary
commoners through the medium of popular Buddhist preaching and the
new, often oral literature of the warrior tales. An especially attractive
Japanese custom – regular bathing – also first manifested itself now with
the appearance of public baths in monasteries, beginning in the thirteenth
century. Local markets began to spread in the thirteenth century, and a new
agricultural surplus accumulated and began to be sold in what was an
increasingly monetized cash economy.53
The cash came in the form of Chinese copper coins, imported from the
continent in large quantities. It would not be until the sixteenth century that
coins would again be minted in Japan. Despite the unique trajectory taken
by developments in Japanese history during the age of the shoguns and the
samurai, contact with other parts of East Asia remained important. Japanese
warrior society was, in fact, arguably more deeply Confucian in its ethical
values than the old Heian aristocracy had been. The war tales, for example,
emphasized warrior relations with their lords in terms of the Confucian
ideal of loyalty. Even the Buddhist idea of the “last age of the law” had
been developed first in China.
Important developments in Japanese Buddhism in this period were
often extensions of Chinese influences. For example, Hōnen (1133–1212)
was a Japanese monk from the great Tendai sect temple complex on Mt.
Hiei, the tallest mountain overlooking Kyōto in the northeast. Living at the
time of the Gempei War, he found it very easy to believe that the “last age
of the law” was at hand, a time when salvation was no longer possible
except through faith in the compassion of the Bodhisattvas. Hōnen began to
preach an inspired message of universal salvation through the intervention
of the Bodhisattva Amitābha, with his promise of rebirth for the faithful in
the Pure Land. All that was necessary was to sincerely recite, “I put my
faith in Amitābha Buddha” (in Japanese, namu Amida Butsu). Although
Hōnen was expelled from Mt. Hiei because of controversy in 1207, his
exile only served to further spread his message of faith as he traveled and
preached beyond the capital. After his death, although belief in Amitābha
and the Pure Land had long been widespread throughout East Asia,
Hōnen’s followers established a distinctive Pure Land sect (Jōdo), which
eventually acquired the largest Buddhist following in Japan.
Zen Buddhism (in Chinese, Chan) was especially welcomed by the
Shogunate in Kamakura as a way of transforming the rough warriors of the
eastern Kantō into trendsetters in sophisticated new fashions, both secular
and sacred, imported from the continent. At the end of the Kamakura
period, there were more than two hundred Chinese monks living in Japan,
and hundreds of Japanese monks had made the trip to China.54 This Zen
Buddhism did much to establish what we think of today as characteristically
“Japanese” tastes for poetry, rock gardens, tea, monochromatic painting,
and architecture.
Despite these ongoing continental contacts, though, it should be
emphasized that all this occurred in the context of a still quite uniquely
Japanese culture that was, furthermore, currently evolving along
independent lines that curiously, in some ways, might even be said to better
echo developments in contemporary medieval Western Europe than in
China. The Japanese islands remained detached from the mainland of East
Asia. Yet the Mongol invasions of 1274 and 1281, though they were
successfully repulsed, were also reminders that the islands did not exist in
isolation. In the aftermath, the Japanese began to become somewhat more
active again overseas.
Initially, much of this activity took the form of piracy, directed first
especially against the Korean peninsula. In 1350, a fleet of one hundred
Japanese pirate ships descended on the Korean coast, and Japanese pirates
returned to Korea five more times that same year. As we have already seen,
Japanese piracy played a role in the establishment of the new Korean
Chosŏn Dynasty in 1392. The legacy of the Mongol invasions also left
much domestic dissatisfaction in Japan because there were very few spoils
of victory with which to reward the warriors who had beaten the Mongols.
Driving away Mongol invaders, after all, did not produce any new land to
give away.
Minamoto Yoritomo died in 1199, and his widow lived on for another
quarter- century. She became the real power – sometimes called the “Nun
Shogun.” She was ruthless, and is even suspected of engineering the end of
Minamoto Yoritomo’s direct line of descent with the murder of her own
younger son in 1219. The end of Yoritomo’s line left her own family, the
Hōjō, in a position from which to control the Kamakura Shogunate as
regents. Naturally, however, other leading Kamakura vassals were inclined
to resent such Hōjō family domination.

Muromachi (1333–1568)
Circumstances must indeed be unusual for an emperor to rebel, but that is
what happened next. A succession dispute had emerged between two
branches of the imperial family, which had been resolved with an agreement
to alternate the throne between the two lines after 1290. Rather than
abdicate to that other branch of his own family, however, in 1331, Emperor
Go-Daigo (r. 1318–1339) rebelled. The Kamakura Shogunate might have
had the military resources to contain this rebel emperor, but too many
warriors rallied to the imperial cause instead. Even some of Kamakura’s
own leading vassals defected, including a man named Ashikaga Takauji
(1305–1358). Takauji’s mother was from the Hōjō family of Kamakura
regents, and he claimed descent from a branch of the Minamoto family.
With such leading vassals turning against it, in 1333, the city of Kamakura
was burned, the Hōjō family and its remaining faithful retainers committed
mass suicide, and the Kamakura Shogunate came to an end.
Emperor Go-Daigo’s aspiration was not merely to keep the throne but
to achieve a genuine imperial restoration: a return of real power from the
military headquarters of the shoguns to the central imperial government.
Emperor Go-Daigo therefore made his own son shogun, and combined the
previously separate offices of civilian and military provincial governor into
a single new office that was to be appointed by the emperor rather than by
the shogun. Leading warriors were naturally dissatisfied with being
excluded by this imperial arrangement, however, and rivalries between
great warriors also created fissures at the court. In 1336, Ashikaga Takauji
forcefully expelled the emperor from Kyōto, enthroned a new emperor of
his own choosing, and had himself appointed shogun in 1338. Takauji thus
became the first in a new line of Ashikaga shoguns. This Ashikaga
Shogunate is also called the Muromachi period, after the name of the
section of Kyōto where the Ashikaga shoguns established their
headquarters.
But Emperor Go-Daigo did not relent. After being driven from the
capital, he took refuge at a location south of Kyōto called Yoshino. There
were now two imperial courts, and sporadic warfare between these
“Northern and Southern dynasties” would continue for more than half a
century, until 1392. Questions of imperial legitimacy were now subsidiary
to personal ambition, however, as warriors used the pretext of loyalty to one
or the other emperor to raid their neighbors and acquire land. In 1351,
Ashikaga Takauji himself even changed sides, after his brother had
temporarily gained the upper hand in Kyōto. Once Takauji had defeated and
killed his brother, he changed sides again. It has been observed that
Takauji’s rise was accomplished through three betrayals: first of Kamakura,
then of Emperor Go-Daigo, and finally of his own brother. Japan was
entering an age of instability, when it became commonplace for vassals to
treacherously overthrow their lords.
Ashikaga Takauji returned the seat of power to the imperial capital
Kyōto, though he made sure that real power remained in the shogun’s hands
rather than the emperor’s. Kyōto flourished once again, and the Ashikaga
shoguns were now able to tap into a growing urban commercial economy.
By the time the Northern and Southern dynasty courts were reunified in
1392, under the third Ashikaga Shogun Yoshimitsu (1358–1408), most of
the Shogunate’s revenue actually came from trade: from taxes on shipping,
at barrier gates and markets, and on wealthy money lenders and sake
brewers. Yoshimitsu also sponsored trade with China, approaching the
Ming Dynasty with a request for a resumption of friendly relations in 1401.
The Ming Dynasty interpreted his lavish gifts as tribute, and in 1403, the
Ming even conferred on Yoshimitsu the title “king of Japan” (the memory
of which has outraged modern Japanese nationalists because it disregards
the legitimate Japanese emperor). It was this commercial prosperity that
made possible Yoshimitsu’s construction of his fabled Golden Pavilion
(Kinkaku-ji) in 1397, a literally gilded retreat in the northwestern suburbs of
Kyōto (see Figure 5.4).

Figure 5.4. Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji), originally built

in 1397 but burned and reconstructed in the twentieth century. Kyōto,
Japan.

Werner Forman/Art Resource, New York.

Even at its peak, however, the Ashikaga Shogunate’s control over the
countryside beyond Kyōto had been limited. Ashikaga Takauji had worked
to appoint many of his own relatives as provincial governors (or
“constables”), but this was an age when even family loyalty could not be
depended on, and the provincial governors – or their deputies – tended to
become independent regional lords. After the assassination of the sixth
Ashikaga Shogun in 1441, the power of the shoguns effectively ended. As
the Shogun Yoshimasa (1435–1490) explained in 1482, “the daimyo do as
they please and do not follow orders. This means there can be no
government.”55
 This word, daimyō, was a relatively new term that would continue to
be important in Japan until the late nineteenth century. Literally, it means
“great name,” and it refers to the holders of many rice fields. Unlike the old
aristocratic estates of the Heian and Kamakura periods, which had been
scattered across many locations and involved a complicated hierarchy of
production rights culminating in great court nobles or temples, the lands of
these new daimyō were now compactly consolidated territories dominated
by on-the-spot warlords from heavily fortified castles. These daimyō
exercised largely independent authority over domains that even came to be
referred to as “countries” (kokka).
A dispute between the Hosokawa and Yamana families over who
should succeed Yoshimasa as shogun resulted in the outbreak of the so-
called Ōnin War (1467–1477) in 1467. This war lasted for a decade and
involved hundreds of thousands of warriors, yet it was fought mostly in the
streets of Kyōto, and neither the shogun nor the emperor involved himself
in its conduct. Amid the battles, Kyōto was reduced to two separate walled
and moated camps about a half mile apart. Much of the rest of the city was
destroyed by fire. As one contemporary recorded, “across our charred land,
all human traces have been extinguished. For blocks on end, birds are the
sole sign of life.”56
Having been notably ineffectual in handling the warrior squabbles that
devastated his capital, in the wake of the Ōnin War the Shogun Yoshimasa
retired to his villa in the Eastern Mountains (Higashiyama) section of
northeastern Kyōto. There he cultivated the arts, and constructed an
intentionally rustic Silver Pavilion (Ginkaku-ji), into which he moved in
1483. Although it is called the Silver Pavilion, it was never in fact coated
with silver leaf – an omission that only intensifies the contrast with the
garishness of Yoshimitsu’s older and more ostentatious Golden Pavilion on
the other side of town.
If Yoshimasa was a failure as a warrior leader, he was an outstanding
patron of the arts. Yoshimasa actually helped establish many of the cultural
styles that we have come to think of as “traditionally Japanese.” These
included a conscious aesthetic of rustic simplicity. Yoshimasa’s Silver
Pavilion became something of a model for the “traditional” Japanese house,
including such characteristic touches as tatami matting on the floors (which
became widespread only in the fifteenth century), sliding internal papered
partitions called shōji, a special alcove for the display of artwork (the
tokonoma), and staggered wall shelves. Other features of traditional
Japanese culture that were particularly cultivated, if not actually invented,
in this period include Nō theater (developed in the late fourteenth and early
fifteenth centuries out of older entertainments), the art of flower arranging
(ikebana), raked-sand gardens, and linked-verse poetry (renga). Although
tea drinking had been introduced from China centuries earlier, the first
known use of the Japanese word for the tea ceremony, chanoyu, appears in
1469, and the characteristically Japanese art of tea matured in the time, and
in the company, of the Shogun Yoshimasa.57 (Still other aspects of
“traditional” Japanese culture are even more recent, such as Kabuki theater,
the geisha girl, the “Way of the Warrior” bushidō, and such cooking styles
as tempura and sushi.)
Kyōto was ravaged by the Ōnin War, and in the war’s aftermath the
great lords and their warriors returned to the provinces, leaving behind a
now powerless shogun and emperor. Although the last Ashikaga Shogun
would not be driven from Kyōto until 1573, after 1467 there simply was no
effective central government in Japan. The century following the Ōnin War
is often called the Warring States period. It was a century of conflict and of
almost total decentralization. In the provinces, governors found themselves
unable to control their own subordinates, who were often themselves
confronted with similar insubordination from below. As one European
observer reported in 1580, Japan was “continually torn by civil wars and
treasons, nor is there any lord who is secure in his domain. This is why
Japan is never a firm whole, but is always revolving like a wheel; for he
who today is a great lord, may be a penniless nobody tomorrow.”58
Rural society, meanwhile, reorganized itself from scattered farm
residences into more compact villages, often initially with a defensive
orientation. Although the samurai had originally been household attendants
of top court nobles, now many wealthy peasants who happened to possess
swords, a little land, and ties of vassalage to some lord began to call
themselves samurai. At least in places, samurai may have made up as much
as 20 percent of the rural population.
Even as decentralization reached an extreme, however, some of the
more successful and energetic of the two or three hundred daimyō who
divided the Japanese islands between themselves at the start of the sixteenth
century began reversing the process and consolidating their control over
surrounding land and warriors. Some daimyō began conducting systematic
land surveys to convert their domains into more closely integrated
economic units. The income of vassals gradually began to be assessed in
regular standardized units (called koku), and this was eventually translated
into an actual paid salary, as daimyō began to pull their samurai off the land
and into permanent residence as garrisons in the daimyō’s castle. In the
sixteenth century, some daimyō even began to issue their own money, and
the increasing monetization of the economy enabled the mobilization of still
larger armed forces and the construction of even greater fortifications. In
1568, one daimyō named Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) marched into Kyōto,
and the great age of Japanese reunification began.

For Further Reading

An excellent comprehensive survey of the entire late imperial period in

China is Frederick W. Mote, Imperial China: 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1999). For a collection of insightful essays on
this period, see Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song–
Yuan–Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Asia Center, 2003).
On Song Dynasty China and the major late imperial cultural, social,
economic, and intellectual transformations, see Peter K. Bol, “This Culture
of Ours”: Intellectual Transitions in T’ang and Sung China (Stanford
University Press, 1992); John W. Chaffee, The Thorny Gates of Learning in
Sung China: A Social History of the Examinations, new ed. (Binghamton:
State University of New York Press, 1995); Edward L. Davis, Society and
the Supernatural in Song China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
2001); Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation
of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Linda A.
Walton, Academies and Society in Southern Sung China (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 1999). For women in late imperial China, see
in particular Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the
Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993).