Warfare in Japan

Harald Kleinschmidt, Harald Kleinschmidt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351873703
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia militare e marittima

Warfare in Japan from the fourth to the nineteenth century has caused much controversy among Western military and political historians. This volume assembles key articles written by specialists in the field on military organization, the social context of war, battle action, weapons and martial arts. The focus is on the transformation of patterns of warfare that arose from endogenous as well as exogenous factors.

Part I
Feudalism in Japan

[1]
Feudalism in Japan—A Reassessment

JOHN WHITNEY HALL

The question of whether Japan can rightly be said to "have had feudalism" is by no means settled. Although Westerners have been writing about "Japanese feudalism" for well over a hundred years, the acceptability of this practice is still a matter of controversy among professional historians, notably among those who make the study of medieval Europe their specialty. To a long line of Western historians ending with Herbert Norman, however, there was no question about the appropriateness of placing the feudal label on Japan. Nor does the contemporary Japanese historian question a term which has become so important a part of his professional as well as everyday vocabulary. In a Japan in which the reading public is daily reminded that the "struggle against feudalism" is still being waged, feudalism seems a present reality which by its very nature cannot be denied to have existed in Japan's past.

To the Japanese historian of today feudalism in Japan is not only real, it is also the same universal reality against which the "more progressive" Western peoples had to struggle before their eventual emancipation. As Nagahara Keiji has put it,

It is now generally accepted that capitalism in Japan developed upon a foundation laid in the semi-feudal land ownership pattern of the villages. The power of the feudalists landlords and the bourgeoisie, though on the surface full of mutual contradictions, served fundamentally to reinforce each other, leading inevitably to the military defeat of August 15th. Although it appeared at first that the land reform had decisively revolutionized the self-reinforcement of these two groups, dissolving large-scale landlordism and high rent tenancy and thereby destroying the feudal relationships within the village, actually it did not produce any such fundamental change. To the contrary, recent studies have shown that it resulted in a re-strengthening of feudal relationships under colonial control.¹

American historians who reject this view are apt to be reminded by their Japanese colleagues that they have been spared the onus of living under feudalism and hence cannot appreciate its reality. Certainly the American scholar does not commute through a countryside which to him constitutes a living reminder of "the feudalism of the village". But while we cannot deny the Japanese his emotions of social protest, we can question whether the object of his attack is the same feudal system against which our European forefathers railed. This surely is a problem which can be studied objectively.

The question of whether the idea of feudalism can be applied to Japan (or any other society outside Wetsern Europe) has exercised the minds of scholars since the time of Voltaire and Montesquieu. The endless conflict between what we might term the "broad" and "narrow" approaches to this problem has led down to the present generation in which we find a Marc Bloch suggesting the existence of "feudalism as a type of society" or a Bryce Lyon insisting that Western European feudalism is "unique".² In the light of this controversy the general historian who has no special stake in the problem is apt to assume a double standard, accepting as popular but misguided the usage that generalizes the term beyond the confines of Europe, and retaining for his own professional purposes a usage which limits the term to Western European societies. Pressed on the issue he is apt to reply, "I have no objection to anyone calling Japan feudal so long as that feudalism is not confused with the real thing." But for two types of historians, the question of whether feudalism as a general concept is appropriately applied to Japan cannot be so easily circumvented. One is the student of Japanese history, be he Japanese or Western, who must eventually commit himself to whether he will use or reject the concept in his writings. The other is the comparative historian, whose subject matter is the very stuff of which the feudalism controversy is made.

In the final analysis the question of whether the concept of feudalism can be applied to Japan raises two basic historiographical issues: first the idea of feudalism itself and its appropriateness as a general category of social organization, and second the methodology of comparative history and its validity as a branch of historical study. The case of Japan, it should be noted, is critical to both of these issues. For it is in part the discovery of similarities between certain Japanese institutions and those of Medieval Europe which has give courage to some historians to formulate the idea of feudalism as a general concept and has helped support the comparative historian's view in the utility of his approach. The importance of the Japanese experience to the comparative historian is apparent in such a recent work as Feudalism in History, in which Japan is cited along with Europe as exhibiting one of "only two fully-proven cases of feudalism", or indeed, "the classic case of feudalism".³

How has it come about that Japan has bulked so large in the feudalism controversy, and furthermore that the practice of calling Japan feudal has been so widely accepted? One answer is provided by the nature of Japanese history itself which has yielded so many startling comparisons with the feudal institutions of Europe. But another, and deeper one perhaps, lies in the way in which Japanese and Western historians have tended to reinforce each other in their thinking on this question. During the eighteenth century the societies of Japan and Europe both arrived at the discovery of their "feudal past" along independent, but parallel paths. Marc Bloch has found the earliest example of the use of the term fèodalitè as a reference to a state of society to go back no farther than 1727.⁴ Certainly the earliest Western writers on Japan, those who wrote before the concept of feudalism had taken shape in Europe, did not describe Japan as feudal. This applied to Kaempfer, Thunberg, and Titsingh, who wrote as late as the 1790's. Western writers were not to take up the practice of calling Japan feudal until the nineteenth century; significantly, not until the Japanese themselves had begun to show an awareness of the distinctiveness of the particular form of society which they were beginning to put behind them.

Japanese historians had long recognized the ascendancy of the military aristocracy as a pivotal event in their national history. Historians of the seventeenth century commonly referred to the epoch of Japanese history from the middle of the twelfth century down to their own time as the age of military houses (buke-jidai). During the eighteenth century, Japanese scholars began to apply to this period the word hōken, a term of Chinese origin referring to the decentralized form of government which characterized the Chou dynasty. By 1827, when Rai Sanyo completed his Nihon gaishi (Unofficial history of Japan), the term had gained general currency.⁵

It is not precisely certain when western observers first described Japan as feudal. Von Siebold writing shortly before 1841 may well have been the first when he wrote:

Japan is a feudal empire in the strictest sense of the term. The mikado, as being the successor and representative of the gods, is the nominal proprietor, as well as sovereign, of the realm, and the ziogoon is his deputy or viceregent. His domains, with the exception of the portion reserved to the Crown, are divided into principalities, held in vassalage by their respective hereditary princes. Under them the land is parcelled out among the nobility who hold their hereditary estates by military service.⁶

To other nineteenth century observers who followed von Siebold, it was with a real sense of excitement that they reported experiencing in Japan a condition of society so similar to the feudalism of their own remembrance. To Alcock in 1863 Japan presented "a living embodiment of a state of society which existed many centuries ago in the West; ... an Oriental phase of feudalism, such as our ancestors knew it in the time of the Plantagenets".⁷ To William Griffis writing in 1870 the fit was even more striking:

Here were real gentlemen, who had served as pages in feudal mansions, had given the tokens of vassalage and had received their lord's beneficium. Their stories of the ceremonial gift of a flower, the presentation of an arrow, or some other emblem of feudal service—contemptible in market value, but priceless from the viewpoint of loyalty—touched the imagination. Men from the ends of the earth, who had heard of Europe only from books, told me of things which matched anything read about in the varied feudalisms of France, Germany, or England.⁸

By the 1880's knowledge of Japanese institutions was sufficiently widespread in Europe that Karl Marx could make his famous statement in Capital: "Japan, with its purely feudal organization of landed property and its developed petite culture, gives a much truer picture of the European middle ages than our own history books, dictated as these are, for the most part, by bourgeois prejudices."⁹

In a reverse manner, once Japan was exposed to knowledge of European feudal institutions it did not take long for Japanese historians to transfer the term hōken out of its previous context and to adopt it as a translation for the European concept of feudalism. The origin of this practice goes back at least to 1888 in the writings of Yokoi Tokifuyu. Japanese historians have continued this practice to the present, following two major lines of interpretation. The first group of Japanese scholars to use the word consciously according to a specified definition were the "legal historians" such as Miura Kaneyuki and Nakada Kaoru. These men, who published during the early 1900's, equated the Japanese hōken system with the feudalism of such Western legal historians as Maitland. They were followed after the early 1920's by writers, beginning with Hani Gorō and Hayakawa Jirō, who adopted the Marxist definition of feudalism.¹⁰

Characteristic of the Japanese use of the concept of feudalism has been a rather simplistic theoretical assumption of its universal applicability to all societies. Maki Kenji, dean of the legal historians today, expresses this straightforward approach in the preface to his Nikon hōkenseido seiritsu shi (History of the establishment of the feudal system in Japan):

In surveying the history of the rise of the civilized countries of the world today we can say that all have demonstrated a common three-stage development from a tribal antiquity through a feudal middle age to a bourgeois modern age. Japanese history has followed this same process... It is useful to study the feudal system of Japan as a historic fact, and further to make comparisons with ancient China and medieval Europe as a means of clarifying important aspects of Japanese history by pointing up common features and special characteristics.¹¹

Marxist historians in Japan also have assumed without significant change the applicability to Japanese society of the general theory of feudalism set forth by Marx in his Capital or by Lenin in his Development of Capitalism in Russia.¹²

Outside Marxist circles, it was Kan'ichi Asakawa who gave academic respectability to the use of the idea of Japanese feudalism in the West. Asakawa, by his remarkable control of the primary data of both European and Japanese institutions, was able to develop a coherent and systematic methodology for the comparative treatment of feudalism in Europe and Japan. His essay "Some Aspects of Japanese Feudal Institutions" has long remained the standard interpretation of the subject.¹³ Only in recent years has the French scholar Joüon des Longrais supplemented Asakawa's work, largely on the basis of Japanese scholarship of the legal school.¹⁴

In reviewing the literature on "Japanese feudalism", both in Japanese and Western languages, one is struck by large areas of disagreement over precise terms of definition and by a general lack of theoretical sophistication. Even among professional historians there has been too easy an assumption of comparability between Japan and Europe or too ready an acceptance of certain developmental schemes of history in which feudalism is considered a "stage". Among non-specialists the term is used quite loosely. Once the similarity between certain conditions in Japan and those of medieval Europe was pointed out, it became common for both Western· and Japanese writers to refer to Japanese institutions quite indiscriminately as feudal, with little concern over the theoretical problems engendered by such a usage. The term has entered popular literature where it is applied to any of a wide variety of traits which seem to have counterparts in medieval Europe. In Japan today, feudalism has taken on a popular pejorative meaning which is applied to almost any aspect of contemporary life which seems old-fashioned or touched with the older social or family ethic—a term with which children criticize their parents, or socialists label their conservative opponents.

Such widespread abuses have naturally prejudiced serious scholars against the possibility of extending the idea of feudalism outside its European context. But the question of whether feudalism can be conceived of as a general category of social organization or must be considered an event unique to European history surely need not be avoided because of such abuses, however much they may exasperate the historian. The systematic comparative historian is not obliged to assume responsibility for these abuses, but rather must seek to devise an orderly treatment of the problem, so that it can be studied for what it is, a problem in comparative historical theory.

A systematic approach to the question of whether "Japan had feudalism or not" should begin with a clear understanding of what is being asked. The question which the comparative historian asks is not whether it is possible to identify in Japan a pattern of history identical with that of Western Europe. He is not seeking to find "European feudalism" in Japan. Nor is he trying to hitch Japanese history onto an assembly line of universal historical development in which feudalism is a fixed stage. His objective is both more modest and more ambitious. He is concerned, rather, with this question, "Has Japanese society at any time in its history exemplified a pattern of social organization which, along with that of Europe, may properly be labeled feudal?" This is a question which need not concern all historians, and its solution need not disturb those who are not intrigued by the question itself. It is a question asked by the historian who wishes to engage explicitly in the kind of theorizing and categorizing which arises from the analysis of broad segments of human development which may embrace more than one culture.

In the strictest sense, of course, the historian can never isolate himsel...