Daimyo

6 Key excerpts on "Daimyo"

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  Above the Clouds

  Status Culture of the Modern Japanese Nobility

  • Takie Sugiyama Lebra(Author)
  • 1993(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  This was a typical feature of land ownership in the elev-enth and twelfth centuries, when ownership and possession were separated on many levels. A lord, or ryoke, belonging to the capi-tal nobility might be represented on his holdings by a custodian, Creating the Modern Nobility 41 often called azukari dokoro, who held all administrative powers and whose office often amounted to a perpetual, irrevocable, hered-itary agency. The central absentee proprietor, whether a member of the royal, noble, or religious establishment, and the local resident manager thus formed an asymmetric dyarchy. As the dynasty legitimized the power of the regents, the lord legitimated the authority of the local custodian. In this arrangement, disparity of status was crucial. The lord and the custodian functioned cooperatively because neither could fundamentally challenge the other's prerogatives (Kiley 1974, 110). Likewise, status disparity made possible the formation and mainte-nance of the feudal bond between the shogun and Daimyo, and between the Daimyo lord and his samurai vassals. The system worked and order was maintained only as long as the disparity was recognized and the two parties respected each other's jurisdiction and prerogatives. The equilib-rium of asymmetric dyarchy thus lasted well into the early fifteenth cen-tury under the alliance of the Ashikaga shogun and shugo Daimyo (provin-cial military governors), which was in turn authorized by the imperial sovereign. It was during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—the sen-goku, or warfare, period—that asymmetric dyarchy gave way to compet-itive polyarchy among rising and falling sengoku Daimyo, with the above disparity losing ground and anarchy coming to prevail. After the short interval of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, the Tokugawa reestablished an elaborate system of dyarchy in which the symbol of authority and its administration ruled jointly.

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  Warfare in Japan

  • Harald Kleinschmidt(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  In quick succession Japan came under the dominance of a few powerful overlords who grasped control of large regional coalitions of Daimyo, and then between 1582 and 1590 under a national hegemony of Daimyo led by Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The movement towards centralization on the national level was matched by a similar integration process within the Daimyo domains. In particular, the Daimyo in order to achieve more effective adminstration of their territories, began to eliminate the small fiefs into which their domains had been subdivided. The great civil wars which engulfed Japan from the 1530's through 1590 and which culminated in the formation of a new national hegemony gave rise to conditions which served to eliminate the most typical feudal practices from many sectors of Japanese society. Ironically, when Japan was for the first time brought completely under the rule of "feudal lords", those very lords had begun to divest themselves of the most fundamentally feudal aspects of their means of governance. 42 The Tokugawa regime, established in 1603 with its headquarters at Edo, rested at least superficially upon a fulfillment of some of the trends which we have traced up to now as indices of the growth of feudal practices in Japan. The entire country was now governed by Daimyo who in turn were the shogun's vassals. The "military band" had by now apparently taken over the entire operation of government. Furthermore, the seemingly artificial efforts of the Tokugawa regime to create a closed caste out of the samurai and to tie the peasantry to the land, support the view that Japan was at long last feudal through and through. 43 Historians have recognized, however, the danger of too sweeping a characterization of Tokugawa Japan as feudal. Most writers have tended to soften their judgment by referring to the Tokugawa age as a period of "late feudalism", "centralized feudalism", or "national feudalism"

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  Social Theory and Japanese Experience

  The Dual Civilization

  • Johann P. Arnason(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Our discussion will first deal with the key factor in this process: the new power structures that took shape in the most successful and representative warring domains, and their implications for the social fabric. But the protagonists of domain-based state formation were not the only active players on the scene; we must therefore briefly consider some other less successful forces and the question of the alternative projects which they may have embodied. The imposition of unity on the autonomous domains went hand in hand with the elimination of rivals to the model that had grown out of domain precedents. Both the strategies of unification and the subsequent methods of consolidation had their origins in innovations on a more limited scale. Finally, the role of the Western factor - and Japanese responses to it - in the unifying process will be briefly discussed.

  The domain ruler - the Daimyo - was, as John W. Hall puts it, ‘without question the most significant’65 of the institutional products of the Ashikaga period. This claim stresses the institutional dimensions of Daimyo power, and their specific features are best understood in terms of the changing relationship between private and public authority. As we have seen, the aristocratic element in the ritsuryo state became the starting-point for a long-drawn-out process of privatization from within and above; the subsequent development of military rule gave rise to feudal forms of privatization, but also to a new strategy of state-building which limited their impact. The rise of the Daimyo - more precisely the sengoku Daimyo - was the result of a breakdown which changed the balance between central and regional power blocs and paved the way for a new wave of devolution within the latter (although there are a few cases of continuity from early medieval to early modern times, the majority of the sengoku Daimyo were upstart warlords who had displaced shugo houses). In a sense, then, Daimyo power was the outcome and expression of a renewed privatizing process, but it became the driving force of developments in the opposite direction. Within the limits of the unequal but never very large territorial possessions, the Daimyo strove to create a power structure that would give them more direct control over land and population as well as a more uniform authority over different social groups; this entailed more emphasis on the public character and legitimacy of their rule. The centralizing process within the domains destroyed the remnants of the fragmented pre-feudal regime (the last vestiges of the shoen system disappeared at the end of the sengoku

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  The Making of Modern Japan

  • Marius B. Jansen, Marius B. Jansen(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  In Cho ¯shu ¯ the Mo ¯ri suf-fered sharp reductions in territory after the defeat at Sekigahara (from 1,205,000 to 298,480 koku ), and one can imagine the deep-laid hope for future revenge, particularly among the lower ranks whose members might have fared differently in different times. Albert Craig reports a Cho ¯shu ¯ tradition in which, on the first day of the new year, domain elders and inspectors appeared before the Daimyo to ask, “Has the time come to begin the subjugation of the bakufu?” and received the ritual response “It is still too early; the time has not yet come.” 4 A second aspect of the Daimyo system as it crystallized during the Edo period was the precision of its ranking. A Daimyo was defined as a feudal lord enfeoffed with an area assessed at the level of 10,000 koku or higher and di-rectly invested by the shogun. This last was a crucial distinction; many vassals of Daimyo were invested with subfiefs larger than that, but they remained rear-vassals (baishin) and moved in their Daimyo’s orbit and not the shogun’s national galaxy. A distinctive aspect of each galaxy was the way in which as-sessed koku income (kokudaka), status rank, and military power as expressed in army size or vassal band coincided. The kokudaka figure was based on domain surveys conducted at the beginning of the period. It was termed the “official” or “outer” (omote) yield of the domain; as time passed that might The Tokugawa State 39 be less than the “real” or “inner” (uchi) productivity, but it remained the measure of status rank because to alter it by bringing it up to date would involve restructuring the Daimyo’s standing relative to that of his peers and hence involve rearranging the whole system.

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  The History of Japan

  • Louis G. Perez(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  The era has been characterized as the “Age of Gekokujo” (Rule of the Mighty by the Lowly) as one proud family after another was supplanted by their former subordinates. It rang as true for the imperial house that was controlled by the Ashikaga, as it did ironically later for the Ashikaga themselves. Scarcely a handful of the proud gokenin houses survived the era. The rest lost out to their former politi- cal and military inferiors. These daimyō, who had only recently won their wealth and power by wrest- ing them away from their feudal superiors, were not about to let anyone, even the shōgun, take them away. When the Ashikaga tried to rein them in, they re- sisted. When the bakufu tried to limit their landholdings, their armies, or the Feudal Japan 33 extent of their power, they entrenched their defensive positions within castles. They consolidated their lands and men, their samurai were now required to reside within the castle all the time, and no one was thereafter granted land as a reward for service. Inheritance was no longer divided among all the children. Now, because warfare and politics required strong central leadership, a primogeniture of sorts became the order of the day. Only one male heir inherited the entire do- main, all siblings became feudal vassals to the leader. Very often, the heir was not even a son. Daimyō often adopted a charismatic subordinate as a “son-in- law” and heir. Needless to say, this practice disinherited all women and made them dependent on their male relatives. It also caused tremendous jealousies among brothers. The practice of a daimyō being killed by brothers, cousins, sons, or other relatives “on the make” became very common. Occasionally a daimyō would be killed by his wife, concubine, sister, or even mother at- tempting to install their favorite as the new daimyō. The daimyō knew from personal experience that land was power; so they never allowed their samurai the right to actually live on the land.

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  Reading Medieval Ruins

  Urban Life and Destruction in Sixteenth-Century Japan

  • Morgan Pitelka(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  28 Murai divides these positions into what he calls continuity (renzokusei) theory and disconnect theory (danzetsusetsu); both end up participating in a teleological narrative of Japanese history that accepts developmental stages of progress as a model for understanding history. Murai Ryōsuke, Sengoku daimyō kenryoku kōzō no kenkyū, 3–20. 29 See Wakita Haruko, Taikei Nihon no rekishi, vol. 7: Sengoku daimyō (Shogakkan, 1993), 166–167, for an overview of yorioya yoriko; see Ikegami Hiroko’s discussion in the context of the retainer bands of the Hōjō: “Sengoku daimyō ryōkoku ni okeru shoryō oyobi kashindan hensei no tenkai,” in Sengoku daimyō ronshū, vol. 1: Sengoku daimyō no kenkyū, ed. Nagahara Keiji (Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1983), 377–388. In English, John Whitney Hall describes this system as it evolved in Bizen Province in “Foundations of the Modern Japanese Daimyo,” 324–325; and Jeffrey Yoshio Kurashige considers it under Hōjō rule in “Serving Your Master: The Kashindan Retainer Corps and the Socio-Economic Transformation of Warring States Japan” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 2011), 54–57. 106 Late Medieval Warlords and the Agglomeration of Power warlord in an increasingly decentralized system. This represented a risk, but also the possibility of more rapid expansion and more efficient mobilization of large numbers of soldiers. In the late fifteenth century, the Asakura needed not only to recruit warriors to their cause but also to dislodge the extant loyalty to the Kai, the previous deputy governors (shugodai) who themselves had hoped to supplant the Shiba and to become the rulers of Echizen. The Asakura accomplished this by disrupting the old title system (myō taisei) that guaranteed certain amounts of taxes paid on the still lingering aristocratic estates (shōen) and replaced it with a direct proprietor system that allowed them to provide immediate financial incentives to their warrior followers.

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