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Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan

Author: Hitomi Tonomura

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1992-01-01

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0804766142

Late medieval Japan witnessed a growth in the power of the commoner, as seen in the spread of corporate villages (so) marked by collective ownership and administration and other self-governing features. This study of a community of so villages in central Japan from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries reconstructs the life of these villages by analyzing the rich and abundant communal records largely written by the villagers themselves and carefully preserved in the local shrine. The author show how these villagers founded and operated a shrine-centered organization that brought coherence, order, and prestige to the community at the same time it formalized the differences among the residents along gender and class lines. The Tokuchin-ho so was a governmental, social, and religious institution that facilitated the movement toward localism, but, the author argues, its growing collective power and organization also benefited its local proprietor, the great monastic complex of Enryakuji. Political and economic resources flowed vertically between the client-village and the patron-proprietor as they collaborated to secure internal peace and wide-reaching commercial interests. The book traces the transformation of the so as late medieval decentralization gave way to politically unified early modern society, with its enforced transfer of merchants from villages to towns, confiscation of shrine land, and the relinquishment of the so's political authority. Despite these efforts, as a powerful organization experienced in promoting communal order, the so was able to maintain its medieval legacy of self-determination, substantially preempting bureaucratic intervention in local governance. The local records allow the author to study the so from the villagers' perspective, and she presents new information on the position of women in rural communities, the local mode of economic surplus accumulation, the detailed social and economic functions of a shrine, and the reaction to nationwide cadastral surveys. The book is illustrated with 21 halftones.

Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan

Author: Hitomi Tonomura

Publisher:

Published: 1989

Total Pages:

ISBN-13:

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Coins, Trade, and the State

Author: Ethan Issac Segal

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2020-03-17

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1684175070

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Framed by the decline of the Heian aristocracy in the late 1100s and the rise of the Tokugawa shogunate in the early 1600s, Japan’s medieval era was a chaotic period of diffuse political power and frequent military strife. This instability prevented central authorities from regulating trade, issuing currency, enforcing contracts, or guaranteeing property rights. But the lack of a strong central government did not inhibit economic growth. Rather, it created opportunities for a wider spectrum of society to participate in trade, markets, and monetization. Peripheral elites—including merchants, warriors, rural estate managers, and religious leaders—devised new ways to circumvent older forms of exchange by importing Chinese currency, trading in local markets, and building an effective system of long-distance money remittance. Over time, the central government recognized the futility of trying to stifle these developments, and by the sixteenth century it asserted greater control over monetary matters throughout the realm. Drawing upon diaries, tax ledgers, temple records, and government decrees, Ethan Isaac Segal chronicles how the circulation of copper currency and the expansion of trade led to the start of a market-centered economy and laid the groundwork for Japan’s transformation into an early modern society.

Lords of the Sea

Author: Peter D. Shapinsky

Publisher: Michigan Monograph Series in J

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 345

ISBN-13: 1929280815

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"Lords of the Sea revises our understanding of the epochal political, economic, and cultural transformations of Japan's late medieval period (1300-1600) by shifting the conventional land-based analytical framework to one centered on the perspectives of seafarers usually dismissed as 'pirates'"--Provided by publisher.

The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto

Author: Suzanne Marie Gay

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-01-01

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 9780824824617

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Annotation. The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto examines the large community of sake brewer -- moneylenders in Japan's capital city, focusing on their rise to prominence from the mid-1300s to 1550. Their guild tie to overlords, notably the great monastery Enryakuji, was forged early in the medieval period, giving them a protected monopoly and allowing them to flourish. Demand for credit was strong in medieval Kyoto, and brewers profitably recirculated capital for loans.As the medieval period progressed, the brewer-lenders came into their own. While maintaining overlord ties, they engaged in activities that brought them into close contact with every segment of Kyoto's population. The more socially prominent brewers served as tax agents for religious institutions, the shogunate, and the imperial court, and were actively involved in a range of cultural pursuits including tea and linked verse.Although the merchants themselves left only the faintest record, Suzanne Gay has fully and convincingly depicted this important group of medieval commoners.

The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto

Author: Suzanne Gay

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2001-09-30

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0824864883

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The Moneylenders of Late Medieval Kyoto examines the large community of sake brewer-moneylenders in Japan's capital city, focusing on their rise to prominence from the mid-1300s to 1550. Their guild tie to overlords, notably the great monastery Enryakuji, was forged early in the medieval period, giving them a protected monopoly and allowing them to flourish. Demand for credit was strong in medieval Kyoto, and brewers profitably recirculated capital for loans. As the medieval period progressed, the brewer-lenders came into their own. While maintaining overlord ties, they engaged in activities that brought them into close contact with every segment of Kyoto's population. The more socially prominent brewers served as tax agents for religious institutions, the shogunate, and the imperial court, and were actively involved in a range of cultural pursuits including tea and linked verse. Although the merchants themselves left only the faintest record, Suzanne Gay has fully and convincingly depicted this important group of medieval commoners.

Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History

Author: Karl F. Friday

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-14

Total Pages: 433

ISBN-13: 135169202X

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Scholarship on premodern Japan has grown spectacularly over the past four decades, in terms of both sophistication and volume. A new approach has developed, marked by a higher reliance on primary documents, a shift away from the history of elites to broader explorations of social structures, and a re-examination of many key assumptions. As a result, the picture of the early Japanese past now taught by specialists differs radically from the one that was current in the mid-twentieth century. This handbook offers a comprehensive historiographical review of Japanese history up until the 1500s. Featuring chapters by leading historians and covering the early Jōmon, Yayoi, Kofun, Nara, and Heian eras, as well as the later medieval periods, each section provides a foundational grasp of the major themes in premodern Japan. The sections will include: Geography and the environment Political events and institutions Society and culture Economy and technology The Routledge Handbook of Premodern Japanese History is an essential reference work for students and scholars of Japanese, Asian, and World History.

Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan

Author: Judith Fröhlich

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 230

ISBN-13: 9783039111947

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This book provides new insights into the creation and use of written texts in medieval Japan. Drawing upon lawsuits from Ategawa no shō in central Japan between the early eleventh and early fourteenth centuries, the author analyses the use of writing by various social groups - temple priests, warriors and peasants. Though these social groups had different levels of literacy and accordingly followed different communicative traditions, their use of writing had common features. In the semi-literate society of medieval Japan the dissemination and reception of written texts took place primarily through speaking and hearing. Documents of the medieval period therefore had a distinctly oral characteristic. Priests, warriors and peasants all alluded to motifs in their legal pleas that were in essence given by the oral world of tales, legends and gossip. By showing that literacy was not in conflict but interacted with orality, the author uncovers an important aspect of the use of the written word in medieval Japan.

Akutō and Rural Conflict in Medieval Japan

Author: Morten Oxenboell

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press

Published: 2018-05-31

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13: 0824872649

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This volume offers the first in-depth analysis in English of an understudied phenomenon in medieval Japanese history: the so-called akutō (literally, “evil bands”). Employing chronicles, laws, and legal documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as recent Japanese scholarship, Morten Oxenboell examines the significance of akutō in legal proceedings to provide a nuanced understanding of how rural communities organized for and engaged in violent conflicts. He deconstructs the image of akutō as instigators of violence by underlining the significance of the term as a rhetorical device used by litigants to voice their grievances in Kamakura legal proceedings. The many instances in which akutō appear offer a clear example of the ways in which the new legal vocabulary concealed realities behind rhetorical flourishes and narratives of violence and predation. Violence was certainly a part of the negotiation for rights and privileges in the estate system, and Oxenboell demonstrates how conflicts developed and were untangled by local actors, who were rarely given a voice in sources from this period. By peeling away the rhetoric, he presents us a unique view of rural populations organizing their communities in the face of violence, whether as victims of outside aggression or as aggressors themselves against landlords or neighbors. The book therefore goes beyond the usual focus on elites in medieval Japanese history by concentrating on local mobilization schemes and strategies, which were often framed and defamed by central elites. Rural residents, who could not rely on the authorities for protection, handled their own security concerns via complex social mechanisms that tied together locals and absentee landlords in an uneasy relationship of mutual dependency. By examining the fissures in this relationship—in the form of akutō complaints—Oxenboell shows that violent activism was part of the daily management of estates and that such conflicts do not indicate an absence of order but rather a system of checks and balances that helped create a vibrant society.

A History of Japan

Author: Conrad Totman

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2014-09-11

Total Pages: 722

ISBN-13: 1119022339

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This is an updated edition of Conrad Totman's authoritative history of Japan from c.8000 BC to the present day. The first edition was widely praised for combining sophistication and accessibility. Covers a wide range of subjects, including geology, climate, agriculture, government and politics, culture, literature, media, foreign relations, imperialism, and industrialism. Updated to include an epilogue on Japan today and tomorrow. Now includes more on women in history and more on international relations. Bibliographical listings have been updated and enlarged. Part of The Blackwell History of the World Series The goal of this ambitious series is to provide an accessible source of knowledge about the entire human past, for every curious person in every part of the world. It will comprise some two dozen volumes, of which some provide synoptic views of the history of particular regions while others consider the world as a whole during a particular period of time. The volumes are narrative in form, giving balanced attention to social and cultural history (in the broadest sense) as well as to institutional development and political change. Each provides a systematic account of a very large subject, but they are also both imaginative and interpretative. The Series is intended to be accessible to the widest possible readership, and the accessibility of its volumes is matched by the style of presentation and production.