M.S. Adolphson
example, many scholars argued that it was the tax- farming approach that allowed governors the
opportunity to enrich themselves during their stints, often resulting in attempts to squeeze out
more than had been the custom. In fact, a consequence of this new hands- off approach on the part
of the imperial court and resulting tendency toward abuse by governors was the emergence of
complaints from farmers, as evidenced in the famous petition from Owari Province in 988, which
resulted in the governor eventually being deposed for having imposed unprecedented taxes and
dues on the local village leaders.^14 This privatization affected vast tracts of land in even more
dramatic ways than those that stayed under the jurisdiction of provincial governors. I am, of
course, referring here to the creation of private estates (shōen), which gained prominence in
earnest from the tenth century.
Although patterns for the creation of shōen varied widely—some created as rewards to temples
and nobles, others from below as local land managers “donated” a piece of land to escape the
taxation of provincial governors—they were all part of the aforementioned trend of privatizing
the administration of land. The key to the success and the spread of shōen was the division of
rights to different “offices” (shiki), each corresponding to a certain level of income from the estate.
This division effectively created strong interests in land from the level of land administrators all
the way up to patrons in the capital area. Regardless, shōen have traditionally been understood to
signal the dismantling of the old system, as control of land shifted to those in the countryside.^15
To Sakamoto Shōzō and Kawane Yoshiyasu (b. 1933), this decentralization of power came to
represent the “feudalization” of Japan.^16
Toda Yoshimi (1929–1991), one of the pioneering historians at Tokyo University in the
postwar era, saw the tenth century in a similar vein, noting likewise the changes that occurred in
administration and control of land during that period. He concurred with Ishimoda about the
emergence of a royal- court state, but added more specific characteristics: rule based on serf- like
small- scale agriculture; a basic class- struggle between nobles and local land holders, on the one
hand, and farmers, on the other; provincial headquarters and laws that displayed patterns of
feudal relations. The Marxist terminology in such scholarship escapes no one today and Toda did
indeed consider the tenth century the beginning of what he called the “early feudal period,” a
crucial shift away from the centered state envisioned by the state- creators of the seventh and
eighth centuries.^17 Ishimoda had suggested something along the same lines, as he saw land
structures and provincial rule as developing feudal patterns of class conflict even as the state was
still controlled by the ancient nobility.^18 Following these interpretations, a number of scholars
came to think of this royal- court state as the beginning of a medieval feudal state.^19
I have addressed the problems associated with committing an interpretation of Japan, or of
any society for that matter, based on a feudal paradigm elsewhere, but suffice it to say that
Japanese scholars began prescribing to a notion of historical stages based on the Marxist view of
development in the Meiji period, when there were deliberate attempts to equate Japan’s historical
stages with those of the West, efforts that have continued well into the present.^20 Ishimoda’s
contrived efforts at reconciling what he saw as emerging “feudal” relations in the countryside
with aristocratic rule provide a telling example of the extent to which historians have to, and
sometimes still do, fit the evidence into a theory in order to make it work. There is, moreover,
another significant problem with this approach. Assuming the existence of a feudal stage, in
which decentralization of power is one of the main characteristics, establishes a preconceived
notion of the nature of the society it presumes to examine. In other words, if we insist on seeing
the shōen and the royal- court state as being feudal, then we have already determined that the
Heian period is an age of decline from a more centered ancient state.
In contrast to the interpretations offered by Toda, Sakamoto, and others, recent scholarship
has put more emphasis on the shōen as endowing the central elites with more direct control of land