Court and countryside 1200–1600and religious aspects of Ikkō power in the identification of the prime movers of the movement.
Marxists have seen the Ikkō movement as an alliance between village- level warriors and peasants
who embraced the “millenarian ideological framework for the rural revolution” provided by the
tenets of the Jōdo Shinshū (“True Pure Land”) sect of Buddhism, and on which leaders capital-
ized to become theocrats. In contrast, other historians downplay piety and focus almost exclu-
sively on the Ikkō sect’s military and economic challenge to warrior hegemony. More recent
work considers the ways in which the hierarchical military, military, and religious power of the
Ikkō sect’s patriarch relied on the communal action of the league members.^46
Villagers
Village studies have long been prominent in scholarship on late medieval autonomy. The auto-
nomy of small proprietors was aided immensely by the growth of permanent villages from
around 1300. During what William Wayne Farris has called the “Muromachi optimum” of
1280–1450, multiple harvests per year became possible, which sparked additional taxation by
estate managers and local warriors, cash- cropping and commercial growth, and the consolidation
of settlements into villages. Written sources for villages survive unevenly, however, with the
best- documented villages clustered in the capital region, where court proprietary power remained
strongest.^47
Early postwar scholarship, dominated by Marxist analyses, focused on elements that illumi-
nated class conflicts. The scope of sengoku ikki led some scholars to present the late medieval
period as a “bright” time for villagers seeking spaces of stability and liberty, in contrast to the
“dark,” constraints of early modern “feudalism.” For other historians, the ubiquity of medieval
violence inverted this light- dark dichotomy. More recent work has been multidimensional,
exploring the ways in which villagers enmeshed themselves in webs of patronage with traditional
proprietors, shoguns, shugo, and daimyō or banded together in horizontal alliances to preserve
water rights and resolve conflicts.^48
Fujiki Hisashi includes villagers as part of the culture of Sengoku “self- redress” (jiriki), engaged
in cycles of feuds, reprisals, and alliances. He stresses the mercenary character of villager- warriors
who floated between daimyō as “irregulars” (zōhyō), part- time warriors engaged in seasonal
military labor and specialists in military activities deemed dishonorable by more elite warriors. In
order to survive, “irregulars” took and sold slaves, and looted fields of crops.^49
Hitomi Tonomura shows how village collectives (sō) cut deals with proprietors in which the
collectives took responsibility for forwarding revenues, and the proprietors defended the inter-
ests of the villages as patrons. These village interests included commercial production and trans-
portation. Some families of village elites became kokujin who straddled boundaries between
warrior and villager. Families like the Kawashima, studied by Suzanne Gay, embraced a diverse
portfolio of interests that included commerce, military service, conflict mediation, and money-
lending. Such figures exploited possession of both shōen institutional identities and vassalage ties
with the shogunate. They also proved integral to uniting local warriors and villages in leagues of
both local and provincial scale.^50
Re- envisioning centers and peripheries in medieval Japan
Narratives of medieval Japanese local autonomy bestow verdicts on the relationships between
centers, peripheries, and narratives of national history. Explorations of daimyō lordship have
opened up ways of understanding connections of villages to political centers, often anticipating
the early modern “separation of warrior and peasant” (heinō bunri). In the east, daimyō like the