P.D. Shapinsky
Hōjō attempted to increase the size of their militaries with villager conscripts, while more closely
binding their warrior retainers to serve them. Daimyō registered villagers and assessed their lands
in order to organize infantry bands and standardize tax collection. In return, the daimyō met
village interests by backing the residents against local lords and moving samurai to castle towns,
in effect ending the local domainal autonomy of many kokujin. In western Japan, although daimyō
engaged in land assessments, they typically left villages in the hands of retainers.^51
After the Meiji Restoration, and the invention of medieval Japan as a period, historians
employed modern Rankean, empirical methods to demonstrate equivalencies between Japan and
Europe, whether in “feudal” warlords or the pirates adventuring in China, and so illuminate
Japan’s national spirit as essentially un- Asian. For Marxists, narratives of local autonomy docu-
mented dialectics of class struggle in order to illustrate shifts from one period to another. For
modernization scholars like John W. Hall, the Japanese case was significant because its “isolation”
provided scholars a “closed system” laboratory for exploring and proving tenets of institutional
change. The medieval period was a time of transition and competition over land tenure when
family- based, feudal authority reached its zenith in the sengoku daimyō. This narrative removed
Japan from Asia and supported a nationalist mythology of indigenous, self- generated
modernization.^52
In the post- Cold-War world, studies of local autonomy took on new significance as some
historians embarked on a debunking of nationalist mythologies. They opened up new vistas by
fusing “foreign relations history” (taigai kankeishi), which incorporated close readings of foreign
sources with domestic ones, the findings of archaeologists, and political- historical explorations of
medieval local autonomy. In so doing, they have demonstrated the degree to which medieval
Japan was a site of cosmopolitan interaction and ethnic diversity.
In particular, they target two pervasive nationalist myths, one that ahistorically maps Japan as
a political and cultural entity onto the Japanese archipelago as it is known today, and a second
that treats the “Japanese” as a homogenous ethnic group.^53 Inhabitants of so- called peripheries
exploited connections to centers beyond Kyoto and Kamakura, took advantage of perceptions
that certain geographies were unattached to any center, and transformed autonomous domains
into new political, economic, and cultural centers.
Japanese sovereignty fluctuated over time, and medieval borders persisted in ambiguous,
shifting states. Military governors and warlords established new centers connected to both Jap-
anese and foreign ecumenes. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Sō, rulers of the island
of Tsushima, accepted concomitantly a position in the Ashikaga provincial administration as
military governors (shugo) and investiture as officials by the Chosŏn Korean court. The Ōuchi
arguably represented the acme of autonomous daimyō diplomacy. They pressed the Chosŏn court
to recognize their claim of descent from a Korean prince in order to secure privileged trading
status with the peninsular kingdom, attempted to monopolize tribute trade with Ming China, all
while controlling shogunal succession in the early sixteenth century and even attempting to
move the emperor to their capital at Yamaguchi.^54 In northeast Japan, the Hiraizumi Fujiwara,
Andō, and Nanbu families maintained links to Ezo (present- day Hokkaido) and Siberia equal to
their connections to Kyōto. Studies of these families have helped scholars reach insights into
hybridity, “frontier zones,” trade with “transmarine Northeast Asia,” and “ethnogenesis.”^55
Smaller scale warriors, pirates, and merchants generated much of this overseas interaction.
Estate residents engaged in foreign trade and sent luxury goods to capital aristocrats. Pirates and
fisher folk developed hybrid, cosmopolitan identities sailing between Japan and Korea. By the
sixteenth century, multiethnic (taminzoku) “Japanese pirate” (wakō in Japanese; read as waegu in
Korean and wokou in Mandarin) bands brought Japanese from across western Japan into contact
with Koreans, Chinese, Portuguese, Southeast Asians, and even Africans. A dark side to such