Court and countryside 1200–1600piracy can be seen in the violence wrought on the coasts of Korea and China and the sale of cap-
tives in markets across Japan. Late medieval ports and daimyō domains housed diasporas of
Chinese, Korean, and European merchants.^56
Amino’s assertions that certain medieval peoples and spaces operated in ways “unattached”
(muen) to institutional powers of any center transformed historiography. This work illuminated
spaces such as seas and mountains as well as male and female peripatetic wanderers. Subsequent
scholarship then called into question the applicability of the term “unattached” to some of those
locations. Estate residents, warriors, and “sea lords” innovated forms of territoriality, such as sea
tenure, that central authorities recognized and legitimized.^57
The idea of diversity in Japan has also inspired debates over the persistence of alternative
political and cultural realms within the archipelago. Amino presented the east and the northeast
as semi- independent spaces within the archipelago, going so far as to suggest that the tenth-
century rebellion of Taira Masakado and even the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate
need to be understood as regionalist assertions of independence—the result of persistent memo-
ries of eastern Japan as an autonomous realm. In contrast, Noguchi Minoru and Jeffrey Mass
argued that eastern warriors colonized western and northern Japan, replacing court authority
with military justice. Mass also maintained that estates and public lands in the east were adminis-
tered using exactly the same institutional devices and documents as in other parts of the archi-
pelago, although he acknowledged that fewer estates were to be found in the east. Carving out a
middle path, David Spafford historicizes regionality of the Kantō, arguing that late medieval
eastern warriors and literate elites relied on and modified earlier precedent in making aesthetic
and territorial claims that constituted a discourse constructing the Kantō as a distinct geographi-
cal space.^58
These explorations of center and periphery highlight the dynamism that research from a per-
spective of local autonomy can infuse into historiography on medieval Japan, transforming our
understanding of not only coastal reaches of the archipelago, but also political centers. Studies of
local autonomy and center and periphery have illuminated how so- called peripheral seafarers
inspired new worldviews that transformed the traditional worldviews of capital elites. Drawing
on the results of archaeological excavations as well as written materials from historical sites in
both southern islands and northern reaches, historians have suggested newer models of “trans-
planted centers” or additional cultural centers.^59
Notes
1 Shiki and the system of rights and perquisites over lands and peoples in the provinces are discussed in
more detail in Chapter 8 of this volume.
2 Nishitani Masahiro, “Shōensei no tenkai to shoyū kōzō,” 116–120; Jeffrey P. Mass, “Of Hierarchy and
Authority at the End of Kamakura,” 18–19; Thomas Keirstead, The Geography of Power in Medieval
Japan, ch. 1, note 46.
3 Keirstead includes a historiographical essay on the decline of the estate system in The Geography of Power
in Medieval Japan.
4 Nagahara Keiji, “The Decline of the Shōen System”; Nishitani, “Shōensei no tenkai to shoyū kōzō,”
130–135.
5 Mass, “Of Hierarchy and Authority”; Miyagawa Mitsuru, “From Shōen to Chigyō: Proprietary Lord-
ship and the Structure of Local Power”; Nishitani, “Shōensei no tenkai to shoyū kōzō,” 136–140;
Imatani Akira, “Muromachi Local Government: Shugo and Kokujin”; Nagahara, “The Decline of the
Shōen System”; Nagahara Keiji, “The Sengoku Daimyō and the Kandaka System,” 28–29.
6 Mass, “Of Hierarchy and Authority”; Hitomi Tonomura, Community and Commerce in Late Medieval
Japan: The Corporate Villages of Tokuchin- ho; Peter D. Shapinsky, Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and
Commerce in Late Medieval Japan, ch. 3; Sakurai Eiji, Muromachibito no seishin, 199–202 and “Chūsei no
shōhin ichiba”; Nishitani, “Shōensei no tenkai to shoyū kōzō,” 140–144; Keistead, The Geography of