K.F. Friday
“Premodern Japan” is, of course, like all historical period labels, an invented construct that
historians deploy for referential (and analytical) convenience. It is, to be sure, a somewhat prob-
lematic construct. For one thing, “premodern” constitutes a definition in the negative, labeling
the epoch for what it is not, rather than for some affirmative characteristic. And for another, the
term hints at a teleological view of history, a progression toward the modern, and consequently,
perhaps, a connection to “modernization theory” and the modernization paradigms of Max
Weber and Talcott Parsons.^4 But both objections can, upon closer inspection, be recognized
mainly as hypercriticism. In the end, they raise a challenge to identify an appropriate alternative
label that decades of conference panels, editorial discussions, and professional conversations have
thus far been unable to meet, except with more awkward expressions, like “Japan before 1600.”
“Premodern,” in the sense in which it is employed in this volume, and within the field at large, is
best understood as an anodyne, entirely temporal in connotation.
By the same token, “premodern Japan” embraces a very long span of time—ten or more cen-
turies during which change featured at least as prominently as continuity. Useful explanation,
and meaningful analysis, therefore demand subdivision of this diffuse epoch. Historians have,
accordingly, devised a number of overlapping systems through which to conceptualize “Japan
before 1600.”^5
The best- known periodization schema sorts the premodern age into eras defined by the
(nominal) geographic seat of power. Although there is variation among the sub- fields of history,
and scholars frequently debate the precise boundaries of some periods, by and large, this concep-
tualization identifies eight major epochs, with some overlap between a few. Thus the Asuka (or
more commonly in the West, the Yamato) period, beginning in the sixth century and lasting
until the turn of the eighth, was followed by the Nara period (710–794), the Heian period
(794–1185), the Kamakura period (1185–1333), the Muromachi period (1333–1568), and the
Azuchi- Momoyama period (1568–1600). The late fourteenth to late sixteenth centuries are also
frequently divided into the Nanbokuchō (1336–1392) and Sengoku (1477–1573) periods.
But while readily familiar to scholarly and general audiences alike, and therefore useful for
short- hand references, these systems are not without foibles. Most importantly, many of the key
cultural, social, economic, and political changes that interest historians did not coincide neatly
with shifts in the location of the capital, or even with changes of leadership. Historians, there-
fore, also identify broad, thematic epochs.
For much of the postwar era, historians in Japan have broken premodern history into three
such periods: the genshi (“primordial”) age, lasting until the late fifth or early sixth century, the
kodai (“ancient” or “antiquity”) age, spanning the sixth through the twelfth centuries, and the
chūsei (“medieval”) age, running from the late twelfth until the late sixteenth centuries.^6 While
this schema was originally derived from Marxist models classifying historical periods in terms of
modes of production, the labels have become standard in Japan, even among historians who
otherwise reject Marxist analyses. Historians in the West have also by- and-large adopted this
system, albeit not without inconsistencies of translation and other problems.
Of the three ages posited by this schema, chūsei poses the fewest difficulties for either adoption or
translation. Indeed, both the term and the construct originated, at the dawn of the twentieth
century, as appropriations from European history.^7 And while chūsei was originally borrowed as an
analogy, with an eye toward mapping Japanese onto Western and world history, it remains apposite
to Japan’s past considered entirely in its own right—that is, as a label for an age of snowballing
socio- political upheaval bookended by the relative stability, and the relatively centralized orders, of
the classical and early modern eras. “Medieval” therefore seems a reasonably unproblematic English
sobriquet for the period. Nevertheless, as it is commonly applied—to the long span of time from
the late twelfth to the late sixteenth centuries—“the medieval age” encompasses a great deal of