10
The imperial court in
medieval Japan
Lee Butler
From the standpoint of government structures and political power, the imperial court of medi-
eval Japan is a historiographic dead end. During the Kamakura era (1185–1334)—the first century
and a half of the period traditionally defined as medieval—there was still political life in the
court, but power was shared with the rising warriors, whose eventual eclipse of the old aristo-
cracy was inevitable, at least as commonly interpreted by historians. Little wonder that the period
is known by the name of the seat of warrior government, Kamakura, not by a title or term that
describes the way the land was actually governed. With the rise of the Ashikaga family, which
established the second warrior government or Muromachi shogunate (1336–1573), all vestiges of
the imperial court’s governing institutions were done away with. The court was finished.
But as the beginning student of Japan soon learns, neither emperor nor court disappeared from
the stage of history, and the reemergence of the emperor as a galvanizing figure late in the Toku-
gawa period, as well as the weighty role he played thereafter in the modern imperial era, forces one
to ask questions: “What happened in the intervening centuries?” “Did emperor and court remain
relevant, and if so, what part did they play in politics and society?” “And if the part they played was
insignificant, why was the institution not done away with sometime during those centuries?” It is
an intriguing topic, one that has elicited a wide range of interpretations over the centuries, stretch-
ing back to the medieval era itself. In this sense, the court enjoys a particularly lengthy and rich
historiography, though hardly one upon which historians have found reason to agree.
There are two main reasons for this. The first is that the issues surrounding the court during
these centuries are complex and the answers elusive (of course, the same can be said of many
topics, but few are so marked by political ambiguity and questions of significance, or the lack
thereof, as the court). Adding to this is the second reason for disagreement, which is the court’s
political immediacy over time. In other words, providing an opinion about the imperial court—
whether one was writing in the fourteenth, seventeenth, nineteenth, or twentieth centuries—
was hardly a task for the disinterested scholar; instead it was usually a political act, a statement of
belief or loyalty (or disloyalty). The result is that for much of history, the court’s interpreters
have been mythmakers, apologists, or detractors, individuals whose views have been shaped by
ideologies surrounding the court of their time. This has rarely made for objective analysis.
And yet, important scholarship was produced in spite of this. Hemmed in though scholars of
the court often were by the biases of their day or their limited vision, they (meaning primarily