L. Butler
native Japanese working from the fourteenth to mid- twentieth centuries) were nonetheless part
of a rigorous intellectual tradition. As a result, while their arguments might in places be convo-
luted or distorted, they were not apt to ignore all evidence.
Representative of such work, complex in thought if occasionally strained in reasoning (at
least from our perspective), are the writings of Arai Hakuseki (1657–1725), an early interpreter
of the medieval court. As a broadly read Confucian scholar and powerful advisor to the sixth and
seventh Tokugawa shoguns, Ienobu and Ietsugu, Hakuseki’s view of the past was shaped both by
practices within the East Asian history- writing tradition as well as by his favorable view of the
Tokugawa regime. Yet he was no mere apologist for the Tokugawa. Furthermore, he accepted
fully the position of the scholar- bureaucrat who not only sought intellectual understanding but
actively shaped and guided government. Where the court was concerned, he was interested both
in interpreting its place in the past and in defining its role in the present—a role he was confident
would remain prominent.
Hakuseki’s views of Japan’s history are laid out most fully in Tokushi yoron, translated into
English by Joyce Ackroyd as Lessons from History.^1 His concern was with power and authority—
the uses and abuses of both, the way each was held and lost by rulers—and his analytical frame-
work was the Mandate of Heaven, the Chinese notion that a ruler (in China, the emperor or “Son
of Heaven”) was endowed with the right to rule based on his ability to govern effectively. It was
a simple and loose concept, both confirming the legitimacy of a ruler in power but also justifying
his eventual overthrow. According to Hakuseki, authority had anciently resided with Japan’s
emperors; but by the time of Go- Daigo (r. 1318–1339) if not before, they had lost the mandate
to rule, it having shifted to the warriors.
Despite the ascendance of the Tokugawa shoguns as the recipients of Heaven’s mandate, for
Hakuseki the touchstone of political legitimacy and practice remained the court. As described by
Kate Wildman Nakai in Shogunal Politics: Arai Hakuseki and the Premises of Tokugawa Rule, Hakuseki
strived to transform the workings and appearance of the shogun’s court, making it more “kingly,”
meaning more like the institution in Kyoto. Accordingly, he effected reforms in everything from
clothing and music to architecture, all in imitation of the imperial institution. Furthermore, in
the face of a Korean embassy of 1711, in which the foreigners showed no inclination to admit
Japanese superiority either in politics or ritual, Hakuseki argued in nativist fashion that “The
tenno is a true Son of Heaven. He is not like the rulers of the successive dynasties of the western
land, where mortals have succeeded to heaven and bearers of different surnames have established
successive dynasties in turn.”^2
As we shall see, Hakuseki was not alone in employing intellectual juggling to define the
emperor and court. The man (and occasional woman), as well as the imperial institution and its
members, was a slippery figure, certainly to those determined to place him within the history of
Japan.
The emperors
There are two ways to approach the historiography of the medieval court. One is by topic, the
other by chronology. The second is in most respects the more logical, given the weight of con-
temporary thought and politics in each age, that is, the court’s “political immediacy” that I earlier
described. But one topic cuts across time, maintaining a persistent if debatable place in the scholar-
ship over the centuries, so I will turn to it first: the role of the emperors.
Writing from the viewpoint of the Mandate of Heaven, Hakuseki’s interest, as seen above,
was in individual rulers, first the emperors, then the shoguns or other military heads. It was a
common approach in the earliest histories of the medieval court and has remained a significant, if