L. Butler
Post- World War II and beyond
With the conclusion of World War II, historians of Japan were at last freed from ideologies that
had shaped the historiography of emperor and court over the centuries. Most immediately, they
could now write of both the imperial institution and the individuals within it without fear of
political reprisal. Nonetheless, for the better part of the next four decades the late medieval (and
early modern) court received little attention from scholars. There were two reasons for this.
First, the broad acceptance by Japanese historians of economic materialism as the driving force
in history made the court of these eras largely irrelevant. After all, if the medieval court held
neither military power nor economic wealth, and in many respects functioned outside the frame-
work of class conflict, what role could it have had in shaping Japan’s history?^16
Second, the general failure of Japanese intellectuals of the prewar period to resist the move to
militarism and the emperor- centered ideology that supported it made the subject too painful to
address, particularly since to study the court of these centuries—when it should have been done
away with—was to give it life, as it were. The classical court, far in the past and a critical com-
ponent of Japan’s early history, was a suitable topic of study, as was the modern emperor, at least
as a symbol of fascism or the “emperor system” and all that had gone wrong in modern Japan. But
the court’s hazy inner centuries were off limits. As described by Takano Toshihiko in the after-
word to his book Kinsei Nihon no kokka kenryoku to shūkyō, as late as the 1980s a typical response
from older colleagues to his research was a bemused look and comment: “So you really are good
at studying the emperors and shrines, aren’t you?” as if it were too difficult to believe.^17
While scholars in Japan worked to discover and define the medieval era’s feudal history
according to Marxist theory, a small but growing number of historians in the West likewise
viewed the period in terms of feudalism, albeit not through Marxist eyes, but as a development
parallel to what had occurred in Western Europe. For both groups, the rise of the warriors and
the courts they established were a critical part of this process, but the imperial court was a tan-
gential factor at best. Although the court was ignored by most historians, some wondered if
perhaps it maintained significance as a religious or symbolic center. These were, however, just
speculations; no serious research to address the questions was undertaken.
Outside Japan, the focus on warriors received impetus through the scholarship of John
Whitney Hall, the most influential historian working on the pre- Tokugawa period. Hall’s
interest was institutional history, something that allowed limited space for the medieval court.
And yet, as Hall and his students dug deeper into the sources, they began to question the feudal
paradigm, beginning with that of the earliest centuries. Early scholarship in English that pro-
vided nuance to the picture while grounding the imperial court firmly in the Kamakura period
included essays by G. Cameron Hurst (“The Kōbu Polity: Court–Bakufu Relations in Kamakura
Japan”) and Cornelius Kiley (“The Imperial Court as a Legal Authority in the Kamakura Age”).
Assiduous though most postwar historians were at ignoring Japan’s imperial court of the late
medieval era (1334–1600), change began to come in the 1970s. The rapid growth of the profes-
sional academy that came with higher education booms in Japan and the United States brought
many more scholars into the field of premodern Japanese studies; and as scholarly production
increased, historians invariably moved into new areas of research and reconsidered old assump-
tions. A primary topic of research in the late 1970s and 1980s was the establishment of the early
modern regime, with Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s land survey of the 1590s receiving the bulk of the
attention in Japan. As scholars worked to flesh out the larger picture, to explain the shift to the
early modern world in comprehensive terms, they soon realized they needed to find a place for
the imperial court. Where, they asked, did it fit in the larger scheme of things? And what did it
mean for the rising warriors and new hegemons? Given its significant place in the sources of the