The imperial court in medieval Japanera, it was clear that the court could not merely be dismissed as irrelevant; it had to be
explained.
The fact was, however, that no one at the time was actually interested in the late medieval or
early modern court itself. It existed in the minds of scholars only as an entity within a warrior-
framed world. In this world, both discourse and practice were set by the warriors, and neither
emperor nor courtiers were actors; instead they were puppets that the warriors manipulated.
And this they did with remarkable skill and ingenuity, “using” the court to establish their legiti-
macy and extend their hegemony. Asao Naohiro argued that this was important in controlling
both commoners and warriors:
It was a powerful device for the bushi to be able to portray their control over the peasants in
terms of rank and title deriving from the imperial court, although it was also essential to be
able to invoke the authority of the shogun as commander of all warrior groups.^18Others maintained that the usurpation of abstract authority was matched by warrior appro-
priation of practical court powers. According to Fujiki Hisashi, this occurred as Oda Nobunaga
arbitrated disputes between members of the elite, specifically the Kyoto nobility and the religious
establishment, and “institutionaliz[ed] his material participation in the court’s judicial proceed-
ings.” In doing so, he “whittled away” the court’s “few remaining discretionary powers.”^19 A
final historiographic approach was one that emphasized the concept of kōgi, or the “public
interest,” and the way that warriors presented themselves as both the proponents and embodi-
ment of this term. As argued by Fukaya Katsumi, the warriors were able to appropriate kōgi from
the court, thereby elevating themselves to a position of power while leaving the emperor and his
associates with none. In this he agreed with Fujiki, who concluded that as a result of these skillful
manipulations by the warriors, “the highest traditional authority—imperial sovereignty—was
shaken in its foundations.”^20
These arguments were laid out forcefully in English translation in an essay collection enti-
tled Japan Before Tokugawa, published in 1981. And they soon found their way into publica-
tions by scholars outside Japan. The core of the argument was well put by Neil McMullin in
his assessment of Oda Nobunaga: “The reason why Nobunaga secured and restored the posi-
tion of the emperor to the degree he did was that he wanted to use the emperor, as Wakita
Osamu says, as his ‘tool’.”^21 Finally, as Herman Ooms made clear, the three unifiers could do
no wrong in their grand scheme to denigrate the court and elevate themselves: “Ieyasu also,
after increasing his symbolic capital through the acceptance of court ranks, title, and office,
increased it even further by severing himself and, step by step, the whole warrior authority
structure from the court.”^22
By the mid- 1980s, this view of the unifiers and court had been repeated and rephrased so often
that it seemed well on its way to becoming a permanent fixture in the historiography. But the
reality was that it was an argument without much foundation. To begin with, it completely
ignored the court, presenting it and its members as lifeless. An outsider to the field could only
assume that this was a reflection of the evidence, but that was hardly the case. Second, it ignored
the abundant sources for the period, many of which were produced by courtiers and which pro-
vided rich insights into emperor and court as well as the warriors. Third, in order to make the
warriors’ appropriation of court powers truly meaningful, as befitted hegemons, historians had
had to rehabilitate the court, giving it authority and powers that historians long before had
shown it had lost. Because it was difficult to find many court powers worth taking, historians
turned to ideas such as symbolic capital and cultural capital, concepts that required less hard evid-
ence to support. As cogently stated by Ike Susumu in his criticism of this argument,