The imperial court in medieval JapanIn English, my own work dealt with many of these topics, both in integrative form in my
book Emperor and Aristocracy in Japan, 1467–1680: Resilience and Renewal (2002), as well as in nar-
rower studies, “The Way of Yin and Yang: A Tradition Revived, Sold, Adopted” (1996); and
“Tokugawa Ieyasu’s Regulations for the Court: A Reappraisal” (1994). The former article deals
with court practitioners of onmyōdō, the struggles they went through during the sengoku era, their
eventual revival (and the revival of their art at court) late in the period, and then the adoption of
many of their practices (and practitioners) by the early Tokugawa shoguns. Here we see how the
new warrior leaders turned to the court for precedent and legitimacy as they established their
rule. It is a theme that shows up elsewhere as well in the new scholarship, revealing that the uni-
fiers and their associates were less innovative and less dismissive of the past than often shown to
be; in fact, they appear to have generally embraced the past and the imperial institution that so
profoundly represented that past.
The same idea shows up in my article on the regulations Ieyasu prepared for the court, as the
third unifier comes across as intent not on restricting and defining the court to fit his new order
but in seeing the court restored to a proper condition, stable and dignified. Like other “new”
scholars of the court, I examined not just the immediate evidence—in this case the several codes
drawn up by Ieyasu—but also the context and background. Among other things, this led me to
argue that two sets of regulations attributed to Ieyasu by earlier historians, and said to be steps in
constricting the court, were not produced by him. Such critical re- readings of the evidence has
been a common part of recent scholarship on the court.
Of course, the new group of scholars working on the late medieval and reunification court
during the 1990s (and now into the early twenty- first century) were by no means in agreement
on all points, unified though they might have been in recognizing the court as an integral part of
the era’s political, social, and cultural order. The biggest points of contention revolved around
the biggest questions, namely: Why did the court survive the late medieval period, a time when
it easily could have been, indeed by all indications should have been, done away with? And what
larger significance did the court have during this period, particularly in shaping Japan’s political
world—in other words, why did it matter? Neither of these questions is easily answered, and
those desiring or demanding straightforward, single- piece explanations are bound to be disap-
pointed. Nevertheless, the extensive scholarship produced during the past quarter- century offers
many clues. While it was particularly difficult to understand the court’s survival when scholars
assumed that it and its members were passive, non- acting entities, once new research revealed the
extent of court and courtiers’ activities, and the strong pull of the court on the rising warriors,
much of the mystery disappeared. The same was true on the question of why the court
mattered.
One of the more successful efforts to address the broader questions directly is Wakita Haruko’s
lengthy article “Sengokuki ni okeru tennō ken’i no fujō” (“The Emergence of the Emperor’s
Authority in the Sengoku Era”). Although her larger argument—that during sengoku the emperor
became the main symbol opposing chaos and the division of power—seems overdrawn, her nar-
rower points—that court authority was reflected in its ability to grant aristocratic ranks and
titles, make priestly appointments, designate temples as imperially commissioned institutions,
and act as arbiters of culture—speak to the continued, even increasing, relevance of the court,
even if the powers it held were hardly of the sort to bring stability to the political order.
A recent work that takes a different approach to the big questions is Thomas Conlan’s From
Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth- Century Japan. In both its emphasis
and its arguments this work is distinctive. To begin with, it deals with the court in the fourteenth
century rather than the fifteenth and sixteenth, which have received much of the attention. Next,
at the core of its analysis is religion, in particular the place of Shingon Buddhist ritual at court, a