The sixteenth centuryMuromachi era spiritual beliefs and cultural habits.^8 A primary goal of this new generation of
scholars has been to free themselves from this “teleology of unification,” and emphasize how
groups, regions, or sub- eras previously considered peripheral to an understanding of the Sengoku
period should be focused upon as equally important in understanding its fundamental nature.^9
Evaluating recent trends in Japanese scholarship
In the early 2000s, a group of young Japanese scholars undertook the task of synthesizing research
trends in Sengoku studies, resulting in a volume called Muromachi Sengoku- ki kenkyū o yominaosu
(hereafter Yominaosu).^10 This landmark study is divided into four broad sections examining polit-
ical (more than half the text), social, economic, and religious history. In particular, the relation-
ship between the court and shogunate, and theoretical frameworks of institutional history
elucidating the Muromachi- to-Sengoku and Sengoku- to-Shokuhō (the era of Oda Nobunaga
and Toyotomi Hideyoshi) transitions are evaluated at length. The questions of where to place the
Age of the Country at War relative to the medieval and early modern periods, and whether it was
simply a transitionary period or something more, receive special attention in the book. Repre-
sentative of the major methodological difference between English- language and Japanese-
language studies, the chapters focus on individual research frameworks or foci (-ron in Japanese),
rather than the thematic or narrative approaches that tend to dominate scholarship in the West.
While the bibliographies in this volume are comparatively limited when juxtaposed against
those found in English- language publications, Yominaosu still offers newcomers to the field the
best overview published to date of the direction(s) in which scholarship has developed.
Unfortunately, research published outside Japan was largely ignored. And while Yominaosu
deserves to be explored in its entirety due to its exhaustive evaluations of past historiography, its
essays make assumptions about readers’ knowledge of the field that render it less than accessible
to non- specialists.^11
The initial political history section of Yominaosu is divided into two parts examining first the
relationship between the court and shogunate, and second regional institutional history.
Matsunaga Kazuhiro begins the former by defining the “paradigm of the relationship between
the shogunate and court” (kōbu kankei- ron), which focuses on the political history of the apex of
the traditional elite from the start to end of the Muromachi period.^12 While he calls attention to
other players, such as the temple or aristocratic members of the kenmon, he argues that the field
has largely deemphasized their roles in the governmental system.^13 Matsunaga identifies the
Nanbokuchō period (1334–1392) as the point at which state authority transferred from the court
to the shogunate, and suggests that the consensus view is of a unified polity in which shogunate
and court jointly managed state organs. In essence, he says, a new diarchy, similar to what existed
throughout the Kamakura era, was reconstituted. In contrast to the more or less equal roles of the
two players under the Kamakura system, however, the Muromachi polity placed the court
marginally below the shogunate in real power. But Momosaki Yuichirō, following Matsunaga in
the same section, argues that the diarchy had died and the age of warriors clearly arrived by the
time of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, by which point the shogunate had absorbed all court functions.^14
Matsunaga’s survey is useful since questions regarding the applicability of Kuroda’s kenmon
taisei remain among many historians focusing on Sengoku history, in particular those who follow
Nagahara’s models, which prioritize economic methods of analyzing history. Momosaki’s
examination of the scholarship also proves useful for its analysis of past Japanese research, but its
real focus is more toward the mid- Muromachi period than the Sengoku period. Both scholars do
demonstrate however, that even within these broad paradigms, Japanese historians pull the
theoretic narrative in various directions (as is the case in each of the following sections of this