J. Kurashige
volume), suggesting that true consensus remains far off. We cannot say, for example, that all
Sengoku histories remain colored by Marxist thinking, and assume that the nuances within these
disagreements are moot.
The second half of the section on political history shifts from the macro toward the micro, and
centers on the shugo, the ties between the shugo and the shogunate, local warrior lords, and the
polities of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi. Yamada Tōru begins this portion of the text by emphasizing
how disunity and a lack of standardization characterized the Muromachi era even during the
most influential days of the Ashikaga shogunate.^15 Shugo, he cautions, were varied in power and
scope, and a definitive definition of the group’s characteristics remains elusive. Despite these
limitations however, Yamada identifies how many medieval scholars have used the political rise
of the shugo order (in contrast to their relative lack of influence during the Kamakura period) as a
window to view the solidification of the Muromachi polity and the foundation of local autonomy
so critical to an understanding of the Sengoku period. Through this focus, Yamada argues that
the study of shugo shifted the field toward an appreciation of local history, away from a fixation
on the center in the form of the shogunate itself and other capital authorities. The emphasis on
the ties between authority (kenryoku- ron) and regional society (chiiki shakai- ron) were derivative of
these shugo studies.
Yoshida Kenji provides a counter- balance to Yamada, tracking the evolution of scholarship
that illuminates the establishment of power by the Muromachi shogunate itself.^16 Yoshida
describes how recent research criticizes the focus on the triumvirate of shogunate- shugo-kokujin
as a ruling stratum (the Muromachi bakufu- shugo taisei- ron), and instead posits that the field now
emphasizes the tensions between the central authorities (in the form of the shogunate trying to
draw local authority toward it), the local authorities (such as the kokujin attempting to resist those
authorities), and the shugo as a mediating middle ground. Yoshida argues, however, that this
paradigm may well be too limited, as it fails to account for northern Japan, the Kantō, and
Kyushu, among other locations. Moreover, even identifying who truly had shugo authority and
the actual parameters of that authority, remains a matter of debate. For example, there are
questions about the degree to which the early Mogami in northern Japan had the legal authority
of shugo, even without formal titles such as Ōshu Kanrei. As a result of these studies, however,
Yoshida suggests the field has moved beyond a dynamic of center versus periphery, and moved to
see the pattern of center and periphery as the key to understanding the Sengoku era as a whole.
Hirade Masanori builds on Yoshida’s survey, moving from the Muromachi through to the post-
Ōnin War period.^17 Yet unlike the previous two scholars, he highlights the central position the
daimyō themselves occupy in many historians’ narratives (Sengoku- ki seiji- kenryoku-ron). Like Yamada,
he describes how Sengoku scholars largely see an existing “polity system” that spanned from northern
Kyushu through to the southern portion of the Tohoku region, with the areas outside that sphere
being a different beast. Nevertheless, despite these broader patterns of rulership, Hirade, like Yamada,
also stresses how the field has begun to highlight the variability between individual lords, and how
difficult it is to use single daimyō as representative of a systemic whole. Furthermore, he argues that
while there are researchers who emphasize the “medieval” or “unique” qualities of the daimyō,
highlighting the connectivity between the lords and their early medieval predecessors (like the shugo)
seems to be the greater trend in the field. In other words, continuities rather than ruptures are again
the order of the day. Like Yamada’s shugo, Hirade’s daimyō, however, cannot be studies in isolation,
but must rather be considered within nexuses of relationships between lower- level warriors and the
heads of village collectives. Thus, the daimyō become a lens through which to see local and regional
social relations, rather than centralized legal or infrastructural evolution.
Oshita Shigetoshi continues in much the same vein as Hirade, by questioning whether or not
Nobunaga and Hideyoshi’s rule represented something fundamentally different than what came