Introductionand 1970s, when John W. Hall, Jeffrey Mass, G. Cameron Hurst, Francine Hérail, Elizabeth Sato,
Carl Steenstrup, Prescott Wintersteen, Martin Collcutt, Michael Solomon, Kenneth Grossberg
and others at last began to integrate the full range of source materials available to historians—
documents, court records, diaries, legal codes, archeological findings, and artwork, as well as
chronicles, narrative sources, and secondary scholarship in both Japanese, English, and (albeit less
systematically or comprehensively) other languages.
In the decades since, scholarship on premodern Japanese history has broadened, deepened, and
expanded exponentially. In both Japan and the West an unprecedented number of specialists
have entered the field. Collectively, their work is marked by a shift in focus from the history of
elites to a broader examination of social structures and their intersection with political, eco-
nomic, institutional, and cultural evolution; a shift in methodology from dependence on literary
and narrative sources to incorporation of documentary sources, physical evidence of the past and
analysis guided by theoretical constructs borrowed from the social sciences; and a fundamental
reassessment of nearly all the key tenets of what was once the received wisdom.
Prior to the 1960s, visions of premodern Japan—particularly the English- language
literature—described a historical landscape littered with failed regimes and radical breaks with
what had gone before, in a narrative dominated by themes of usurpation: An emergent tribal
confederation was reformed—very nearly at a stroke, in the wake of a spectacular coup d’état in
645—into a centralized imperial regime slavishly copied from Tang China. But this overly ambi-
tious attempt to force Japanese square pegs into Chinese round holes was doomed from the start.
Within decades of their inception, organs and procedures were abandoned and, bit by bit, the
authority of the imperial throne that underlay the system became buffered by layers (“screens and
curtains” in the words of George Sansom) and usurped.^16 Real power passed from reigning
emperors to Fujiwara regents, and then to retired sovereigns, after which the court itself was
slowly pushed aside. Warriors assumed control of first the countryside and then, with the estab-
lishment of the Kamakura shogunate in the 1180s, of the country as a whole, marking the demise
of the classical age and the onset of a medieval, “feudal” world. And the pattern continued, as
shoguns ruling in the name of emperors themselves became figureheads for Hōjō regents.
Attempts to restore the past, first in the form of Emperor Go- Daigo’s quixotic and ill- fated
“Kenmu Restoration” (1333–1336) and then in the form of a new shogunate under Ashikaga
Takauji and his heirs, only hastened the pace of change, as warlords in the countryside gobbled
up real power, first ruling in the name of shoguns who ruled in the name of emperors, but later
all- but sovereign in their own right, in positions that owed to little beyond raw military might.
And then, just as the archipelago was dissolving into utter chaos, three brilliant leaders—Oda
Nobunaga (1534–1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu
(1543–1616)—emerged in sequence, restoring national order, albeit at the expense of progress.
The Tokugawa, the ultimate victors in this opera, stabilized the new order and their place in it
by freezing society, stifling change, and hermetically sealing Japan off from contact with the
outside world.
As Jeffrey Mass observed, “part and parcel of this way of thinking was a search for the institu-
tionally new ... ‘change’ seemed more compelling than ‘survival’.”^17 This perspective owed in large
part to myopic engrossment with analogy to European history and faith in literary and other nar-
rative sources. But it began to break down rapidly in the 1970s, as historians became more sophistic-
ated in methodology, more attentive to approaching premodern Japan on its own terms, less
infatuated with the role of “great men,” and more skeptical of hoary archetypes. The shift began
with John W. Hall’s focus on the resilience of old patterns, and continued under the generation of
historians who came of age in the 1970s and their emphasis on the survival of older institutions,
mindsets, and practices alongside new developments. By the dawn of the twenty- first century, the