Medieval warriors and warfareHistorians, therefore, generally prefer the term bushi (literally, “military professional”) as a
generic appellation for medieval warriors. “Bushi” first came into use during the early eighth
century, as a description for military officers and officials, but the warrior order to which scholars
today refer by this word began to appear in the provinces and the capital during the tenth
century.^1
Until fairly recently, the “rise of warriors” was commonly cited as a development of eastern
Japan, with the tōgoku bushi (“warriors of the East”) understood to have been the archetype of the
medieval warrior order. This view derives from Hara Katsurō’s landmark 1906 study, Nihon
chūsei shi. Therein, Hara outlined the creation of the Kamakura shogunate by eastern warriors in
analogy to the process that led to Europe’s medieval age. He argued that, as in the German vil-
lages of the Roman Empire, the civilization of the capital did not extend to the eastern hinter-
lands; and that, in consequence, stalwart warriors emerged there as the driving force of historical
development and gave rise to the Kamakura era—which he viewed as the starting point of a new
and uniquely Japanese civilization.^2
The focus on warriors as the impetus behind the transition from the classical to the medieval
era continued in the work of Ishimoda Shō, a leading figure in postwar scholarship on medieval
Japan. Searching for the process through which the court- centered polity and estate (shōen) system
of the classical age gave way to the “feudal” polity of medieval times, Ishimoda identified bushi
with the zaichi ryōshu (“on- site proprietor” or “local landowner”) class that dominated the agri-
cultural villages of the Heian period. His “proprietor system theory” (ryōshusei ron) exerted an
enormous influence on subsequent scholarship. Indeed, until the 1960s, most research on medi-
eval warriors focused on their role as landholders, and merely debated the process by which this
system developed.^3
Proponents of the “proprietor system theory” contended that warriors emerged spontan-
eously during the middle years of the Heian period, much as knights had in northwestern Europe
a few centuries earlier, when rural landholders took up arms, developed private retinues of fight-
ing men, and rapidly emerged as the de facto ruling power in the countryside. This militarization
of the gentry was said to have been necessitated by the ineptitude of the imperial state (ritsuryō)
military and police system, which had been all- but abandoned by the early ninth century, result-
ing in a breakdown of order in the countryside severe enough to force those who owned or
administered estates in the countryside to arm themselves, in order to protect their lands and
control the peasants who lived on them.^4
By the 1970s, however, this scenario was coming under fire from two fronts. First, newer
work on landholding and rural governance had produced a radically different portrait of the
Heian polity and a substantially revised chronology for the onset of warrior rule, stressing the
adaptability and resiliency of the imperial court as a ruling body and the seat of governing author-
ity. The new scholarship highlighted the ability of the court nobility to maintain control over
landholding and governance in the countryside throughout the Heian period, and that warriors
(and other rural land magnates) only began to break out of these constraints during the Kamakura
period.^5
Second, historians had begun to look more closely at Heian warriors as warriors, observing
that bushi appeared in the capital as well as the provinces, becoming a readily identifiable occupa-
tional sub- group within the middle ranks of the court nobility, serving the interests of the ruling
elite. They also called attention to the distinctive horse- borne archer- centered style of fighting
the bushi developed, which they argued, was best- suited to mobility and offensive operations—
and not at all the sort of military technology likely to be adopted for defensive purposes.^6
Toda Yoshimi and Ishii Susumu, writing in the 1970s, were two of the first scholars to con-
sider the problem of how the bushi came into being as an outgrowth of the state’s military and