Kawai Y., with K.F. Friday
police apparatus, rather than as an element of the provincial landholding system. Toda examined
the military conditions of the ninth century and identified a “military revolution” (gunsei kaikaku)
that, over the course of the late ninth to early tenth centuries, gave rise to bands of mounted
archers. This, he concluded, marked the origins of the bushi. Ishii, in turn, analyzed the provincial
military system of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, theorizing that provincial elites came to be
identified as warriors on the basis of records appointing them to military offices and family genea-
logies maintained by provincial government offices (kokuga). Their work sparked interest in the
workings of the Heian military system among a number of historians, including Fukuda Toyo-
hiko, Shimomukai Tatsuhiko, Inoue Mitsuo, Morita Tei, Horiuchi Kazuaki, Takayama Kaoru,
and Shirakawa Tetsurō.^7
In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers built on these findings, deepening the debate over how
and when warriors came to be. One group focused on the military skills and equipment that
defined the emerging warrior order, and observed that mounted archery first became central to
military affairs in Japan not during a ninth- century “military revolution,” but under the ritsuryō
military.
Karl Friday, for example, traced the evolution of the state’s military system from the ritsuryō
era to the end of the Heian period, arguing that an order of professional fighting men in the
countryside and the capital emerged gradually over the course of the eighth to tenth centuries, as
changing military needs and priorities led the court to restructure its armed forces to center on
small, highly mobile bands of mounted archers, and to cease efforts to draft and drill the popu-
lation at large, concentrating instead on co- opting the privately acquired skills of martially tal-
ented elites.^8
Working at nearly the same time as Friday, William Wayne Farris took the idea of continuity
even further, contending that the basic patterns governing the military system into the four-
teenth century were already in place in the 600s: The Japanese had adopted mounted archery, the
military was organized around local strongmen, and military men had assumed important roles
in the political structure. Recurrent modifications to the missions, tactics, and procedures for
mobilization and command of the military did not obliterate the original pattern. The imperial
state armies still centered on the extended families of the pre- ritsuryō local elites leading peasants
conscripted through local political and economic powers, and local strongmen continued to
occupy an essentially similar position in society, the economy, and the military through the end
of the Kamakura period.^9
A decade later, Takahashi Masaaki reversed the assertions of the earlier “proprietor system
theory,” contending that the birthplace of the bushi was the capital, not the agricultural villages
of the east. Noting that the bows, the curved tachi swords, the ōyoroi and haramaki armors, the
saddles and other equestrian gear, and even the peculiar form of mounted archery that collec-
tively characterized Heian- period warriors were all developed in the capital, Takahashi argued
that the first bushi were not provincial landholders but rather the officers of the court’s guard and
police units.^10
Takahashi was following Toda and Ishii (and, albeit unwittingly, Friday and Farris) in defin-
ing warriors in terms of their occupations. In this view, bushi were those who performed military
functions for the state and were recognized as such—authorized by the state to use their private
military resources on its behalf. To this Takahashi added an additional qualifier, distinguishing
true bushi from others who possessed martial skills, on the basis of membership in families for
whom the bearing of arms became a house profession (kagyō) pursued from generation to
generation.^11
A growing hereditary identification of particular skills and services with specific lineages was,
to be sure, an important feature of aristocratic society during the middle and late Heian period.