Medieval warriors and warfareThis phenomenon became pronounced between the late tenth and early eleventh centuries.
Nevertheless, the lineages that came to be known as warrior houses around this time and forward
were not the same houses that had served in the court guard units of earlier decades. This raises
questions about the appropriateness of including the ritsuryō era and early Heian era court military
officers within the definition of bushi.
Some historians—most notably Motoki Yasuo, Shimomukai Tatsuhiko, and Kawajiri Akio—
therefore date the beginnings of the warrior order to the mid- tenth century. Shimomukai, for
example, observes that all of the individuals listed under the heading of “bushi” in Ōe Masafusa’s
early twelfth- century roster of the most prominent figures of the time, Zoku honchō ōjōden, were
sons or grandsons of the warriors involved in the campaign against Taira Masakado in 939. He
further notes that the vast majority of medieval warrior houses traced their ancestry (legitimately
or not) to the victors in the Masakado affair (Taira Sadamori, Minamoto Tsunemoto, and Fuji-
wara Hidesato).^12
Accordingly, Shimomukai and others argue that the bushi order began in the tenth and early
eleventh centuries, when prominent lineages of the Kanmu Heishi, Seiwa Genji, and Hidesato-
ryū Fujiwara emerged as hereditary warrior houses in the capital.^13 The scions of these houses
were middle- ranked court nobles whose careers centered on appointments to provincial govern-
ment offices. Many such career provincial officials (zuryō) found that they could use the power
and perquisites of their offices, and the strength of their court connections, to establish landed
bases in their provinces of appointment and to continue to exploit the resources of these prov-
inces even after their terms of office expired. The result was the diffusion of warrior houses to the
countryside.^14
The Kamakura shogunate and the advent of warrior rule
In the early postwar era, Ishimoda Shō and Nagahara Keiji analyzed bushi history within a Marxist
framework that cast the appearance of the Kamakura shogunate as a landmark in the transition
from a classical “slave state” to a medieval “feudal age.” They saw the Genpei War as a revolt of
provincial warriors—whom they defined as a class of militarized local landholders (zaichi
ryōshu)—against the estate (shōen) system and the rule of the court aristocracy, and saw the sho-
gunate as an instrument for rallying the political power of rural elites. As such, they maintained
that it represented, alternatively, a “transitional regime” bridging classical and medieval society,
or the first stage of feudal rule, albeit in a form that still retained elements of the classical state.
Both scholars were attempting to attach a progressive significance to the founding of the shogu-
nate as the first warrior government. Yet because they began from the premise that aristocratic
rule and the shōen system were components of the classical state, they were forced to view the
shogunate, which coexisted with both institutions, as transitional.^15
As research on Heian social and economic history progressed in the late 1950s and early 1960s,
however, Toda Yoshimi and others began to characterize the landholding arrangements that
held under the late Heian estate system as “feudal,” which meant that the court aristocrats—the
proprietors of the estates—must themselves have represented a form of feudal power.^16 This
influential view of things dramatically altered the historical significance of the founding of the
Kamakura regime. For if a feudal polity had already come into being before the shogunate was
created, there was no logical imperative to assign any particular meaning to the shogunate, in
terms of the shift from the classical to the medieval era. This raised the further question of how
to understand the Genpei War and its relationship to the founding of the shogunate.
As we saw in the previous section, historians have, since the 1970s, increasingly come to
regard the early bushi not as provincial landlords arming themselves in order to rule their estates,