Kawai Y., with K.F. Friday
but as an occupational group—a professional warrior order—serving the ruling class. This view
has significant implications for our understanding of the Kamakura regime and its functions. For
as Irumada Nobuo observed, the shogunate was first and foremost a military organization, the
product not of the provincial landlord class per se, but of a particular group within it, the bushi.^17
As such, the regime could not have been an inexorable product of the evolution of the Heian era
landholding system, which raises new questions concerning how and why it came into being. A
number of researchers have sought answers in the military developments of the Genpei War.
As early as the 1970s, Jeffrey Mass, for example, saw the shogunate as an outgrowth of
Minamoto Yoritomo’s efforts to raise an army in order to avenge his father and to regain the
station in life that, but for his sire’s misadventures in the 1159 Heiji Incident, would have been
his birthright. But Mass still deemed Yoritomo’s objectives to be as much political as military.^18
Kawai Yasushi, on the other hand, traces the introduction of the shogunate’s key institutions
more directly to tactical exigencies.
Like Mass, Kawai centered his attention on the Kamakura regime’s network of jitō (estate
stewards) and shugo (provincial constables), which represented both the means by which Yori-
tomo extended his grip across the country, and the root of the shogunate’s authority. Virtually
all accounts of Kamakura history locate the foundation of the regime’s permanent legal
identity—and therefore its political authority—in the court’s recognition of Yoritomo’s exclu-
sive authority over his vassals (gokenin), which crystalized in his (and his successors’) right to
appoint his men as jitō on estates and public domains and as shugo over provinces countrywide.
Traditionally, this authority was held to have derived from an edict known as the Bunji Chokkyo
(“Bunji [era] Charter”), issued by Retired Emperor Go- Shirakawa in the eleventh month of
1185.^19 But as both Mass and Kawai noted, Yoritomo had been posting vassals to provincial
constableships and estate and district managerial titles from long before this.
In Kawai’s treatment, the key point is that Yoritomo’s selection of the lands over which he
assigned jitō was anything but random. Quite the contrary, he placed jitō only on lands belonging
to enemy warriors. This, Kawai argues, constituted a military occupation of enemy lands and
domiciles. That is, the shogunate’s jitō network developed out of a policy of confiscating enemy
bases and granting them as benefices to Kamakura vassals. This policy of handing benefices to
vassals was a powerful recruiting tool for Yoritomo. It was also a tool unavailable to his Taira
opponents, because, as the nominal government army, they could not simply assume control
over lands taken from warriors in rebellion against the court—for such lands legally fell back
under court jurisdiction. But Yoritomo, who was himself formally a rebel and outlaw, was not
constrained by these principles. Thus the jitō system, Kawai concludes, began not as the result of
any court edict, but as the structural base of a rebel army.
The shugo post, he continues, also evolved during the war years, when the unprecedented
scope and scale of the fighting required mobilization not just of warrior vassals but also of lower-
status troops, and of laborers to construct and raze fortifications and such. This task necessitated
borrowing the authority of the provincial governments, and the creation of officers with
province- wide command and mobilization authority.^20
Increasingly, then, historians are emphasizing the role wartime military policies and innova-
tions played in the emergence of warrior rule in early medieval Japan. Such reassessment has not
been limited to the origins of the Kamakura regime. Researchers also analyze the evolution and
expansion of warrior political power during the fourteenth- century Nanbokuchō conflict that
established the Muromachi shogunate through the lens of military developments.^21