arms. The result was the gradual emergence of an order of professional
fighting men in the countryside and the capital.
Superficial similarities between the samurai and the knights of north-
ern Europe make it tempting to equate the birth of the samurai with the on-
set of “feudalism” in the Japanese countryside, but such was not the case.
While the descendants—both genealogical and institutional—of the profes-
sional warriors of Heian times did indeed become the masters of Japan’s
medieval and early modern epochs, until the very end of the twelfth cen-
tury the samurai remained the servants, not the adversaries, of the court
and the state.
This situation, so enigmatic in hindsight, seems much less so when
considered in the context of the times. For the nascent warrior order of the
tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries was constrained from without by the
same public (state) and private (court noble) policies that encouraged its
development, and from within by the inability of its own members to forge
secure and enduring bonds among themselves. Like the landholding and
governing systems of the same era, the Heian military and police system
readily responded and adapted to changing circumstances in the capital
and the provinces, while the court jealously guarded its exclusive right to
oversee and direct it. Then, in 1180, Minamoto Yoritomo, a dispossessed
heir to a leading samurai house, adeptly parlayed his own pedigree, the lo-
calized ambitions of provincial warriors, and a series of upheavals within
the imperial court into the creation of a new institution—called the shogu-
nate, or bakufu,by historians—in the eastern village of Kamakura.
The first shogunate was in essence a government within a govern-
ment, at once a part of and distinct from the imperial court in Kyoto. Its
principal functions were to oversee eastern Japan and the samurai class,
based on authority delegated to it by the court. But the establishment of
this new institution set rolling a snowball that expanded until it bowled
over and completely destroyed Japan’s classical polity. In the twelfth cen-
tury, shôgunal vassals across the country discovered that they could ma-
nipulate the insulation from direct court supervision offered them by the
Kamakura regime to lay ever stronger and more personal claims to the
lands (and the people on them) they ostensibly administered on behalf of
the powers-that-were in the capital. Through gradual advance by fait ac-
compli, a new warrior-dominated system of authority absorbed the older,
courtier-dominated one, and real power over the countryside spun off
steadily from the center to the hands of local figures.
By the second quarter of the fourteenth century, this evolution had
progressed to the point where the most successful of the shogunate’s provin-
cial vassals had begun to question the value of continued submission to the
Kamakura regime. Thus when a deposed emperor, posthumously known as516 Samurai