Court and countryside 1200–1600Provincial constables existed in tandem with imperially appointed provincial governors
through the reign of Emperor Go- Daigo (r. 1318–1339). Regional trends are visible: Kamakura
shugo displaced provincial governors in the east, whereas in central and western Japan, the civil
governorships remained stronger. Nevertheless, detailed examinations of Kamakura- era land-
holding practices also reveal considerable intermixing between shogunate and court spheres of
interest, with members of the court continuing to own land in the Kantō for instance, and families
serving concurrently in both warrior and civil administrations.^16
Civil provincial governors’ offices also generated local lordship. Local functionaries (zaichō
kanjin) in these offices chafed at dependence on the court, and sought security for their holdings
through patronage and violence. From the late Heian period, families such as the Ōuchi of Suō
established themselves as local functionaries and then, in the Kamakura period, sought to diversify
their portfolios by adding jitō positions. In some cases, local functionaries helped proprietary
agents defeat jitō and their deputies, who sought to take control of estates on which they had been
placed.^17
The capture of estates by jitō has been a central theme of medieval history. Although ostensibly
administering estates belonging to court proprietors, jitō enjoyed immunity from direct court
control; proprietor complaints about misbehaving jitō could only be adjudicated by Kamakura.
Nagahara Keiji, Jeffrey Mass and others focused on this dual identity as the key to local warrior
self- advancement, highlighting the tendency of the shogunate to seek compromise, rather than
rule in favor of one party or the other, in the expanding number of probate and territorial contest
disputes that arose during the thirteenth century. Regional trends similar to those cited in the
case of shugo can also be identified. In eastern Japan, where most gokenin homelands were located,
jitō acquired managerial titles over estates of aristocrats and other head proprietors and
contractually forwarded taxes—but also established the beginnings of domains. In the capital
region, the strength of the court held off incursions by eastern warriors until the 1330s. Jitō
received increased appointments in western Japan after Kamakura’s 1221 victory in the Jōkyū
War, and in those regions, stewards’ assaults on proprietors’ portions sometimes led to
compromises in which proprietors and jitō divided the actual territory of the estate (shitaji
chūbun).^18
As nascent local lords, jitō played important roles in the commercialization of Japan. Rising
warrior debt pushed some to attempt to expand their control beyond the terms initially allotted
to them. They managed markets, and extracted cash from estate residents and merchants.
Although many studies of jitō emphasize the coalescing of power- bases around family heads
(sōryō), some jitō who possessed homelands in eastern or central Japan together with holdings in
the west also exploited partible inheritance to develop domestic and overseas trade networks,
becoming agents of port- town urbanization.^19
Although historians focus most often on jitō as the architects of local warrior lordship, to be
successful jitō needed to oust managers appointed by the proprietor. Such figures could also build
local power- bases on the estates, and some even established themselves as trans- generational
warrior lords by opposing the jitō and working with proprietors. Amino Yoshihiko noted that
such local experts often had connections to multiple estates, which facilitated commercial and
subsistence connections among estates.^20
Akuto ̄
Akutō (“evil bands”) have become prominent in the historiography of Kamakura- era territorial
disputes and the growth of local lordship in medieval Japan. Early scholars understood the term
to have had a stable, objective referent. More recently, historians have interpreted it as a subjective