Japan’s Long Sixteenth Century: Civil War, Foreign Encounters, and Popular Culture

1 Course Unit

Between the middle of the fifteenth century and the turn of the sixteenth, Japan was plunged into a state of continuous military unrest. As the central government foundered, a class of provincial magnates emerged, using military success to fashion themselves into warlords. Over the decades, the endemic fighting gradually (and not so gradually) chipped away at the centuries-old medieval order, not only unsettling entrenched social and political hierarchies but undermining structures of property, taxation, and production. By the time one warrior house managed to assert its control over the entirety of the archipelago, in 1615, the Japanese landscape and its society had been fundamentally reconfigured. This class takes this period of protracted violence, known in Japan as the Age of Warring States, as a stage to explore and challenge our ideas of authority, violence, and historical change. It will pair scholarly monographs (in excerpts and in their entirety) and articles with primary sources in translation, moving through the period both chronologically and thematically. During the course of the semester we will read (among others) chronicles and war tales to examine how power fashioned itself in narrative; we will read law codes to explore strategies of governance and legitimation, as well as mechanism of self-governance and resistance; we will consider the emergence new movements that accelerated the spread of Buddhism among commoners and mobilized the population in unprecedented ways; we will compare these phenomena with the sudden and shocking arrival of Catholic missionaries, who envisioned the evangelization of the archipelago and used the trade of firearms to obtain the favor of local potentates; and we will read poetry and diaries and travelogues, which testify to new countrywide networks of cultural patronage that emerged as a result of the collapse of the more centralized medieval world. The course will be centered on in-class discussion of the material, interspersed with short lectures designed to provide context. Students will learn to compare scholarly arguments and to understand historiographical stakes, while also conducting close readings of short documents and longer narrative sources. By juxtaposing European accounts with Japanese sources, for instance, we will consider the authors’ different cultural perspectives with a special emphasis on the ways in which these not only shape subject matter but also inform omissions and misunderstandings—and ultimately condition what we, now, are able to see, and what views are foreclosed to us by our witnesses’ choices. Mutually Exclusive: EALC 3743 1 Course Unit