Japan In The Muromachi Age

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

Japan’s Renaissance is a detailed and exhaustively researched account of the regime of Japan’s second shogunate, and also an agile comparative analysis of the political economy of the period with other Renaissance systems. The book argues that the development of shogunal power in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Japan was similar to the evolution of monarchic power in France and England during the same period. Contrary to the received wisdom that the government of the Ashikaga shoguns was the low point of premodern Japan, this book demonstrates that it was the incubator for many developments and the administrative technology which reached their maturity in the Tokugawa period. Applying the ideas of political economy to medieval Japanese history makes this book an essential companion for all Japan and East Asia specialists, students of comparative feudalism and monarchical development, as well as educated generalists who are interested in premodern Japan. The book is illustrated with antique maps and Japanese paintings of the period which add to the reader's understanding of this dramatic age in Japan’s history.

Survey of the historical events and developments in medieval Japan's polity, economy, society and culture.

Makes Japanese sources accessible in English Although much of the work on Japanese economic history is inaccessible to Westerners, many of Japan's leading economic historians have published widely in English. Combined with the work of Western economists who can utilize Japanese-language sources, this series assembles a wide range of English-language articles on the key issues in Japanese economic development. Individual volumes cover the interwar period, postwar reconstruction and growth, the textile industry, demographics, agriculture, trade, and the rise of commerce and protoindustry in the Tokugawa era. An information-packed classroom and research resource An introductory essay in each volume discusses the significance of the articles, compares various economic development in Japan with those in other countries, and puts studies in the context of similar studies in Europe. A versatile research resource, this 7-volume set is a veritable gold mine of hard-to-find information and data from diverse sources and a godsend to everyone interested in comparative economic and social history. Professors will appreciate the collection because it gives them instant access to less familiar English-language sources and is an easy way to introduce students to doing their own research. Students will appreciate the many articles as a mother lode of information for reports and papers. Researchers will be pleased by the coverage of more than three centuries of Japanese history and life.

Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed forces, the weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them, and the techniques and customs of battle. A thorough, accessible and informative review, this study highlights the complex casual relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology, and the conduct of war.

Examining inscriptions on landscape paintings and related documents, this book explores the views of the "two jewels" of Japanese Zen literature, Gido Shushin (1325-1388) and Zekkai Chushin (1336-1405), and their students. These monks played important roles as advisors to the shoguns Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358-1408) and Yoshimochi (1386-1428), as well as to major figures in various michi or Ways of linked verse, the No theatre, ink painting, rock gardens, and other arts. By applying images of mountain retreats to their busy urban lives in the capital, these Five Mountain Zen monks provoke reconsiderations of the relation between secular and sacred and nature and culture.

This volume of twelve essays with useful bibliographies, in the fields of history, art, religion, literature, anthropology, political science, and law, documents the history of United States scholarship on Japan since 1945.