Capital and Countryside in Japan, 300–1180: Japanese Historians Interpreted in English, no. 129 in the Cornell East Asia Series, is a collection of essays that discuss center–periphery relations in premodern Japan. Arranged in chronological order, the fourteen essays of the tome provide a lucid overview of the institutional and political transformations that took place on the Japanese archipelago between the fourth and thirteenth centuries. However, there is much more to Capital and Countryside than this simple description indicates.
Each of the essays is a translation/interpretation/explanation of scholarship originally published in Japanese. For the volume's compilation, Joan R. Piggott requested seven “American researcher[s] … to select essays to which they frequently returned, and which are still cited frequently in contemporary scholarship” (p. 1). Exactly why the list of contributors was limited to U.S.(-based) scholars remains unexplained. Given Piggott's strong presence in the work—not only is she the editor of the volume, she also contributed six essays in addition to the introduction—one wonders why interpretations by non-U.S. scholars such as Gina L. Barnes, Charlotte von Verschuer, and Francine Hérail are absent. Possibly as a result of this, Capital and Countryside contains very few references to translations or secondary sources in languages other than English or Japanese.
Nevertheless, in terms of being “a valuable source for everyone interested in premodern Japan” and “useful for advanced courses and seminars in Japanese history” (back cover blurb), Capital and Countryside exceeds expectations, as it makes influential research in Japanese widely accessible to nonspecialists.
The majority of the texts appear in English for the first time; the only exceptions are the contributions by Walter Edwards (chapter 1, “Tsude Hiroshi: Early State Formation in Japan,” pp. 13–53, and chapter 2, “Kobayashi Yukio: Treatise on Duplicate Mirrors,” pp. 54–76). Although abstracted translations of both articles had appeared in English previously, they were given a new, expanded interpretation for Court and Capital.
Furthermore, the tome draws on a wide variety of texts. These include not merely seminal articles interpreted in their entirety—chapter 6, “Takeda Sachiko: Roads in the Tennō-centered Polity” (Piggott, pp. 147–65); chapter 8, “Morita Tei: Toward Regency Leadership at Court” (Piggott, pp. 209–26); and chapter 14, “Koyama Yasunori: East and West in the Late Classical Age” (Bruce L. Batten, pp. 362–401)—or presented in adapted and abstracted form—chapter 5, “Takahashi Tomio: The Classical Polity and its Frontier” (Karl Friday, pp. 128–45). Other essays provide interpretations of particular chapters from a monograph, such as chapter 12, “Motoki Yasuo: Kōfukji in the Late Heian Period” (Mikael S. Adolphson, pp. 298–325) and chapter 13, “Ishimoda Shō: Japan's Medieval World” (Piggott, pp. 326–61), or even summaries of an entire monograph: chapter 4, “Inoue Tatsuo: The Hitachi Fudoki and the Fujiwara” (Michiko Aoki, pp. 103–27), and chapter 9, “Sasaki Muneo: The Court-centered Polity” (Piggott, pp. 227–44).
While some of the texts presented were already meticulously annotated by their original authors, as in the case of chapter 7, “Hotate Michihisa: Traffic Between Court and Countryside in Ritsuryō Japan” (Janet R. Goodwin and Gustav Heldt, pp. 166–208), and chapter 11, “Miyazaki Yasumitsu: The Mino Genji in the Late Classical Age” (Piggott, pp. 280–97), others were not: Chapter 3, “Hara Hidesaburō: Suruga and Tōtōmi in the Kofun Age” (Piggott, pp. 77–101), was originally delivered as a lecture to a nonspecialist audience. Furthermore, differences between Western and Japanese scholarly writing styles needed to be overcome: see, for example, chapter 10, “Toda Yoshimi: Kyoto and the Estate System in the Heian Period” (Janet Goodwin, pp. 245–79, esp. p. 248), and chapter 13 (esp. p. 326). In each case, the commentator-interpreters have made every effort to make the arguments even more lucid by adding new maps and tables, as well as supplementary footnotes providing further explanation or referring to more recent research. As a result, the tome presents the reader with a succinct overview of ongoing debates concerning state formation, administrative process, and the expansion and decline of central power between 300 and 1180.
Capital and Countryside concludes with concise descriptions of most primary sources and documentary collections mentioned (pp. 403–16), a glossary of selected terminology (pp. 417–41), and an extensive bibliography (pp. 442–70), all of which increase its value as a reference work for students and scholars of Japan's pre-thirteenth-century history. However, because half of the essays (chapters 1–6 and 8) contained in the volume rely on Chinese texts, it is a pity that these were not included in the annotated list of primary sources.
Capital and Countryside is very much the work of Joan Piggott. At times, the burden of this gargantuan task shows in her writing—for example, when she is almost literally repeating a section from the translation in the preceding introduction (“The tennō-centered polity … at each station,” pp. 147, 150—the only differences being the addition of umaya and of references to a map). But this is just a minor quibble; Piggott deserves to be applauded for her relentless efforts in making scholarship on premodern Japan accessible to a wide audience. Concurrent with Capital and Countryside, Piggott co-edited Dictionnaire des sources du Japon classique (Dictionary of Sources of Classical Japan) with Ivo Smits, Michel Viellard-Baron, Ineke Van Put, and Charlotte von Verschuer (Paris: Collège de France, 2006). This trilingual dictionary, of which an online draft version is hosted by the Historiographical Institute at the University of Tokyo (Tōkyō daigaku shiryō hensanjo) at http://www.hi.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ships/shipscontroller, contains detailed information on Japan's pre-thirteenth-century primary sources.
Since the publication of Capital and Countryside in 2006, other works discussing state formation and center–periphery relations have appeared in English. These include Gina L. Barnes, State Formation in Japan: Emergence of a 4th-Century Ruling Elite (London: Routledge, 2007); Mikael S. Adolphson, Edward Kamens, and Stacie Matsumoto, Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2007); and Herman Ooms, Imperial Politics and Symbolics in Ancient Japan: The Tenmu Dynasty, 650–800 (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2008). Finally, in her interpretation of Sasaki Muneo's monograph (chapter 9), Piggott points to the lack of English-language scholarship on “how … monarch, regent, retired monarch, senior nobles, and controllers called shikiji benkan, who were concurrent members of the Royal Secretariat, [carried] out tasks of governance” (p. 230). Fortunately for us, she has recently made a further attempt at filling this gap in the edited volume Teishinkōki: Year 939 in the Journal of Regent Fujiwara no Tadahira (Ithaca, N.Y.: East Asia Program Cornell University, 2009).
