How is power connected to land? How do religions work in practice and not simply as ideological discourse? How can we today recover the lived history of how humans anywhere have done their first and most fundamental work—modifying the environment to provide sustenance? To scholars of premodern Japan, spoiled with an abundance of texts that imagine humanity apart from materiality, such questions are not so much food for thought as violently existential challenges. And yet the collected essays in Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan attempt to answer these very questions. The estate (shōen) system has often been portrayed simplistically as the sum total of “private” landholdings in Japan. In Land, Power, and the Sacred, estates are not so much simple parcels of land but rather the framework facilitating a wide range of political, religious, and social activity connecting people of all classes. As one contributor paraphrased pioneering scholar Nagahara Keiji, “the estate was the main social structure” (p. 4).

Scholarly conference volumes have often served as the advance guard of new historical thinking for the premodern Japan field, starting with the leadership of John W. Hall and Jeffrey Mass, who in total produced over a half-dozen edited volumes until Mass's death in 2001. Each of Hall's and Mass's collections served as both a snapshot of the field and the warning shot of its future. They were also paradoxical: simultaneously polemical and didactic; expansive and myopic; inclusive of early career scholars but exclusive to certain institutional cohorts. Land, Power, and the Sacred, organized by senior scholars Joan Piggott, Mass's former student, and Janet Goodwin, fits in with this paradigm, for better or worse. But at its best, Land, Power, and the Sacred eclipses its predecessors by offering new and refreshing lenses on how power, economy, and religion were always grounded, literally, in the structures of the management of the earth.

The introduction and part one, “The Big Picture,” give us multiple openings to contextualize the estate system, and two of these essays are cogent and extremely helpful. Goodwin's introduction raises big questions and clearly justifies the volume and its methodologies, including the intriguing practice of “walking the land” to survey former estates. Similarly helpful and clear is an essay by Sakurai Eiji that connects the history of estates to the medieval economy, charting the rise of cash crops and the increasing supply of metal currency from China. Sakurai's scholarship continues the important, mind-jostling work of that small subset of Japanologists who remind the rest of us that our events took place in a regional context. But these waters are muddied somewhat by Piggott's chapter, which attempts a historiography by summarizing three important Japanese works on estates from the last forty years (from 1978, 1989, and 2013). Researchers will no doubt gain something from being able to consult such a detailed scaffolding of past scholarship, but since each work Piggott lengthily summarizes has its own internal logic, the chapter is a dizzying experience for the uninitiated. I wonder if a general reader would have been better served with one narrative instead of three—Piggott's own mature understanding of estates after decades of her scholarship, perhaps.

A mostly productive tension between expansive and myopic runs throughout the volume. The essays in parts two, “How Do We Know about Estates?” and three, “Making the Land Productive,” tend toward minutiae: sustained, in-depth examinations of single estates and their environmental, political, and economic history. To be fair, these approaches would be better characterized as microscopic rather than myopic—they reveal the benefits and the drawbacks of close inquiry. Nishida Takeshi maintains dogged focus on the geographical and environmental features of cultivation in the Ōbe estate. Hirota Kōji teases out the multi-layered political struggles between proprietors, villagers, nobles, and warriors that marked the history of Hine estate. Piggott traces the seesaw of disputes over Kuroda estate as Tōdaiji temple and the provincial government battled to administer, and define, its boundaries. There are benefits to all three of these chapters, but they each risk missing the forest for the trees. A bit more accommodating is the chapter by Kimura Shigemitsu, who examines the interrelationship between wet (rice) fields and dry (wheat) fields and shows how cultivators and proprietors expanded both types in quite complex configurations. And Endo Motoo uses the history of shifting control over the Ōbe estate as a site to explain medieval record-keeping and preservation practices to the general reader. Both of these essays would be appropriate to assign to graduate or advanced undergraduate students.

Part four, “The Secular and the Sacred,” represents the volume's most effective concerted effort in local history. All four essays deal exclusively with the Ōbe estate (owned by the powerful Tōdaiji temple) and the monk Chōgen (1121–1206)—an example of the hijiri, a kind of charismatic independent contractor—who financed Tōdaiji's reconstruction by fundraising and land cultivation. Each essay here builds on the last, providing context and nuance to Chōgen's multifaceted operation: Nagamura Makoto teases out his tension with Tōdaiji's corporate structure; Oyama Kyōhei explores the diversity of his building projects and of his labor force; Goodwin posits the communal bonds behind his local activity; and Yoshiko Kainuma demonstrates his unique religious vision expressed through the statues and architecture of Jōdoji, a temple he founded. Though the reader may tire of four different ways to introduce the same topics, the range of material on Chōgen's activities (including his autobiography, will, and a contemporary plaque commemorating his work) provide ample rationale for multiple analytical lenses—in fact, I have now worked Chōgen into my lectures on medieval Japan, inspired by this section.

Parts five, “Power, Space, and Trade,” and six, “Power: Challenges and Conflicts,” effectively broaden the focus of the volume to larger time scales and geographies. The sections feature Piggott's own former students (four in total) who introduce some of the exciting new research being done by the next generation. Sachiko Kawai introduces the role of royal women (nyoin) and, though some claims remain speculative, she incisively suggests the ways nyoins’ political alliances, trade routes, and supplies were all bolstered by their control over estates. Rieko Kamei-Dyche returns the focus to the courtly proprietary class with a well-balanced exploration of the Saionji family's multifaceted management, and aggressive pursuit, of estates and their diverse strategic benefits. Michelle Damian builds detailed maps of trading hubs along the Inland Sea to demonstrate the breakdown of the estates’ economic control, highlighting instead the rise of profit-driven movements of goods. And though he stops short of fully contextualizing them, Dan Sherer evaluates two lawsuits against akutō (“evil bands”) from the Ōbe estate and shows some of the contradictions involved in estate proprietors’ use of akutō as a legal category. The two essays by senior scholars here are also clear and insightful: Philip Garrett explores estate land and water disputes in Kii Province but links them to the broader rise of more unified territorial domains under local, rather than capital-based, temples. Noda Taizō details the interventions and depredations of warriors against the Ōbe estate that, despite heated wrangling between proprietors and shogunate officials, inexorably led to the kind of usurpation that would build the warring states domains.

Finally, Ethan Segal's short part seven, “Getting the Word Out,” is a lucid and worthwhile piece on the difficulty of teaching estates, as well as some helpful suggestions for how to incorporate estates into both global and Japanese history classes.

The volume is beautifully produced, with dozens of pristine color plates in addition to many other helpful images, charts, timelines, and tables. The project is also to be commended not only for bringing together both Japanese- and English-speaking scholars in equal measure, but for doing the Japanese scholars justice with effective in-house translations. As in all conference volumes, the value of Land, Power, and the Sacred lies in the brilliance of many of the individual essays and the body of knowledge that accrues after reading through them all. The student or general reader should be content with the former; the specialist would do well to pursue both.