Our understanding of Japan's fourteenth century has long needed greater depth and breadth. In From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth-Century Japan, Thomas Conlan has shifted his gaze from warriors and warfare to throne and court, and particularly to the thinking and influence of royal advisors during the Northern and Southern Courts (Nambokuchō) era from 1336 to 1392. This was the time when two rival courts divided rule over Japan, fueling six decades of civil war. Conlan's book provides significant new insights into the changing politics and mentalité surrounding contested monarchy during those decades. While this book is not an easy read, it contains a wealth of new information for the determined reader who wants to know what happened after the failure of Go-Daigo Tennō's restoration in 1336, and until the time when Ashikaga Yoshimitsu (1358–1408) came to dominate the reunified court as a king-like shogun. Particularly focal players in Conlan's story are two royal protector monks from the Hino family, Kenshun (1299–1357) and Kōzei (1325–79), whom Conlan sees as having initiated a new regime of royal legitimation based on “ritual determinism.”
Conlan begins by introducing the Hino family of administrative nobles who became increasingly powerful at court from the mid-Kamakura Period (1185–1333) onward. Conlan contrasts their administrative style with that of their Heian-period predecessors, especially from the Regents' Line (Sekkanke), because the Hino relied on deductive reasoning rather than precedent—theirs was not an old leading family with detailed journals and records of protocol for reference. We learn too about Go-Daigo's tutor and advisor, Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293–1354), who came from another family of the administrative nobility, the Murakami Genji. Like the Hino, Kitabatake repudiated precedent. For him, the transmission of the regalia—the sword, mirror, and jewel—determined succession to the throne (p. 52).
As Hino and Kitabatake ministers were changing their thinking about the nature of royal legitimacy, Kamakura-period monarchs like Go-Uda (1267–1324) and Go-Daigo (1288–1339) were looking to Shingon Buddhist thought, rites, and institutions to shape their own iconic images as Buddhist kings. By this time, according to Conlan, the Shingon school was primary because it had come to possess an institutional integration that Tendai did not (p. 4).
In particular Conlan spotlights the Hino-family monk Kenshun, whose family then dominated the Northern Jimyōin-line monarch's court. Thanks to his special relationship with Ashikaga Takauji (1305–58), founder of the Ashikaga shogunate, Kenshun became protector monk (gojisō) for both the Northern monarch and the Ashikaga shogun. From that influential position Kenshun argued successfully that Shingon ritual mastery could legitimate rulership. His heir Kōzei, serving as the protector monk for both the shogun Ashikaga Yoshiakira (1330–67) and Go-Kōgon Tennō (1338–74), continued drawing the offices of shogun and monarch closer, such that the shogun, clearly in the dominant position vis-à-vis the Northern monarch that Takauji had enthroned in 1336, emerged in Yoshiakira's day as the primary ritual leader of the Northern court, thereby replacing the monarch in that role. Thus Conlan seems to date the emergence of shogunal kingship from Ashikaga Yoshiakira's time rather than from Yoshimitsu's. Moreover, for Conlan, the impetus for these changes was less the failure of Go-Daigo's royal restoration than the civil war and its violent discontinuities.
This is an ambitious reinterpretation of key issues in fourteenth-century history and as such, needed a longer book to flesh out the story. While Conlan has carefully footnoted his vast array of sources, I nevertheless missed specific engagement with the ideas of other researchers and ongoing debates inside and outside of Japan. The book would also have benefitted from more plentiful translation of primary sources. As it is, it is hard to accept such assertions that Kitabatake Chikafusa was a “nominalist,” or that Kōzei “effortlessly understood the language of power” (p. 149).
Given the centrality of such terms as “ritual” and “sovereignty” for this project, readers also need more discussion of both concepts in historical context. Especially in the case of ritual, thick description and mise-en-scène of some actual events would have helped the reader grasp how such rituals “conjured court and sovereign” (chap. 5). The argument that “ritual mimesis” functioned as a “unifying language of power” (p. 14) also needed extended discussion. It is unfortunate that neither the prologue nor the introduction adequately introduces the book's key arguments. That constitutes a challenge that will limit the audience for this important book.
I wish too that Conlan had demonstrated more interest in the Heian-period roots of his story. In the Japanese historiography, Mikawa Kei and Motoki Yasuo, among others, have stressed the rise of the administrative nobility from the eleventh century onward, as well as their role in increasing factionalism at court. The influence of royal protector monks goes back to Nara times. Shingon institutions, often with princely abbots at their head, were critical to rule by late Heian retired monarchs. Furthermore Shirakawa, Go-Shirakawa (1127–92, r. 1155–58), and Go-Daigo (1288–1339, r. 1318–32, 1333–39) all proclaimed that the monarch was himself the font of precedent. That means that the idea that the will of the ruler should trump past practices was hardly new in the fourteenth century. Ties to the classical past needed more discussion in this book.
I noted a few errors. Hino Meishi would have served as a director (naishi) in the Naishidokoro office of the royal Back Palace (p. 106). And directors (not secretaries) of the Royal Secretariat (Kurōdodokoro) were called Kurōdo no tō (p. 197). I am puzzled by Conlan's thinking when he writes that the court suffered administrative collapse in the tenth century (p. 21). Masakado and Sumitomo at the end of the 930s were both challenges to the court, as was the Owari Petition in 988, but there was no collapse.
I would like to conclude with a word about translation of terms. I have long argued that we need to unify the way we translate Japanese historical terms so that readers will recognize what they read from one book or article to another. To that end, the Historiographical Institute of the University of Tokyo has spent considerable resources in creating a glossary database of foreign translations of Japanese historical terms (http://wwwap.hi.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ships/db-e.html). I do not object to a researcher coming up with new translations, but I do think that the rejection of an older translation needs explanation. Some of Conlan's new translations here seem strange, if not wrong: jusangū is rendered as “sub-retired emperor” when the term meant “equivalent in status to a queen-consort” (p. 129). He renders kajisui as “baptismal water”—“ritual water” would have better avoided the Christian metaphor (p. 154). And sōjō is rendered strangely as “sangha prefect” (pp. 84, 97), which does not communicate that the sōjō was officially the senior Buddhist prelate of the realm as well as head of the Prelates' Office (Sōgō, p. 84). A Chinese character glossary including names and places would have been helpful. And unfortunately there are many copy-editing mistakes that should have been found and fixed before publication.
To conclude, I remain unconvinced by Conlan's argument that the fourteenth-century civil war “stemmed from a fundamental conflict in understanding about the nature of politics and society” (p. 24). By my reading, the ambitions of warriors remain at the crux. Nevertheless, I learned a great deal from reading this book and will recommend it to advanced students. I congratulate the author for encouraging us to look at developments beyond military camp and battlefield during the long fourteenth century, the history of which he has opened up here in exciting new directions.
