Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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structure of Japan’s role in the current world system. One the one hand, the choices

speak to the contemporaneousness of the changing economic activities from inside

the political and cultural boundaries of the nation-state to the new de-territorialized

and disengaged flow of globalization. With its major manufacturing sectors moving

overseas and the gradual opening of its heretofore protected domestic market, ‘‘Made

in China’’ is only a symptom of a larger structural transformation of Japanese

capitalism since the 1970s. On the other hand, the juxtaposition also symbolizes

the shift from manufacturing of ‘‘hard’’ goods to the exporting of ‘‘soft’’ entertain-

ment, of which Suzuki Ichiro

is only the latest example.

What this radical shift conceals, however, is the persistent ambivalence of Japan in-

between East and West, an irreducible characteristic of Japanese modernity since the

late ninete enth century. Ichiro

is a ‘‘real deal’’ (honmono) only after his proven success

in the West despite his numerous achievements in Japan. It is only through the

recognition and approval of the West that the worth of a Japanese identity can be

realized. The narrative of Japan’s move from being a producer of hardware to an

exporter of software and China’s emergence as a global factory reinforces the devel-

opmentalist rhetoric of modernization discourse that gives rise to a hierarchy of

national development (advanced, developed, developing, underdeveloped) that ig-

nores the highly uneven development within these economic units. We should recall

that the emergence of Japan as a modern nation-state required not only the recog-

nition of the West through its own version of imperialism and colonialism, but also

the overturning and inverting of the historical superior–infe rior relationship between

China and Japan, and its disengagement from the Sinocentric subsystem into the

world of global colonialism.

US hegemony notwithstanding, it has been argued that capitalism, divorced for the

first time from its histo rically specific origins in Europe, has become an authentically

global abstraction.

This de-territorialization is accompanied by a spatial displace-

ment of capitalist epicenters, from Western Europe since the sixteenth century to

North America in the twentieth century, to East Asia in the new millennium. Each

change of command in the capitalist world economy reflects the ‘‘victory’’ of a

‘‘new’’ region over an ‘‘old’’ region. Whether a fresh change of command and a

new stage of capitalist development are imminent remain unclear, especially in the

wake of post-9/11 US ‘‘new imperialism.’’ The displacement of an ‘‘old’’ region

(North America) by a ‘‘new’’ region (East Asia) as the most dynamic concentration of

processes of capital accumulation is already a reality.

China, of course, plays a significant role in the reconfiguration of this ‘‘new’’

hegemony and will continue to do so. Predictably, there are growing alarmist and

opportunist readings of Japan’s relation to the re-emergence of China. While some

see China as a threat to Japan, both economically and militarily, others see China as

presenting an unprecedented business opportunity for the sagging Japanese econ-

omy. The resurgence of China bears an uncanny similarity to the ‘‘tributary system’’

of the Sinocentric imperium where Japan existed as a subordinate unit.

If we recall

that Japan’s ascendance to the status of a modern power was through its disassoci-

ation from the Sinocentric world order, what would a seeming return to a China-

centered regionality mean for Japan and its relationship with Asia? What would

‘‘Japan in Asia’’ mean in the region where Japan is no longer an Asian exception,

but simply an Asian nation without qualifi cation?

420 LEO CHING

NOTES

1 Fukuzawa, ‘‘On Leaving Asia,’’ pp. 351–2.

2 Okakura, The Ideals of the East,p.1.

3 Ibid., pp. 3–4.

4 Ibid., p. 244.

5 Sun, ‘‘How Does Asia Mean? (Part 1),’’ p. 21.

6 Okakura, The Ideals of the East, pp. 8–9.

7 Ching, Becoming ‘‘Japanese,’’ p. 26.

8 Pempel, ‘‘Trans-Pacific Torii,’’ p. 49.

9 Ibid., p. 53.

10 Ibid., p. 56.

11 Ibid., p. 57.

12 Twu, To

shihonshugi, pp. 169–71.

13 Harootunian, The Empire’s New Clothes, p. 78.

14 Ching, ‘‘Globalizing the Regional,’’ p. 251.

15 Harootunian, The Empire’s New Clothes, p. 80.

16 Pempel, ‘‘Trans-Pacific Torii,’’ p. 57.

17 Ibid., p. 60.

18 Hanasaki, ‘‘Decolonialization,’’ p. 71.

19 Ibid., pp. 71–2.

20 Fujioka, ‘‘Jigyaku shikan’’ no byo

ri.

21 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, p. 35.

22 Ibid., p. 155.

23 Kobayashi, Shin gomanizumu sengen special Taiwanron,p.8.

24 Iwabuchi, Recentering Globalization, p. 176.

25 Pempel, ‘‘Trans-Pacific Torii,’’ p. 51.

26 Dirlik, After the Revolution, p. 51.

27 Arrighi, Hamashita, and Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia, p. 269.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arrighi, Giovanni, Hamashita Takeshi, and Selden, Mark, eds. The Resurgence of East Asia: 500,

150, and 50 Year Perspectives. London: Routledge, 2003.

Ching, Leo. ‘‘Globalizing the Regional, Regionalizing the Global: Mass Culture and Asianism

in the Age of Late Capital.’’ Public Culture 12:1 (2000): 233–57.

Ching, Leo. Becoming ‘‘Japanese’’: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Dirlik, Arif. After the Revolution: Waking to Global Capitalism. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan

University Press, pub. by University Press of New England, 1994.

Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake Of World War II. New York: Norton,

1999.

Fujioka Nobukatsu. ‘‘Jigyaku shikan’’ no byo

ri. Tokyo: Bungei Shunju

, 1997.

Fukuzawa Yukichi. ‘‘On Leaving Asia’’ (1885). In David Lu, ed., Japan: A Documentary

History. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996.

Hanasaki Ko

hei. ‘‘Decolonialization and Assumption of War Responsibility.’’ Inter-Asia Cul-

tural Studies 1:1 (2000): 71–84.

Harootunian, Harry D. The Empire’s New Clothes: Paradigm Lost, and Regained. Chicago:

Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.

JAPAN IN ASIA 421

Higashi Ajia Bunshitetsu Nettowaku, ed. Kobayashi Yoshinori ‘‘Taiwanron’’ o koete. Tokyo:

Sakuhinsha, 2001.

Iwabuchi Ko

ichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

Kato

Norihiro. Haisengoron. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1997.

Katzenstein, Peter, and Shiraishi, Takashi, eds. Network Power: Japan and Asia. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1997.

Kobayashi Yoshinori. Shin gomanizumu sengen special Taiwanron. Tokyo: Shogakkan, 2000.

Koschmann, J. Victor. ‘‘Asianism’s Ambivalent Legacy.’’ In Peter Katzenstein and Takashi

Shiraishi, eds., Network Power: Japan and Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,

1997.

McCormack, Gavan. The Emptiness of Japanese Affluence, 2nd rev. edn. Armonk, NY: M. E.

Sharpe, 2001.

Oguma Eiji. A Genealogy of ‘‘Japanese’’ Self-Images, trans. David Askew. Melbourne: Trans

Pacific Press, 2002.

Okakura Kakuzo

. The Ideals of the East with Special Reference to the Art of Japan (1903). New

York: ICG Muse, 2002.

Pempel, T. J. ‘‘Trans-Pacific Torii: Japan and the Emerging Asian Regionalism.’’ In Peter

Katzenstein and Takashi Shiraishi, eds., Network Power: Japan and Asia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1997.

Sun Ge. ‘‘How Does Asia Mean? (Part 1).’’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1:1 (2000): 13–47.

Sun Ge. ‘‘How Does Asia Mean? (Part 2).’’ Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 1:2 (2000): 319–

41.

Tanaka, Stefan. Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History. Berkeley: University of California

Press, 1993.

Twu, Jaw-Yann. To

shihonshugi. Tokyo: Ko

dansha, 1990.

FURTHER READING

The most comprehensive and concise assessment of the concept of ‘‘Asia’’ in Japanese

intellectual history is Sun Ge’s two-part essay ‘‘How Does Asia Mean?’’ which was

published in the inaugural and second issue of Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (1:1

(2000): 13–47; 1:2 (2000): 319–41). David Askew’ s translation of Oguma Eiji’s A

Genealogy of ‘‘Japanese’’ Self-Images (Melbourne: Trans Pacific Press, 2002) provides

a historical account of various contested discourses on Japan’s self-identity through

the construction of its modern empire and argues that the myth of Japanese

ethnic homogeneity was a postwar derivation that effaced the traces of Japanese

imperialism and colonization in Asia. Stefan Tanaka’s Japan’s Orient (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1993) is a powerful and lucid study of how the concept

of to

shi (Oriental Studies) authorized a particularistic view of Japan’s place in the

modern world system that not only posited Japan’s equivalence to the West, but

also reversed the historical subordinate position of Japan to imperial China. For

postwar and recent discussions on Japan and Asia, Peter Katzenstein and Takashi

Shiraishi’s coedited Network Power: Japan and Asia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University

Press, 1997) is indispensable; T. J. Pempel and J. Victor Koschmann’s contributions

to the volume are especially useful in delineating the postwar re-emergence of

Asian regionalism and the legacy of colonial Asianism respectively. For a critique

of the resurgence of neo-nationalism in 1990s Japan, the special issue of the

South Atlantic Quarterly, ‘‘Millennial Japan: Rethinking the Nation in the Age of

422 LEO CHING

Recession,’’ edited by Tomiko Yoda and Harry Harootunian, of fers many insights.

Iwabuchi Ko

ichi’s Recentering Globalization (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,

2002) examines the circulation of Japanese popular culture in Asia and the increasing

albeit asymmetrical intra-regional flows bet ween Japan and its neighbors. For a

historical perspective on the return to a Sinocentric hegemony, see Giovanni Arrighi,

Hamashita Takeshi, and Mark Selden, eds., The Resurgence of East Asia (London:

Routledge, 2003).

JAPAN IN ASIA 423

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Center and Periphery in Japanese

Historical Studies

Michael Lewis

Introduction

Historians have widely, if at times casually and implicitly, used the idea of center and

periphery to interpret Japanese history. Their work has explored the political, eco-

nomic, military, and cultural centers – Yamatai, Yamato, the imperial court, Kyoto,

the shogunate, Kanto

, Edo, Osaka, Tokyo, Tokyo University, the Ministry of Finance

– that abound on both material and mental maps. Studies have also described the

dependent places, people, and institutions locked in orbit, however wobbly, around

these ‘‘cor es.’’ In general, the common approac h has conformed to a basic definition

of the center–periphery bond as ‘‘geographical, economic, social, cultural, and pol-

itical structures that exist in space in order to indicate some kind of hierarchical and

polarized organization of this space.’’

The center–pe riphery mod el originated in the social sciences, where its elasticity

allowed for a wide variety of applications. Writing in the 1960s, the sociologist

Edward Shils was among the first to use it to explain a ‘‘consensualist’’ society in

which the metropolitan center is the site for creating and propagating cultural values.

According to Shils, people on the margins not only defer to these values , but in their

mental maps also identify their particular social and cultural place in relation to the

metropolitan pole star.

In contrast to Shils, Immanuel Wallerstein, who developed

‘‘world-system theory,’’ employs ‘‘core and periphery’’ to explain conflict instead of

consensus. Drawing on Marx, Lenin, and dependency theories of imperialism, Wal-

lerstein and his followers treat not single societies but transnational cores and per-

ipheries, along with intermediate ‘‘semi-peripheries,’’ to explain the origins and

contradictions of the modern capitalist world. As an antidote to the optimistic

metanarrative of modernization theory, world system theory delineates how first-

world indust rialized states (cores) dominate and exploit the third world through

manipulation of semi-peripheral developing states. The dominance of core states

expands as they benefit from the inequa lities inherent in the system while insuring

dependency and underdevelopment everywhere else. As a theory of change grounded

in a Leninist dialecti c, howe ver, cores are not immortal. The system’s contradictions

can ultimately end in revolution.

Historians of Japan have adopted and adapted the idea of center and periphery as a

tool for exploring the past within Japan’s historical and modern borders as well as

A Companion to Japanese History

Edited by William M. Tsutsui

through its regional and international ties. In a manner paralleling the idea’s flexible

use in other disciplines, the model has been used to explain the cooperative working

of social, political, and economic hierarchies across time and space and the cr eation

of consensus among rulers and ruled. It has also been used to demonstrate exploit-

ation and dependence in explorations of dominant political, economic, and

cultural hegemonies. Although not as often, it has occasionally been applied to

determining Japan’s place in a world economic and polit ical system. This position

has ranged from the periphery, semi-periphery, and at the core depending on the

historical moment.

The concept of reflexivity, that the periphery can influence the core and that central

values and institutions can be reshaped by ideas and actions at the margins, has wor n

away any kind of definitional rigidity in the center–periphery approach. In the practice

of Japanese history, as was the case early on in work done in other histories and social

science disciplines, it was also recognized that people exist in a relativistic world of

multiple centers and peripheries and that these change over time. Furthermore, the

creation of this plural order is not just a modern phenomenon or one linked to

capitalist development , but something that has occurred over long premodern his-

torical periods within a constellation of changing regional relations. These consider-

ations have softened any kind of binary or economically determined use of the center–

periphery model.

The narrower use of cores and peripheries in Wallersteinian theory has also been re-

evaluated. In part, this has resulted from the collapse of the Soviet state and its

periphery and the realization that Wallerstein’s theoretical model insufficiently

matches observable reality. The recognition that non-economic factors, particularly

cultural factors, significantly shape political and social linkages has also called forth

more expansive uses of center–periphery approaches appli ed to the world before the

emergence of modern capitalism. Recently, historians and archaeologists of Japan

have used the world system theory to describe Japan’s place in a premodern, indeed

even prehistoric, regional order in Asia.

Variable Centers, Porous Peripheries: Amino Yoshihiko and Premodern

Japanese History’s Modern Implications

Few if any serious historians or geographers accept the notion that Japan emerged in

a single location inhabited by one ethnically homogeneous people. Nevertheless, the

idea that Japan was settled by several groups coming from the Asian mai nland

and Southeast Asia, which ultimately created a highly centralized and uniform culture

that was distinctly ‘‘Japanese’’ continues in Nihonjinron discourse. The geographical

and temporal cradle for this centering is the Yamato ‘‘state’’ near present day Nara

during the fifth and sixth centuries. The creators of the Yamato order are said to

have been strongly influenced by Chinese models of statecraft that shaped the

practices of the ritsuryo

system of criminal and civil laws. The order also adapted

notions of political mapping that established units of governance, some more nom-

inal than substantial, over wide areas of the main islands of Honshu

, Shikoku, and

Kyu

shu

CENTER AND PERIPHERY 425

In past historical and geographical accounts, this Kinai state, literally the region

‘‘within the boundaries,’’ established an essential core that within a few centuries

developed into an imperial institution. By the time it came to be based at a new

capital, Heian-kyo

, this center had become a political, economic, and cultural me-

tropolis within a network of secondary cities and peripheral regions demarcated

as subordinate political units. Trunk roads (do

) connected the Kinai center with the

major peripheral regions (also called do

but me aning areal units), which cont ained

‘‘provinces’’ (kuni) and were subdivided into still smaller administrative units includ-

ing post and temple towns, districts, and go or ri (loosely translatable as ‘‘villages’’).

According to traditional accounts – and still present in versions of the Nihonjinron

discourse – this or derly landscape was peop led by groups distinguished by memb er-

ship in sacred and secular occupational estates (inherited in some cases) and depen-

dent on an agrarian economy supported by rice-growing peasant farmers. The

essential characteristics of this original ‘‘Japan’’ were ethnic unity, control of con-

tiguous territory, and integrated political rule based on shared recognition of cen-

tralized secular and sacred authority. Although this capsule description is necessarily a

caricature, it nonetheless captures the essence of a static and agreeably neat model

that has enjoyed wide cur rency.

Amino Yoshihiko has demolished this unified image. Through essays and books

written since the 1970s, notable for their popularity among the Japanese reading

public as well as professional historians in and outside Japan, Amin o has steadily

hammered away at both the general and specific arguments supportive of Japan’s

early ethnic and political unity. Instead of a single core, he posits a multiplicity of

centers and peripheries and accordingly downplays the supposedly superior political

potency of Kinai ruling groups. Overall, the revision constitutes a kind of reversal of a

Copernican-like Yamato-centered explanation in favor of historical depiction based

on far broader and less concise considerations. Among the most important are the

varying influences of the natural environment, the diversity of the premodern econ-

omy and occupational groups, and the varieties of trade and diplomatic ties within

Asia.

Although Amino has been known primarily as a scholar of medieval history,

his work questions Japan’s earliest origins and has implications for the contempor-

ary understanding of Japanese ethnic identity. In iconoclastic arguments that are as

blunt as they are powerful, he dismis ses noti ons of any sort of original ‘‘Japanese’’

people or place concluding that ‘‘the argument that from Jo

mon times there

has been in Japan a ‘single race’ and a ‘single state’ is a baseless fabrication.’’

also calls into question the association of the imperial house as ruling over a

uniform agrarian society in which those of the periphery were in absolute thrall to

those at the center. On this issue he concludes that ‘‘the proposition that the society

has been agricultural from ancient times until now is dubious. Consequently, the

notion that the emperor, as one of the kings born into this society, might be

described as exclusively connected with paddy fields is completely wrong.’’

Taking

the emperor out of the sacred rice fields may appear to be a minor point. But

Amino’s argument is a power ful revis ion that breaks the imperial institution’s

monopoly on secular and sacred symbolism by demonstrating that people

joined together to pursue plural ‘‘medieval utopias.’’

His questioning even

extends to raising doubts about the historical applicability of the word ‘‘Japan’’

426 MICHAEL LEWIS

(Nihon), which he contends at best enjoyed limited and contested use during the

premodern period.

Overall, Amino’s scholarship works to decenter our understanding of the origins of

what eventually became the modern Japanese nation-state. In searching for new

origins and elevating the importance of diverse historical actors, his arguments

necessarily raise doubts about the legitimacy of the modern imperial institution and

the necessity of sacrifices made in the name of sanctity which he finds entirely

specious. While demoting the historical significance of a single central imperial

order, Amino endorses the importance of Japan as being composed of variou s

autonomous or semi-autonomous zones in coastal regions and mountain settlements.

Within these zones, some of them frontiers, people worked in a variety of callings, not

just as peasant farmers, but also as fisherfolk, traders, potters, and silk weavers.

One of the most important arguments Amino makes on the basis of lively pre-

modern non-farming economic activity is that capitalism developed far earlier in this

decentralized order than has been previously understood. H e demonstrates its ap-

pearance in studies of medieval temple moneylenders, the use of monetary instru-

ments in financial transactions, and payment of taxes in commodities other than

grain. He concludes that as early as the fourteenth century regions within Japan

had already experienced ‘‘growth in commerce, industry, finance, and shipping, the

close-knit development of a distribution system necessary for supporting a stable

credit economy, and thriving trade and other contacts ranging from northern East

Asia all the way down to Southeast Asia.’’

Amino’s work on contentious regional

relations between different groups within Japan, which he associates with the exist-

ence of a basic east–west divide, argues for variable political and economic centers

with their own or shared peripheries . As he makes plain in his discussion of the rise

and decline of the Nara–Kyoto-based imperial order, Japan’s history has not been a

unidirectional march toward ever greater political and economic centralization, but

one of twists and turns and even backtracking as regional fortunes changed over time.

Amino has been joined by other historians in Japan who, if less absolute in their

revision of premodern center–periphery relations, endorse his doubts about the

state’s unified origins. They also tend to view Japan’s heterogeneous past as a

construct repeatedly contested and remade before it became ‘‘Japanese history’’ in

relatively modern times. Murai Sho

suke is rep resentative in viewing the borders of

medieval Japan as existing less as hard and fast lines than as zones which, accordion-

like, expanded and contracted. Following Amino, he de-emphasizes the agrarian

basis of premodern Japan in highlighting the importance of trade relations at frontier

zones. These ties involved economic exchange and indicated places where ethnical ly

identical people engaged in ‘‘foreign’’ trade within the space now known as Japan.

At the same time, other groups in coastal ports and harbors partici pated in exchanges

that were almost ‘‘domestic’’ even though they engaged ethnically different

partners from across the China Sea, the Sea of Japan, and from the Ryu

kyu

s and

Hokkaido

Bruce Batten has expanded on the decentering work of Amino, Murai, and others

by applying various social science theories across far wider time frames. In To the Ends

of Japan: Premodern Frontiers, Boundaries, and Interactions he explicitly poses ‘‘big

questions’’ such as ‘‘What is ‘Japan’?’’ ‘‘When did it come to be?’’ ‘‘How did it

change over time?’’ and ‘‘How does it fit into the larger world?’’ His attempts to

CENTER AND PERIPHERY 427

answer these queries aim at creating nothing less than ‘‘a new synthesis on Japanese

history.’’

Batten’s wide-ranging study uses center and periphery both as a generic

concept and as world system theory to describe the creation of ethnic difference

within Japan. The approach distinguishes his work from Amino’s. But when it comes

to cases, many of their conclusions are mutually supporting. Both emphasize flexible

borders and frontiers, not as ‘‘places’’ but as ‘‘margins or interfaces’’ in economic,

political, and cultural contact with a Japan that was multi-centered until it emerged as

a ‘‘nation-state’’ in the nineteenth century.

Until that time, Batten depicts Japan as

both a world system in its own right and a subsystem within Asia. Thereafter, its

economic, political, and military networks merged with those of the wider capitalist

world and ‘‘Japan lost all claims to systemic integrity.’’

By questioning popularly accepted notions of national unity and singular origins,

erasing any distinct borderlines separating historical Japan from non-Japan, and

reassessing the process that forged Japanese ethnic identity, Amino and kindred

historians have gone beyond rearranging the conceptual furniture to knocking

down walls and opening new doorways. Although much of the work of what might

be loosely called the ‘‘Amino school’’ has been done to explain the premodern past, it

has been, like all good history, indubitably present-minded. Rereading the premo-

dern has forced reconsiderations of both what it means to be ‘‘Japanese,’’ and the

basis for any pretensions of cultural or ethnic uniqueness based on Nihonjinron

notions.

As might be expected, historical revision so sweeping has ca lled forth criticism.

Some of this has come from citizens offended by new interpretations that fail to

support an unambiguous national identity based on unique blood and soil origins.

Less easy to discount is criticism by serious historians who question the revisionists’

methods and conclusions. One noticeable drawback to Amino’s work is that it tends

to be more convincing when it explains what was not than what was. When moving

from puncturing received explanations to creating new interpretations, extrapolation

at times outruns empirically thin evidence. Although the Amino school’s composite

portrait of premodern Japan is far more colorful, lively, and diverse than the mono-

chromatic uniformity of an emperor-centered, rice-based agrarian society, aspects of

the newer image are nonetheless impressionistic. Likewise, pushing back the advent

of capitalism to the thirteenth century (or earlier), while an exciting transformation of

how we have consider ed the past, risks anachronistically confusing premodern

methods of exchange with more modern economic systems. These reservations

notwithstanding, Amino and kindred researchers have contributed greatly to a fresh

understanding of Japan’s past.

Medieval Japan: Bringing the Warriors Back In, Village Views,

and New Discourses on Spatiality and Power

In the essays in The Cambridge History of Japan, volume 3, Medieval Japan, identi-

fiable centers continue to exert a good deal of autonom ous authority.

Although

power sharing mediates their political influence, the Heian court, Kamakura and

Muromachi shogunates, and Buddhist establishments nevertheless mai ntain familiar

institutional identities. Chapters on economic changes generally, and on the sho

en in

428 MICHAEL LEWIS

particular, impart a sense that the story is following a sturdy and familiar plotline that

will culminate at a new starting point of recentralization.

Since the appearance of the Cambridge volume, new studi es have appeared

that shift the focus from central institutions to take a closer look at changes on

the periphery as they develop in their own right. Pierre Francois Souryi’s appropri-

ately titled work, The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society, does

this by suggesting the entire medieval period from 1180 to 1600 was one of ‘‘those

below overturning those above’’ (gekokujo

). His emphasis on the key role of warrior

politics and social relations gives the samurai and commoner groups pivotal roles

in reshaping the history of the medieval period. His interest in groups on the

peripheries accordingly leads him to give less attention to the longevity and adapt-

ability of central institutions. Souryi focuses instead on the dispersal of political

power and increases in local autonomy, which he contends began about two centuries

before the usually accepted date in the fourteenth century. According to his

interpretation, changes from the twelfth century brought forth a full-scale social

transformation by the Muromachi period. Although some standard histories

have viewed the age as one of ‘‘decline,’’ Souryi argues that it was in fact a time

of social dynam ism, artistic creativity, and economic growth.

The influence

of Amino Yoshihiko is reflected in this decentered vision. In place of an overriding

concern with the fate of once stable central institution s, he pays more attention to

the lively social conditions that were transforming Japan from the margins inward.

Here he finds populations who did not live their lives as somehow peripheral to

either court or shogunate. This emphasis is particularly evident in his discussion

of the Muromachi and sengoku periods. In chapters titled ‘‘Emancipation of

the Serfs,’’ ‘‘The People of the Sea,’’ ‘‘Dancers and Courtesans,’’ and ‘‘The Pariah,’’

Souryi makes clear that the actions of grou ps of commoners at the ‘‘margins’’

played an important role in shaping the social and economic history of the medieval

order.

Historians have not universally accepted Souryi’s depiction of medieval Japan as a

world overturned. In criticisms resembling those leveled at Amino’s work, Souryi has

been taken to task for being stronger on enthusiasm than empirical evidence. His

interpretation has a lso been challenged as too eager to discard previous explanations,

particularly those that stress the continuing importance of the court and shogunate

throughout most of the me dieval period. His pushing back the gekokujo

age to 1180

also gives only passing consideration to that hoary institution of the sho

en and the

evolution of medieval land relations. The criticisms tend to recenter what Souryi has

attempted to decenter. Yet, his work to shift the focus from central institutions and a

center-outward perspective is a contribution that has undeniably enlivened medieval

studies.

Hitomi Tonomura’s work demonstrates that redirecting attention from the center

to the margins need not require turning the world upside down, but simply shifting

the level of analysis to the village. Her Community and Commerce in Late Medieval

Japan: The Corporat e Villagers of Tokuchin-ho scrutinizes the so

, ‘‘a village-based

corporate group marked by various forms of collective ownership and administra-

tion.’’

In a study that is reminiscent of historical ethnography, Tonomura considers

how local farmers, merchants, and others interacted and coped with demands im-

posed by major central institutions. This latter group includes the emperor, court,

CENTER AND PERIPHERY 429