Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (review)

In his new book, Karl Friday describes the rise of the Japanese military estate from the tenth to the fourteenth century as an evolutionary process, rejecting the idea that any "dramatic revolution" led Japan's celebrated samurai to dominance.

Friday takes the point of view not only that war can "create, define and defend both states and peoples" but also that society and political system can influence the shape and purposes of warfare. In his chosen time frame, Friday contends, warfare in Japan gradually extended in scope and intensity, but essentially remained the same until the end of the fourteenth century. Given the posited mutual interaction between society and war, this conclusion would logically lead us to think that Japanese society did not change dramatically in the period under study. But in seeming or partial contradiction of his own starting point, Friday concludes (on p. 166) that while "the fourteenth century was an era of thoroughgoing social and political change, with attendant consequences for the conduct of war," at the same time military "goals and tactics did not change in any fundamental way" (p. 168).

By employing the phrase "early medieval Japan" prominently in his title, Friday implicitly links his work to a revisionist view of premodern Japanese history, pioneered among others by the late Jeffrey Mass, which posits that the Japanese warrior class did not reach complete dominance before the fourteenth century and that it did so largely due to the political convulsions and constant warfare of that age. Yet Friday stakes out what may be described as a safe middle ground. Rather than having the Japanese Middle Ages start only in the fourteenth century and end perforce in the middle of the sixteenth, he speaks of an early medieval period that lasted from roughly the tenth to the fourteenth century. The late medieval period falls outside the scope of his book.

For any study of the antecedents of the Japanese samurai, the so-called ritsuryō military system is a logical starting point. In his introduction, and later in chapter two, Friday outlines how this imported system quickly lost its efficacy in the changing Japanese situation and how from the eighth to the middle of the tenth century "the court moved from a conscripted, publicly trained military force to one composed of privately trained, privately equipped professional mercenaries" (p. 6). The ground is familiar here, both to Friday and to readers of his earlier work.

Concurrent with and contributing to the above development was the emergence of a provincial warrior elite that maintained close ties with the central government and its leading court nobles. The provincial warriors can be divided into two main categories, one tracing their lineage back to local chieftains of the pre-ritsuryō period, the other being the "descendants of cadet branches of central court houses—the Minamoto, the Fujiwara, the Tachibana and the Taira—that had established bases in the provinces" (p. 9).

Yet the emergence of a warrior order should not be equated with the onset of feudalism in Japan—as has often been done in parallel with the European situation. Friday points out that even Japan's first warrior government, the Kamakura bakufu, should be seen more as an outgrowth and supplement to the older imperial polity than as an immediate challenge to it. The balance of power between the civil and military authorities continued until the end of the fourteenth century, from which time onward warriors and not courtiers dominated the scene in Japan. At that same juncture, the preferred battle technique of the early medieval samurai, mounted archery, made way for new strategic and tactical paradigms that were focused on the capture or defense of territory and based on the massive deployment of infantry.

Friday analyzes his subject of early medieval Japanese warfare from five angles: how war was legitimized, how armies were raised, which weapons were used, how war was actually fought, and what were the rules of the...