War and State Building in Medieval Japan (review)

Among the many conference volumes on Japanese history, this one stands out for its brevity and coherence. Perhaps not coincidentally, the two editors are political economists, not historians. Although one of them (Rosenbluth) has published widely on modern Japan, neither editor can claim prior expertise on the subject of this book, which is aptly summarized by its title, War and State Building in Medieval Japan.

War and State Building owes its origins to a workshop held in Kyoto in March 2004, which the editors organized to "bridge the divide between history and social science" (p. v). To that end, they invited six historians of medieval Japan: three Americans (Karl Friday, Carol Richmond Tsang, and Thomas Conlan), one Frenchman (Pierre Souyri), and two Japanese (Susumu Ike and Tsuguharu Inaba), each of whom contributes a chapter to the present volume.

In this volume, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth apply recent (and not-so-recent) theorizing on state formation to the case of late medieval Japan. The basic argument, à la Charles Tilly, is that in Japan, as in Europe, warfare played a crucial role in the emergence of the modern, territorial state. This will hardly come as a surprise to most readers of this journal; it would be difficult, I think, to find a specialist who disagrees with the notion that warfare was a catalyst to state building in late medieval and early modern Japan.

That said, this volume does present a refreshing take on the matter. The editors and several of the contributors (particularly Inaba, Tsang, and Souryi) favor a "bottom-up" approach, focusing on popular movements and resistance rather than the exploits and accomplishments of "great men" such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. According to the editors, peasants' "willingness to supply resources for large armies lies at the root of Japan's political unification in the sixteenth century" (p. 4). More generally, "the main story of the emergence of the modern territorial state is a Hobbesian one of distraught peasants exchanging financial and labor resources for military protection" (pp. 3-4). Although this perspective does not deny the role of military elites, it certainly gives commoners an agency lacking in many older accounts of the state-building process.

Unfortunately, but perhaps unavoidably, the assertion that commoners submitted to higher authority in exchange for protection remains just that—an assertion. The case studies provide much information about community resistance to daimyo rule, but little evidence of how local actors actually viewed their final submission to military authority. So whether they were "rational peasants" making a conscious choice, as the editors imply, or were simply overpowered, as I would guess, is not clear from the material presented in this book. To be fair, however, it may well be that the historical record is silent on the motivation of non-elites, rendering this point moot.

One great strength of War and State Building is its explicitly comparative, multidisciplinary framework. In a sense, one wishes that the editors had gone even further in this regard. For example, the comparisons that Ferejohn and Rosenbluth make with European history are interesting and insightful, but other regions of the world are wholly ignored. The editors also seem to conflate the notion of the "modern, territorial state" with that of the state itself; there is little recognition that other types of state have existed in Japan, Europe, and elsewhere, often well before the period covered by this book. However, these weaknesses are also strengths, because the focus on modern, territorial state building in Japan and Europe contributes to the book's overall coherence and readability. In any case, the editors are to be congratulated for their bold application of theoretical and comparative perspectives to the study of premodern Japanese history—a field badly in need of such outside stimuli, as I will argue below.

This brings me to the six specialized chapters by historians, which can be summarized roughly as follows: Karl Friday, in "They...