State of War: The Violent Order of Fourteenth-Century Japan (review)

English-language scholarship, as if by unspoken agreement, has traditionally kept much of the history of Japan's complicated fourteenth century at arm's length. True, Andrew Goble's study of Go-Daigo's abortive attempt to revive imperial authority in his Kenmu: Go-Daigo's Revolution dealt with one crucial segment of it, the years from 1321 to 1335. But the long aftermath, the 50-odd years during which two imperial courts butted heads in the pursuit of legitimacy, has been almost totally untouched. Not since 1971, when Paul Varley devoted a chapter to the Nanbokuchō in his Imperial Restoration in Medieval Japan, has anyone dared set foot in that particular briar patch. Instead, over the intervening years, survey histories have done little more than give it an oblique and apprehensive glance before racing on, with evident relief, to the more manageable chaos of the Muromachi bakufu. To cite just one example, the index to Medieval Japan, the third volume of The Cambridge History of Japan, directs the reader to just three Nanbokuchō references, each one of them cursory.

This observation is not meant to be taken as criticism. One can readily understand why historians, hoping that readers will not notice the omission, have tiptoed unobtrusively around the fringes of such a muddle. Civil wars, even when fought by two well-defined parties with sharply contrasting aims, still resist comfortable explanation, especially when, on the ground, opportunities to settle private scores sometimes blur more lofty motives. Imagine then the difficulties of tracking events in Japan over the years between 1336 and 1392, as Thomas Conlan has done in the book under review. In the Nanbokuchō period, instead of two well-defined parties espousing radically different aims, there was a myriad of actors, sometimes forming alliances of convenience, at others breaking them just as easily. Despite the rhetoric, all of the disorder was dictated by one principle, and one principle only—and that the most basic: down and dirty pragmatism. The pattern was set by one of the chief instigators of the turmoil, Ashikaga Takauji, who, on the evidence, seems to have deserved Kitabatake Chikafusa's condemnation as "a thief without merit or virtue." This, after all, was a warrior who, after pledging loyalty to the Hōjō early in 1333, within just a few months had changed sides to support Go-Daigo, only to turn against him toward the end of 1335. Then, later, in 1351, still exclusively preoccupied with his own ambitions, Takauji suddenly began to make overtures to that same Southern Court he had spent years pursuing through the Yoshino mountains. If a leading actor could behave like this, then we have no right to expect the multitude of bit players to conduct themselves otherwise. To be sure, the element of self-interest can be detected through earlier periods of Japan's history, where warriors seem to have been sporadically at war with each other for immediate benefits, but never to such an extent as in the years of the Northern and Southern Courts.

It was not that there were no well-defined principles to choose between in this long, drawn-out struggle. There were two, one supporting the legitimacy of the Northern Court, the Jimyōin branch of the imperial line, and the other, the Daikakuji branch, represented by the Southern Court. It would be difficult to imagine any issue quite so clear cut. The trouble was that none of those involved in the fighting seemed to care very much for either side, rather cherishing agendas of their own, and switching sides from time to time, back and forth, as those agendas dictated. Exceptions are very thin on the ground, with perhaps the most notable being Kitabatake Chikafusa, the courtier who gave his life, and that of his eldest son, barely 20 years old, in the service of what proved to be a lost cause.

It...