From Sovereign to Symbol: An Age of Ritual Determinism in Fourteenth-Century Japan by Thomas Donald Conlan (review)

About two decades ago, Jeffrey P. Mass (1940–2001) gathered scholars from Europe, Japan, and North America at the University of Oxford for a conference to question the common assumption that the age of the warrior began with the end of the Genpei War in 1185. Over the years he had come to the conclusion that the Kamakura bakufu supported the entrenched court-centered system by containing the provincial warrior class rather than bolstering its challenge of the Kyoto elites, and that the fourteenth century therefore marked the true beginning of a warrior age.¹ Thomas Conlan’s From Sovereign to Symbol further underscores the importance of the fourteenth century as a period of dramatic change and transition. However, in a view contrasting with previous interpretations that extolled the primacy of Zen thought and institutions under Ashikaga patronage,² Conlan argues that Shingon rituals became so important during this transformative age that they not only symbolized, replicated, and reinforced power, but actually were power—something that he calls “ritual determinism.” His argument focuses on two ideologues: the Shingon monk Kenshun (1299–1357) and Kitabatake Chikafusa (1293–1354), who also took Buddhist vows but is better known as the author of Jinnō shōtōki (Chronicle of Gods and Sovereigns, 1343). In Conlan’s words, Kenshun and Chikafusa were “more important than the emperors or shoguns whom they nominally served” (p. 6), but they have largely been ignored because previous scholars have focused on Zen and relied heavily on the war chronicle Taiheiki (Chronicle of the Great Peace, late fourteenth century), which Conlan thinks “needs to be forgotten” (p. 13).³

In his prologue, Conlan introduces the sources and figures discussed in the book, and the brief introduction that follows offers an overview of his main arguments and the state of the field. The narrative then proceeds chronologically from the late Kamakura period, with the first chapter describing what Conlan calls the rise of an “administrative nobility” (p. 21), in which the value placed on expertise in protocol, procedures, and rituals made it possible for mid-ranking nobles to make a career at a court that had otherwise been more concerned with social ranking than talent and knowledge. This is a good point, although it would perhaps have been even more convincing had connections been drawn to earlier developments in other areas, such as the establishment of “literary families” through the control of ceremony and canonical texts, or the acknowledgement of ritual efficacy among relatively low-ranking clerics, both of which predate the era that Conlan discusses.⁴

The next chapter introduces Kitabatake Chikafusa more thoroughly than any study in English since Paul Varley’s translation of the Jinnō shōtōki over three decades ago.⁵ Conlan argues that Chikafusa and Go-Daigo (1288–1339, r. 1318–1319) established new modes of legitimacy based on merit rather than precedent and made the discourse on legitimacy more public. The two central elements of this new discourse were the reconceptualization of the imperial regalia and of the Southern court’s land in Yoshino as a sacred mandala. The notion of Yoshino as a sacred mandala was even used to guide troop placement and to legitimize claims of territorial control. The regalia, which, according to Conlan, were only now crystallized as the sword, mirror, and curved jewel, were in turn connected to sacred sites such as Atsuta shrine, where the sword was supposedly kept, and Ise, where the jewel was believed to be housed. It seems only natural that such sites, including the capital—controlled by both the Northern and Southern courts on numerous occasions—became targets of the feuding factions, but it is surprising that the author, who is one of our foremost experts on fourteenth-century warfare in Japan, does not consider military strategies more expressly.

In chapter 3 Conlan focuses on Kenshun and the...