Download or read book Hired Swords written by Karl F. Friday and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996-03-01 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tracing the evolution of state military institutions from the seventh through the twelfth centuries, this book challenges much of the received wisdom of Western scholarship on the origins and early development of warriors in Japan. This prelude to the rise of the samurai, who were to become the masters of Japan's medieval and early modern eras, was initiated when the imperial court turned for its police and military protection to hired swords--professional mercenaries largely drawn from the elites of provincial society. By the middle of the tenth century, this provincial military order had been handed a virtual monopoly of Japan's martial resources. Yet it was not until near the end of the twelfth century that these warriors took the first significant steps toward asserting their independence from imperial court control. Why did they not do so earlier? Why did they remain obedient to a court without any other military sources for nearly 300 years? Why did the court put itself in the potentially (and indeed, ultimately) precarious situation of contracting for its military needs with private warriors? These and related questions are the focus of the author's study. Most of the few Western treatments see the origins of the samurai in the incompetence and inactivity of the imperial court that forced residents in the provinces to take up arms themselves. According to this view, a warrior class was spontaneously generated just as one had been in Europe a few centuries earlier, and the Japanese court was doomed to eventually perish by the sword because of its failure to live by it. Instead, the author argues that it was largely court activism that put swords in the hands of rural elites, thatcourt military policy, from the very beginning of the imperial state era, followed a long-term pattern of increasing reliance on the martial skills of the gentry. This policy reflected the court's desire for maximum efficiency in its military institutions, and the policy's succes

Download or read book Japan Encyclopedia written by Louis-Frédéric and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 1130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Knowing Japan and the Japanese better," Louis Frédéric states in the introduction to this encyclopedia, "is one of the necessities of modern life." The Japanese have a profound knowledge of every aspect and detail of Western societies. Unfortunately, we in the West cannot say the same about our knowledge of Japan. We tend to see Japan through a veil of exoticism, as a land of ancient customs and exquisite arts; or we view it as a powerful contributor to the global economy, the source of cutting-edge electronics and innovative management techniques. To go beyond these clichés, we must begin to see how apparently contradictory aspects of modern Japanese culture spring from the country's evolution through more than two millennia of history. This richly detailed yet concise encyclopedia is a guide to the full range of Japanese history and civilization, from the dawn of its prehistory to today, providing clear and accessible information on society and institutions, commerce and industry, sciences, sports, and politics, with particular emphasis on religion, material culture, and the arts. The volume is enhanced by maps and illustrations, along with a detailed chronology of more than 2,000 years of Japanese history and a comprehensive bibliography. Cross-references and an index help the reader trace themes from one article to the next. Japan Encyclopedia will be an indispensable one-volume reference for students, scholars, travelers, journalists, and anyone who wishes to learn more about the past and present of this great world civilization.

Download or read book The World Turned Upside Down written by Pierre Souyri and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique synthetic history of Japan's "middle ages" is a remarkable portrait of a complex period in the evolution of Japan. Using a wide variety of sources--ranging from legal and historical texts to artistic and literary examples--to form a detailed overview of medieval Japanese society, Souyri demonstrates the interconnected nature of medieval Japanese culture while providing an animated account of the era's religious, intellectual, and literary practices.

Download or read book The Taming of the Samurai written by Eiko Ikegami and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-03-25 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern Japan offers us a view of a highly developed society with its own internal logic. Eiko Ikegami makes this logic accessible to us through a sweeping investigation into the roots of Japanese organizational structures. She accomplishes this by focusing on the diverse roles that the samurai have played in Japanese history. From their rise in ancient Japan, through their dominance as warrior lords in the medieval period, and their subsequent transformation to quasi-bureaucrats at the beginning of the Tokugawa era, the samurai held center stage in Japan until their abolishment after the opening up of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century. This book demonstrates how Japan’s so-called harmonious collective culture is paradoxically connected with a history of conflict. Ikegami contends that contemporary Japanese culture is based upon two remarkably complementary ingredients, honorable competition and honorable collaboration. The historical roots of this situation can be found in the process of state formation, along very different lines from that seen in Europe at around the same time. The solution that emerged out of the turbulent beginnings of the Tokugawa state was a transformation of the samurai into a hereditary class of vassal-bureaucrats, a solution that would have many unexpected ramifications for subsequent centuries. Ikegami’s approach, while sociological, draws on anthropological and historical methods to provide an answer to the question of how the Japanese managed to achieve modernity without traveling the route taken by Western countries. The result is a work of enormous depth and sensitivity that will facilitate a better understanding of, and appreciation for, Japanese society.

Download or read book Laughter in the Shadows written by Stuart E Methven and published by Naval Institute Press. This book was released on 2014-02-15 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir of a CIA operations officer captures the spirit of the early years of the Agency, a period sometimes described as its "finest hours." Using the name "St. Martin," Stuart Methven served in the CIA from the 1950s through the 1970s. The book opens by describing the author's training in the clandestine arts and subsequent assignment to Asia in a country he calls "Bushido." There he is involved in numerous operations, including one that takes him under the ocean, and earns his case officer's "brevet." A nation-building program in "Cham" follows, which begins well enough when Methven gains a tribal leader's confidence by parachuting badly needed supplies to his mountain village. It ends abruptly, however, with a coup d'etat and civil war that forces Methven's evacuation, the first of several during his career. His next assignment is in South Vietnam working to counter another budding insurgency. Methven spends four years in the mountain and delta provinces of Vietnam before being given a sabbatical to MIT's School of International Studies. After completing his studies, he returns to Southeast Asia as a deputy station chief with a focus on a large Soviet mission in Samudra and the recruitment of Soviet military officers. Promoted to station chief, his final assignment is in central Africa, where his station becomes center stage for a large covert operation that attracts Soviet and Cuban military intervention. Glimpses of the CIA from the inside are rare, and Methven's recollections of his experiences during a formative period in the Agency's history will be of particular value to those with an interest in the CIA and international affairs—and in spy stories.

Download or read book Heian Japan Centers and Peripheries written by Mikael S. Adolphson and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2007-02-28 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This exceptionally rich set of essays substantially advances our understanding of the Heian era, presenting the period as more fascinating, multi-faceted, and integrated than it has ever been before. This volume marks a turning point in the study of early Japanese culture and will be indispensable for future explorations of the era." —Andrew Edmund Goble, University of Oregon "As a Japanese historian, I enthusiastically recommend Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first multi-author English-language academic work to offer a synthetic treatment of the Heian period. Japan’s emperor system is the last remaining sovereignty of its kind in human history, and this volume is indispensable when considering what sovereignty itself means in the present. To that end, the classical patterns established in the Heian period are superbly analyzed in this volume through the dual approach of ‘centers and peripheries.’" —Hotate Michihisa, Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo The first three centuries of the Heian period (794–1086) saw some of its most fertile innovations and epochal achievements in Japanese literature and the arts. It was also a time of important transitions in the spheres of religion and politics, as aristocratic authority was consolidated in Kyoto, powerful court factions and religious institutions emerged, and adjustments were made in the Chinese-style system of ruler-ship. At the same time, the era’s leaders faced serious challenges from the provinces that called into question the primacy and efficiency of the governmental system and tested the social/cultural status quo. Heian Japan, Centers and Peripheries, the first book of its kind to examine the early Heian from a wide variety of multidisciplinary perspectives, offers a fresh look at these seemingly contradictory trends. Essays by fourteen leading American, European, and Japanese scholars of art history, history, literature, and religions take up core texts and iconic images, cultural achievements and social crises, and the ever-fascinating patterns and puzzles of the time. The authors tackle some of Heian Japan’s most enduring paradigms as well as hitherto unexplored problems in search of new ways of understanding the currents of change as well as the processes of institutionalization that shaped the Heian scene, defined the contours of its legacies, and make it one of the most intensely studied periods of the Japanese past. Contributors: Ryûichi Abé, Mikael Adolphson, Bruce Batten, Robert Borgen, Wayne Farris, Karl Friday, G. Cameron Hurst III, Edward Kamens, D. Max Moerman, Samuel Morse, Joan R. Piggott, Fukutò Sanae, Ivo Smits, Charlotte von Verschuer.

Download or read book Samurai Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan written by Karl F. Friday and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Karl Friday, an internationally recognised authority on Japanese warriors, provides the first comprehensive study of the topic to be published in English. This work incorporates nearly twenty years of on-going research and draws on both new readings of primary sources and the most recent secondary scholarship. It overturns many of the stereotypes that have dominated views of the period. Friday analyzes Heian -, Kamakura- and Nambokucho-period warfare from five thematic angles. He examines the principles that justified armed conflict, the mechanisms used to raise and deploy armed forces, the weapons available to early medieval warriors, the means by which they obtained them, and the techniques and customs of battle. A thorough, accessible and informative review, this study highlights the complex casual relationships among the structures and sources of early medieval political power, technology, and the conduct of war.

Download or read book H j Shigetoki 1198 1261 and His Role in the History of Political and Ethical Ideas in Japan written by Carl Steenstrup and published by . This book was released on 1977 with total page 826 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Matsura t written by Hyungsub Moon and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Cambridge History of Japan written by John Whitney Hall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 796 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume provides the most comprehensive treatment in Western literature of the Heian period, the Japanese imperial court's golden age.

Download or read book T hoku Unbounded Regional Identity and the Mobile Subject in Prewar Japan written by Anne Giblin Gedacht and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-11-28 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1870, a prominent samurai from Tōhoku sells his castle to become an agrarian colonist in Hokkaidō. Decades later, a man also from northeast Japan stows away on a boat to Canada and establishes a salmon roe business. By 1930, an investigative journalist travels to Brazil and writes a book that wins the first-ever Akutagawa Prize. In the 1940s, residents from the same area proclaim that they should lead Imperial Japan in colonizing all of Asia. Across decades and oceans, these fractured narratives seem disparate, but show how mobility is central to the history of Japan’s Tōhoku region, a place often stereotyped as a site of rural stasis and traditional immobility, thereby collapsing boundaries between local, national, and global studies of Japan. This book examines how multiple mobilities converge in Japan’s supposed hinterland. Drawing on research from three continents, this monograph demonstrates that Tohoku’s regional identity is inextricably intertwined with Pacific migrations.

Download or read book Rulers Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan written by Judith Fröhlich and published by Peter Lang. This book was released on 2007 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides new insights into the creation and use of written texts in medieval Japan. Drawing upon lawsuits from Ategawa no shō in central Japan between the early eleventh and early fourteenth centuries, the author analyses the use of writing by various social groups - temple priests, warriors and peasants. Though these social groups had different levels of literacy and accordingly followed different communicative traditions, their use of writing had common features. In the semi-literate society of medieval Japan the dissemination and reception of written texts took place primarily through speaking and hearing. Documents of the medieval period therefore had a distinctly oral characteristic. Priests, warriors and peasants all alluded to motifs in their legal pleas that were in essence given by the oral world of tales, legends and gossip. By showing that literacy was not in conflict but interacted with orality, the author uncovers an important aspect of the use of the written word in medieval Japan.

Download or read book Daily Life in Japan written by Louis Frederic and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the tenth century onwards the emperors of Japan gradually lost power. The local lords or clan chiefs waged ceaseless war against each other, while the court, wholly steeped in Chinese culture, seemed to take no further interest in the affairs of the nation. In 1191 the Minamoto clan mastered the disturbances and finally imposed its rule. Hard work, respect for the hierarchy, the cult of nationalism, a sense of self-sacrifice and duty – such was the new trend. The Buddhist doctrine of Zen made its appearance. It gave mystical support to the samurai, and the Japanese spirit was henceforth directed towards a political and religious asceticism which had an enormous influence on all aspects of art, thought and daily life. An acknowledged authority on the ‘classical’ period of Japanese history, the author reveals what the life of the Japanese people was like during these five centuries, and shows how a transformation of heart and mind produced a civilization as original as it was profound.

Download or read book The First Samurai written by Karl Friday and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In The First Samurai, you'll discover the amazing true story of Taira Masakado, Japan's first samurai hero. This account traces the roots of Masakado's "bloody feud with local rivals, including his uncles and brothers-in-law. It explains how apparently trifling squabbles grew into years of bitter provincial warfare involving thousands of highly trained samurai." "Filled with harrowing battle scenes, portraits of early Japan, and astounding legends of Masakado's celebrated life after death, The First Samurai is a must-read for anyone interested in the samurai, early Japanese history, and a whopping good tale well told."--BOOK JACKET.

Download or read book The Civilizations of Asia and the Middle East written by Jaroslav Krejci and published by Springer. This book was released on 1990-06-18 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers a comparative view of the world-views, values and institutions in Asia and the Middle East. The account takes the form of a historical narrative, focused on the most relevant events and features in the process of continual change.

Download or read book Castles of the Samurai written by Jennifer Mitchelhill and published by Kodansha International. This book was released on 2003 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The castles of Japan are a product of the country's long history of civil warnd samurai rule from the Middle Ages to mid-19th century. They functionedoth as military fortresses as well as symbols of authority. Theyncorporated powerful mechanisms for warding off attackers, yet as symbolshey were possessed of immense beauty and grace.;This study is divided intoour parts: the first examines who built these castles and why, with anncisive look at Japanese history and the internecine fighting betweenamurai clans; the second part discusses the castle as a fortress - themportance of its location, its layout, stone walls and moats, towers, gates,hooting holes, and stone drops; the third part covers the beauty of theastle as a symbol, covering the intricate craftsmanship seen in structuraletail and the aesthetics of the samurai class itself; and the fourth partontains practical information on visiting castles and gleaning the most from first-hand view.

Download or read book Warfare in Japan written by Harald Kleinschmidt and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-05-15 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Warfare in Japan from the fourth to the nineteenth century has caused much controversy among Western military and political historians. This volume assembles key articles written by specialists in the field on military organization, the social context of war, battle action, weapons and martial arts. The focus is on the transformation of patterns of warfare that arose from endogenous as well as exogenous factors.