Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan

Book Overview

Employing chronicles, laws, and legal documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as recent Japanese scholarship, Morten Oxenboell examines the significance akuto in legal proceedings to provide a nuanced understanding of how rural communities organized for and engaged in violent conflicts. Rural residents, who could not rely on the authorities for protection, handled their own security concerns via complex social mechanisms that tied together locals and absentee landlords in an uneasy relationship of mutual dependency. By examining the fissures in this relationship-in the form of akuto complaints-Oxenboell shows that violent activism was part of the daily management of estates and that such conflicts do not indicate an absence of order but rather a system of checks and balances that helped create a vibrant society. Book jacket.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0824884353
• ISBN13: 9780824884352
• Release Date: February 2020
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
• Length: 570 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.1" x 9.2"