Articles by Yasufumi Horikawa
Medieval Worlds, 2023
This article introduces five oaths (kishōmon) from sixteenth-century Japan, currently held by the... more This article introduces five oaths (kishōmon) from sixteenth-century Japan, currently held by the East Asian Library, Princeton University, United States. Each of these documents can be identified as one half of an oath passed down to the Saji family, a local warrior (samurai) family based in Kōga district, Ōmi province, central Japan (the other half was separated). Local warriors of Kōga are well known for their multi-layered networks and organizations called collectives (sō), which served as mediators in local disputes. Combining these Princeton oaths (we shall keep to this English term for the Japanese kishōmon) with other documents that survived in the Saji’s hereditary archive, this article discusses their function. We have here a case study of Kōga that reconstructs local disputes and mediation by local warriors and sheds light on their collective organizations. This article also explores how medieval people envisioned divine punishments for breaking promises to deities. The diary of Yoshida Kanemi, a Shintō priest in Kyoto, contains valuable information: people of Kōga and its surrounding areas often visited Kanemi and asked him for prayers to cancel the oaths they had written. Kanemi’s diary shows that the people of Kōga on the one hand did indeed fear divine punishments but, on the other, tried to avoid them by drawing on new practices offered by Yoshida Shintō. After the destruction of the Kōga gunchū sō, a district-wide collective of local warriors of Kōga, in 1585, the Saji and other local warriors were banished from Kōga. They later returned to their homeland but lost their warrior privileges in the region. In this process, the Saji lost some of their inherited documents, including those currently held by Princeton University. Thus, the Princeton oaths not only tell us how medieval oaths functioned in Warring States Japan but also describe the hardship one local warrior family experienced in the socio-political transition from the medieval to the early modern (Tokugawa) period.
Funktionale Differenzierung Koniglicher Herrschaft Und Die Bildung Neuer Eliten Im Japan Des 12. Bis 14. Jahrhunderts, 2023
This paper focuses on the crisis of the estate system as one of the major social conflicts unique... more This paper focuses on the crisis of the estate system as one of the major social conflicts unique to medieval Japan. It overviews how this crisis caused various conflicts at different levels and reorganized medieval society during the fourteenth century. Accompanied by several political upheavals, such as the collapse of the Kamakura Shogunate and the fourteenth-century civil war, the estate system restored some stability under the new socio-political structure that had developed over the course of the fourteenth-century civil war with the Muromachi Shogunate and its provincial constables (shugo) as control valves. This new socio-political system, which made it possible for the estate system to continue, had, however, a strong force toward decentralization in itself. When the balance between centrifugal and centripetal forces became unstable in the mid-fifteenth century, Japanese medieval society moved forward to an age of multi-polarization and decentralization.
Personal Manuscripts: Copying, Drafting, Taking Notes, 2023
In medieval Japan, many social elites wrote diaries to accumulate precedents, which prescribed po... more In medieval Japan, many social elites wrote diaries to accumulate precedents, which prescribed political customs and the conduct of ceremonies. Due to their importance as both a reference for precedents and family patrimony, medieval diaries were studied and preserved for generations. The importance of personal diaries increased for social elites through the tenth and the eleventh centuries, corresponding to the discontinuation of official compilations, the formation of highly ritualized court society, and the formation of hereditary family status and expertise. This article focuses on the diary of Yoshida Kaneatsu (吉田 兼敦) (1368-1408) and introduces his efforts to create a valuable diary. In so doing, the article aims to demonstrate some characteristics of medieval diaries.
Websites (resources) by Yasufumi Horikawa
When Princeton University purchased five oaths (kishōmon) from a Japanese antique bookseller in 2... more When Princeton University purchased five oaths (kishōmon) from a Japanese antique bookseller in 2017, little was known about their origin except that the bookseller had obtained them from the collection of Takita Eiji (1904-1998), an entrepreneur and a local historian from Aichi prefecture who had studied Zen Buddhism and Japanese History at the University of Tokyo. It is now known that these documents were part of a collection of documents handed down to the Saji, a warrior family based in Kōga district, in Ōmi province (nowadays Kōka city, Shiga prefecture).
Papers by Yasufumi Horikawa
Medieval Worlds. Comparative & Interdisciplinary Studies, 2023
In the thematic section of our winter volume, guest editors Philippe Buc and Thomas D. Conlan pre... more In the thematic section of our winter volume, guest editors Philippe Buc and Thomas D. Conlan present a collection of articles on Japanese and European oath-taking and oath-breaking practices and their developments during the medieval period. In our individual article section, we offer a new edition and commented translation of an Icelandic fragment of the Nikuláss saga erkibiskups, the Saga of Bishop Nicholas.
All articles can be downloaded for free under: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023
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Articles by Yasufumi Horikawa
Websites (resources) by Yasufumi Horikawa
Papers by Yasufumi Horikawa
All articles can be downloaded for free under: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023
All articles can be downloaded for free under: https://doi.org/10.1553/medievalworlds_no19_2023