A History of Japan [antikvár]

PREFACE This volume relates the course of events in a period of some two hundred and eighty years during which the whole of Japan was torn by factions and plagued by incessant civil war until late in the sixteenth century, when a process of national unification by force of arms was begun by a great general, Nobunaga, continued by his successor Hide-yoshi, and completed by the victories of leyasu, the first Tokugawa Shôgun, Examined in retrospect this prolonged achievement of the military power reveals a decline in the moral standards of its leaders. The rule of the Hôjô had been distinguished by prudent administration and a concern for justice until after the Mongol invasion of 1281, which threw a great strain upon the feudal economy. At the turn of the century the Hôjô were showing clear signs of weakness, ancj in 1334 (perhaps because any feudal system harbours an internal contradiction ) they succumbed to the pressure of dangerous rivals. Kamakura fell, the Regency was destroyed, and the Throne, after a fruitless restoration, was subjected to the dominance of a new line of Shoguns, beginning witli Ashikaga Takauji. Takauji and his kinsmen and associates were men without scruple. They have been blamed for their ill-treatment of the Imperial House, although in this they were no more guilty than the Hôjô, who had banished an Emperor in 1221. Their real faults were their gross ambition and their ruthless greed. Yet the two centuries and more of Ashikaga rule (from 1336 to 1573) are the liveliest, the most varied and interesting period in Japanese history, whether military, political, or social. In the nineteenth century, because political orthodoxy regarded the Ashikaga Shôguns as traitors, Japanese historians tended to neglect this period; but today it is enthusiastically explored by specialists in almost every field bent upon tracing the evolution of the national life during the middle ages. Some scholars describe the dynastic struggle of the fourteenth century and its sequels as a social revolution. Such a label seems to me misleading, for what took place was a redistribution of feudal privilege and power due to economic stresses rather than to conscious political design and affecting the lives of both warrior and peasant in unforeseen ways. It is upon this aspect of Ashikaga history that I have mainly dwelt in the following chapters. I have paid comparatively little attention to the activities of Western missionaries and traders in Japan in the six-