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Japans Medieval Population
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Book Synopsis Japan's Medieval Population by : William Wayne Farris
Download or read book Japan's Medieval Population written by William Wayne Farris and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-01-01 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Japan's Medieval Population will be required reading for specialists in pre-modern Japanese history, who will appreciate it not only for its thought-provoking arguments, but also for its methodology and use of sources. It will be of interest as well to modern Japan historians and scholars and students of comparative social and economic development."--BOOK JACKET.
Book Synopsis Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan by : William Wayne Farris
Download or read book Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan written by William Wayne Farris and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2020-08-06 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, scholars have wondered what daily life was like for the common people of Japan, especially for long bygone eras such as the ancient age (700–1150). Using the discipline of historical demography, William Wayne Farris shows that for most of this era, Japan’s overall population hardly grew at all, hovering around six million for almost five hundred years. The reasons for the stable population were complex. Most importantly, Japan was caught up in an East Asian pandemic that killed both aristocrat and commoner in countless numbers every generation. These epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, and dysentery decimated the adult population, resulting in wide-ranging social and economic turmoil. Famine recurred about once every three years, leaving large proportions of the populace malnourished or dead. Ecological degradation of central Japan led to an increased incidence of drought and soil erosion. And war led soldiers to murder innocent bystanders in droves. Under these harsh conditions, agriculture suffered from high rates of field abandonment and poor technological development. Both farming and industry shifted increasingly to labor-saving technologies. With workers at a premium, wages rose. Traders shifted from the use of money to barter. Cities disappeared. The family was an amorphous entity, with women holding high status in a labor-short economy. Broken families and an appallingly high rate of infant mortality were also part of kinship patterns. The average family lived in a cold, drafty dwelling susceptible to fire, wore clothing made of scratchy hemp, consumed meals just barely adequate in the best of times, and suffered from a lack of sanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of disease outbreak. While life was harsh for almost all people from 700 to 1150, these experiences represented investments in human capital that would bear fruit during the medieval epoch (1150–1600).
Book Synopsis War and State Building in Medieval Japan by : John A. Ferejohn
Download or read book War and State Building in Medieval Japan written by John A. Ferejohn and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-20 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The nation state as we know it is a mere four or five hundred years old. Remarkably, a central government with vast territorial control emerged in Japan at around the same time as it did in Europe, through the process of mobilizing fiscal resources and manpower for bloody wars between the 16th and 17th centuries. This book, which brings Japan's case into conversation with the history of state building in Europe, points to similar factors that were present in both places: population growth eroded clientelistic relationships between farmers and estate holders, creating conditions for intense competition over territory; and in the ensuing instability and violence, farmers were driven to make Hobbesian bargains of taxes in exchange for physical security.
Book Synopsis Warriors of Medieval Japan by : Stephen Turnbull
Download or read book Warriors of Medieval Japan written by Stephen Turnbull and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-09-20 with total page 315 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Combines material previously published as Warrior 29: Ashigaru 1467-1649, Warrior 64: Ninja AD 1460-1650, Warrior 70: Japanese Warrior Monks AD 949-1603, with a new section on Samurai, new images, and a new introduction and conclusion. Driven by strict codes of honour and bound by deep allegiances of rank, family or religion, the elite warriors of medieval Japan were bold fighters, loyal comrades and deadly enemies, With rare material from Japanese sources and lavish artwork and photography, this book examines the military lives, beliefs and battle experience of four formidable warrior types – samurai, ninja, warrior monk and ashigaru foot soldier – resulting in a highly authoritative account of Japan's warrior elite.
Book Synopsis Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan by : William E. Deal
Download or read book Handbook to Life in Medieval and Early Modern Japan written by William E. Deal and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2007 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an introduction the Japanese history, culture, and society from 1185 - the beginning of the Kamakura period - through the end of the Edo period in 1868.
Book Synopsis Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan by : Edward R. Drott
Download or read book Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan written by Edward R. Drott and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have long remarked on the frequency with which Japanese myths portrayed gods (kami) as old men or okina. Many of these “sacred elders” came to be featured in premodern theater, most prominently in Noh. In the closing decades of the twentieth-century, as the number of Japan’s senior citizens climbed steadily, the sacred elder of premodern myth became a subject of renewed interest and was seen by some as evidence that the elderly in Japan had once been accorded a level of respect unknown in recent times. In Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan, Edward Drott charts the shifting sets of meanings ascribed to old age in medieval Japan, tracing the processes by which the aged body was transformed into a symbol of otherworldly power and the cultural, political, and religious circumstances that inspired its reimagination. Drott examines how the aged body was used to conceptualize forms of difference and to convey religious meanings in a variety of texts: official chronicles, literary works, Buddhist legends and didactic tales. In early Japan, old age was most commonly seen as a mark of negative distinction, one that represented the ugliness, barrenness, and pollution against which the imperial court sought to define itself. From the late-Heian period, however, certain Buddhist authors seized upon the aged body as a symbolic medium though which to challenge traditional dichotomies between center and margin, high and low, and purity and defilement, crafting narratives that associated aged saints and avatars with the cults, lineages, sacred sites, or religious practices these authors sought to promote. Contributing to a burgeoning literature on religion and the body, Buddhism and the Transformation of Old Age in Medieval Japan applies approaches developed in gender studies to “denaturalize” old age as a matter of representation, identity, and performance. By tracking the ideological uses of old age in premodern Japan, this work breaks new ground, revealing the role of religion in the construction of generational categories and the ways in which religious ideas and practices can serve not only to naturalize, but also challenge “common sense” about the body.
Book Synopsis Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan by : William Farris
Download or read book Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan written by William Farris and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For centuries, scholars have wondered what daily life was like for the common people of Japan, especially for long bygone eras such as the ancient age (700-1150). Using the discipline of historical demography, William Wayne Farris shows that for most of this era, Japan's overall population hardly grew at all, hovering around six million for almost five hundred years. The reasons for the stable population were complex. Most importantly, Japan was caught up in an East Asian pandemic that killed both aristocrat and commoner in countless numbers every generation. These epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, and dysentery decimated the adult population, resulting in wide-ranging social and economic turmoil. Famine recurred about once every three years, leaving large proportions of the populace malnourished or dead. Ecological degradation of central Japan led to an increased incidence of drought and soil erosion. And war led soldiers to murder innocent bystanders in droves. Under these harsh conditions, agriculture suffered from high rates of field abandonment and poor technological development. Both farming and industry shifted increasingly to labor-saving technologies. With workers at a premium, wages rose. Traders shifted from the use of money to barter. Cities disappeared. The family was an amorphous entity, with women holding high status in a labor-short economy. Broken families and an appallingly high rate of infant mortality were also part of kinship patterns. The average family lived in a cold, drafty dwelling susceptible to fire, wore clothing made of scratchy hemp, consumed meals just barely adequate in the best of times, and suffered from a lack of sanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of disease outbreak. While life was harsh for almost all people from 700 to 1150, these experiences represented investments in human capital that would bear fruit during the medieval epoch (1150-1600).
Book Synopsis Akutō and Rural Conflict in Medieval Japan by : Morten Oxenboell
Download or read book Akutō and Rural Conflict in Medieval Japan written by Morten Oxenboell and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2018-05-31 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers the first in-depth analysis in English of an understudied phenomenon in medieval Japanese history: the so-called akutō (literally, “evil bands”). Employing chronicles, laws, and legal documents from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as well as recent Japanese scholarship, Morten Oxenboell examines the significance of akutō in legal proceedings to provide a nuanced understanding of how rural communities organized for and engaged in violent conflicts. He deconstructs the image of akutō as instigators of violence by underlining the significance of the term as a rhetorical device used by litigants to voice their grievances in Kamakura legal proceedings. The many instances in which akutō appear offer a clear example of the ways in which the new legal vocabulary concealed realities behind rhetorical flourishes and narratives of violence and predation. Violence was certainly a part of the negotiation for rights and privileges in the estate system, and Oxenboell demonstrates how conflicts developed and were untangled by local actors, who were rarely given a voice in sources from this period. By peeling away the rhetoric, he presents us a unique view of rural populations organizing their communities in the face of violence, whether as victims of outside aggression or as aggressors themselves against landlords or neighbors. The book therefore goes beyond the usual focus on elites in medieval Japanese history by concentrating on local mobilization schemes and strategies, which were often framed and defamed by central elites. 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 akutō 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 Synopsis Tracing the Itinerant Path by : Caitilin J. Griffiths
Download or read book Tracing the Itinerant Path written by Caitilin J. Griffiths and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2016-10-31 with total page 233 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women have long been active supporters and promoters of Buddhist rituals and functions, but their importance in the operations of Buddhist schools has often been minimized. Chin’ichibō (?–1344), a nun who taught male and female disciples and lived in her own temple, is therefore considered an anomaly. In Tracing the Itinerant Path, Caitilin Griffiths’ meticulous research and translations of primary sources indicate that Chin’ichibō is in fact an example of her time—a learned female who was active in the teaching and spread of Buddhism—and not an exception. Chin’ichibō and her disciples were jishū, members of a Pure Land Buddhist movement of which the famous charismatic holy man Ippen (1239–1289) was a founder. Jishū, distinguished by their practice of continuous nembutsu chanting, gained the support of a wide and diverse populace throughout Japan from the late thirteenth century. Male and female disciples rarely cloistered themselves behind monastic walls, preferring to conduct ceremonies and religious duties among the members of their communities. They offered memorial and other services to local lay believers and joined itinerant missions, traveling across provinces to reach as many people as possible. Female members were entrusted to run local practice halls that included male participants. Griffiths’ study introduces female jishū who were keenly involved—not as wives, daughters, or mothers, but as partners and leaders in the movement. Filling the lacunae that exists in our understanding of women’s participation in Japanese religious history, Griffiths highlights the significant roles female jishū held and offers a more nuanced understanding of Japanese Buddhist history. Students of Buddhism, scholars of Japanese history, and those interested in women’s studies will find this volume a significant and compelling contribution.
Book Synopsis Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan by : Karl F. Friday
Download or read book Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan written by Karl F. Friday and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 256 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.
Book Synopsis The Japanese Samurai by : Louise Park
Download or read book The Japanese Samurai written by Louise Park and published by Marshall Cavendish. This book was released on 2010 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ancient and Medieval People profiles some of the fiercest warriors in history. Learn about their lives and times, notorious battles, and daring feats! In The Japanese Samurai, read about famous samurai battles in Japan. Learn about samurai swords, the Bushido code, and the decline of the ancient samurai. Book jacket.
Book Synopsis Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan by : William Wayne Farris
Download or read book Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan written by William Wayne Farris and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Book Synopsis Japan's Medieval Population by : William Wayne Farris
Download or read book Japan's Medieval Population written by William Wayne Farris and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2006-05-31 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume charts a course through never-before-surveyed historical territory: Japan’s medieval population, a topic so challenging that neither Japanese nor foreign scholars have investigated it in a comprehensive way. And yet, demography is an invaluable approach to the past because it provides a way—often the only way—to study the mass of people who did not belong to the political or religious elite. By synthesizing a vast cache of primary and secondary sources, William Wayne Farris constructs an important analysis of Japan’s population from 1150 to 1600 and considers social and economic developments that were life and death issues for ordinary Japanese. Impressive in his grasp of detail and the scope of his inquiry, Farris makes the argument that, although this age initially witnessed the continuation of a centuries-old demographic stasis, a far-reaching transformation began around 1280 and eventually gained momentum until it swept through the Japanese archipelago. Between 1280 and 1600, Japan’s population approximately trebled, growing from 6 million to 17 million. Crucial to the demographic breakthrough was the resolution of two central problems facing both the rulers and the ruled. The first was how to supply a burgeoning population with sufficient food; the second, how to keep the peace. Japan’s Medieval Population will be required reading for specialists in pre-modern Japanese history, who will appreciate it not only for its thought-provoking arguments, but also for its methodology and use of sources.
Book Synopsis Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism by : Jacqueline I. Stone
Download or read book Original Enlightenment and the Transformation of Medieval Japanese Buddhism written by Jacqueline I. Stone and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2003-05-31 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Original enlightenment thought (hongaku shiso) dominated Buddhist intellectual circles throughout Japan’s medieval period. Enlightenment, this discourse claims, is neither a goal to be achieved nor a potential to be realized but the true status of all things. Every animate and inanimate object manifests the primordially enlightened Buddha just as it is. Seen in its true aspect, every activity of daily life—eating, sleeping, even one’s deluded thinking—is the Buddha’s conduct. Emerging from within the powerful Tendai School, ideas of original enlightenment were appropriated by a number of Buddhist traditions and influenced nascent theories about the kami (local deities) as well as medieval aesthetics and the literary and performing arts. Scholars and commentators have long recognized the historical importance of original enlightenment thought but differ heatedly over how it is to be understood. Some tout it as the pinnacle of the Buddhist philosophy of absolute non-dualism. Others claim to find in it the paradigmatic expression of a timeless Japanese spirituality. According other readings, it represents a dangerous anti-nomianism that undermined observance of moral precepts, precipitated a decline in Buddhist scholarship, and denied the need for religious discipline. Still others denounce it as an authoritarian ideology that, by sacralizing the given order, has in effect legitimized hierarchy and discriminative social practices. Often the acceptance or rejection of original enlightenment thought is seen as the fault line along which traditional Buddhist institutions are to be differentiated from the new Buddhist movements (Zen, Pure Land, and Nichiren) that arose during Japan’s medieval period. Jacqueline Stone’s groundbreaking study moves beyond the treatment of the original enlightenment doctrine as abstract philosophy to explore its historical dimension. Drawing on a wealth of medieval primary sources and modern Japanese scholarship, it places this discourse in its ritual, institutional, and social contexts, illuminating its importance to the maintenance of traditions of lineage and the secret transmission of knowledge that characterized several medieval Japanese elite culture. It sheds new light on interpretive strategies employed in pre-modern Japanese Buddhist texts, an area that hitherto has received a little attention. Through these and other lines of investigation, Stone problematizes entrenched notions of “corruption” in the medieval Buddhist establishment. Using the examples of Tendai and Nichiren Buddhism and their interactions throughout the medieval period, she calls into question both overly facile distinctions between “old” and “new” Buddhism and the long-standing scholarly assumptions that have perpetuated them. This study marks a significant contribution to ongoing debates over definitions of Buddhism in the Kamakura era (1185–1333), long regarded as a formative period in Japanese religion and culture. Stone argues that “original enlightenment thought” represents a substantial rethinking of Buddhist enlightenment that cuts across the distinction between “old” and “new” institutions and was particularly characteristic of the medieval period.
Book Synopsis Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan by : Andrew Edmond Goble
Download or read book Confluences of Medicine in Medieval Japan written by Andrew Edmond Goble and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2011-09-30 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Confluences of Medicine is the first book-length exploration in English of issues of medicine and society in premodern Japan. This multifaceted study weaves a rich tapestry of Buddhist healing practices, Chinese medical knowledge, Asian pharmaceuticals, and Islamic formulas as it elucidates their appropriation and integration into medieval Japanese medicine. It expands the parameters of the study of medicine in East Asia, which to date has focused on the subject in individual countries, and introduces the dynamics of interaction and exchange that coursed through the East Asian macro-culture. The book explores these themes primarily through the two extant works of the Buddhist priest and clinical physician Kajiwara Shozen (1265–1337), who was active at the medical facility housed at Gokurakuji temple in Kamakura, the capital of Japan’s first warrior government. With access to large numbers of printed Song medical texts and a wide range of materia medica from as far away as the Middle East, Shozen was a beneficiary of the efflorescence of trade and exchange across the East China Sea that typifies this era. His break with the restrictions of Japanese medicine is revealed in Ton’isho (Book of the simple physician) and Man’apo (Myriad relief formulas). Both of these texts are landmarks: the former being the first work written in Japanese for a popular audience; the latter, the most extensive Japanese medical work prior to the seventeenth century. Confluences of Medicine brings to the fore the range of factors—networks of Buddhist priests, institutional support, availability of materials, relevance of overseas knowledge to local conditions of domestic strife, and serendipity—that influenced the Japanese acquisition of Chinese medical information. It offers the first substantive portrait of the impact of the Song printing revolution in medieval Japan and provides a rare glimpse of Chinese medicine as it was understood outside of China. It is further distinguished by its attention to materia medica and medicinal formulas and to the challenges of technical translation and technological transfer in the reception and incorporation of a new pharmaceutical regime.
Book Synopsis Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women by : Christina Laffin
Download or read book Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women written by Christina Laffin and published by . This book was released on 2013-01-31 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book counters the notion that medieval women, unlike those in the Heian period, had been relegated to the private sphere by institutional transformations, and no longer wrote, worked, taught or traveled. Tracing the life of Nun Abutsu through her di
Download or read book Rage and Ravage written by Bernard Faure and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2021-12-31 with total page 553 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the leading scholars of Japanese religion, Rage and Ravage is the third installment of a milestone project in our understanding of the mythico-ritual system of esoteric Buddhism—specifically the nature and roles of deities in the religious world of medieval Japan and beyond. Bernard Faure introduces readers to medieval Japanese religiosity and shows the centrality of the gods in religious discourse and ritual; in doing so he moves away from the usual textual, historical, and sociological approaches that constitute the “method” of current religious studies. Throughout, he engages theoretical insights drawn from structuralism, post-structuralism, and Actor-Network Theory to retrieve the “implicit pantheon” (as opposed to the “explicit orthodox pantheon”) of esoteric Japanese Buddhism (Mikkyō). In volumes one and two, The Fluid Pantheon and Protectors and Predators, Faure argued against a polarity or dichotomy between buddhas and kami by emphasizing the existence of deities that did not belong to either category, and he rejected the retrospective notion of “hybridity.” The present work makes a similar case about the reified distinction between gods and demons to show that, due to the fluid nature of the Japanese pantheon, these terms do not represent stable identities: Gods can become demons, and demons are sometimes deified. Divine protectors were often former predators, and in some instances they retained their predatory features even after being converted. After emphasizing the demonic aspects of devas as “gods or spirits of obstacles” in the earlier volumes, Faure now focuses on the deva-like or “divine” aspects of deities that have been described as “demonic.” Rage and Ravage and its companion volumes persuade readers that the gods constituted a central part of medieval Japanese religion and that the latter cannot be reduced to a simplistic confrontation, parallelism, or complementarity between some monolithic teachings known as “Buddhism” and “Shinto.” Once these reductionist labels and categories are discarded, a new and fascinating religious landscape begins to unfold.
