Sowing Ghosts: Japan in the Sengoku Jidai Part I

What follows is an Author's Note explaining the historical background in which Sowing Ghosts is set. Normally such a note would appear at the end of the book, but I thought that for our purposes here it might better serve if it appeared first.

For more than a century, between 1467 and 1580 CE, Japan was convulsed by a chaotic period of civil war as the governing Ashikaga shōgunate fell apart. This sengoku jidai (best translated as “period of the country at war”*) is a tremendous source of stories. But it is also a risky period for writers and readers, because much of what we think we know about medieval Japan is not true for the sengoku.

The samurai, for instance, are in this period not the cultured, loyal-unto-death warriors of popular Western fiction. In fact the “way of the warrior,” bushido, wasn’t codified until the eighteenth century. Warriors during the period of this book were to a great extent devoted to their own interests, rather than to those of any superior. In much of Japan this self-interest took the form of vassals overthrowing their leaders, in much the way the fictional Lord Tanuma is seeking to take over the (real) province of Kozuke for himself.

It's Not What We Think

A lot of the things we think of when we think of pre-modern Japan are not part of Hiroki’s world. For example, there is no sushi here (not in the modern sense, at any rate)†, nor is there kabuki theatre; there are no geisha and no pleasure districts like the famous Yoshiwara (though there are plenty of courtesans and prostitutes). There were no firearms, no tobacco: these didn’t begin to appear in Japan until about twenty years after this story is set. There is no Tokyo (just a collection of fishing villages called Edo).

The rigid stratification of society into four classes (samurai, farmers, artisans, merchants) is not a feature of this period either; in fact, there was a great deal of social mobility at this time. Many warriors began life as peasants, and one of them—Hideyoshi—went on to become the man who finally unified the country (and earned noble rank and the title of Imperial Regent as well). Even the wearing of two swords as an indicator of samurai status is a feature of a later period. While some warriors definitely carried both long- and short-sword, for most of them the short-sword was more of a dagger than a sword. What’s more, the primary battlefield weapon of the warrior wasn’t the sword at all: it was a slender lance called a yari.

Government, and the Lack Thereof

The most important feature of life at this time was the absence of centralized government. This had a lot to do with a very Japanese approach to the wielding of power. Rather than take over an existing power structure, ambitious men (they were pretty much all men) would insert themselves into a position that was in theory subordinate to the person whose power they were assuming.

So: in theory the ruler of Japan was the emperor, the living representative of an unbroken lineage stretching back to Amaterasu Omikami, the sun-goddess.

But… the emperors, as a class, wielded ruling authority only for a few generations in the first millennium CE, and then their authority was supplanted by one or another aristocratic family, such as the Fujiwara. Instead of usurping the throne, these families took on such roles as regents, and married their daughters to emperors in order to control the throne without occupying it.

But… the aristocrats were devoted to life in the capital city, and so they handed over the enforcement of laws and defence to military clans. One of those military clans took on supreme power—but instead of usurping the throne or the role of regent, the leader of this clan took on a new title, that of shōgun, and used his power to control both the nobles and the imperial house. (”Shōgun” is an abbreviation of the full title, and for our purposes let’s translate it to mean “military dictator” though that wasn’t the original intention.)

But… the shōgun themselves were not always effective rulers, because they depended on the support of their powerful vassals. Eventually one of these vassal families inserted itself into power—again, using a subordinate title without claiming the shōgunate. In the period just before this story the title was kanrei (which literally means shōgun’s deputy but which I have translated as “chief minister” to give a better idea of the power being wielded).

But… by the middle of the fifteenth century even the deputy shōgun were too weak to enforce their rule effectively outside the capital. And when even this weaker position began to be fought over by competing groups within the ruling families, the whole tottering structure fell over. A war between these factions (called the Ōnin War because it began in the Ōnin calendar era) nearly destroyed Kyoto in the years 1467-1477, and in the aftermath of that war there were only occasional periods of fitful government control in the city—and none at all outside the city that wasn’t enforced by local hegemons rather than the shōgunate.

So at best, the Japanese empire in the early sixteenth century was being ruled by clans usurping the power of clans who had usurped the power of clans who had usurped the power of the imperial clan. But things were not actually at their best.

By the time Hiroki’s story begins, even the pretense of the shōgunate had collapsed to the point where two different groups of samurai claimed the authority to rule—and even within these groups the official leaders (Ashikaga shōgun, Hosokawa kanrei) held little or no power. Because neither group could hold Kyoto there was a steady succession of low-key fights in the city between factions, and this fighting was more reminiscent of gang fights (such as took place in early twenty-first century Colombia or Mexico) than of anything military. The idea of samurai always fighting to the death most definitely did not apply here.

[This note continues in the next post.]

*The Chinese characters with which the phrase is written in Japan are, in the Chinese context, translated as The Age of Warring States. This translation is wholly inappropriate in the Japanese context, because Japan has never been anything but a unified state, whereas the original Chinese phrase referred to the period (475-221 BCE) before the founding of the empire of Qin.

†The history of sushi is fascinating: it originated as a means of preserving fish, rather than as a way of serving fresh fish raw. In fact the word sushi has nothing to do with fish at all: it means "seasoned rice." (The original sushi was more heavily seasoned than it is today, and the combination of salt, sugar and vinegar turned fish pressed between blocks of the rice into something resembling South American ceviche. What we tend to think of as sushi (technically called nigiruzushi) was invented as a form of street-food in early nineteenth-century Edo, and used fish—tuna, for instance—that was considered too crude or rough to be served to the ruling class.