AUTHOR'S NOTE
Government
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 shogunate. 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 shogunate.
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 shogunate 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.
Tomorrow: Life in the Capital
Next Characters Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6
Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18
No comments:
Post a Comment