AUTHOR'S NOTE
Life in the Capital
For most people in Kyoto (the inhabitants seldom called the city anything other than “the capital”), life was uncertain, whether they were aristocrats or labourers or even emperors. There was no law enforcement because there were no laws. (There were codes of conduct within samurai clans, but in the capital none was being enforced.) The population had crowded together into neighbourhoods enclosed by walls, or moated walls, such that as many as 150,000 people (or 75,000 or 100,000; nobody’s really sure) were crammed into half the original area of the city. Many streets in the occupied sections of the city were barricaded or gated, and the population, no matter how lowly their status, were more than prepared to defend themselves against warrior incursions.
Somehow, despite the chaos and the violence, life went on. Food was brought into the city, goods were manufactured for sale, sake-brewers and rice-merchants operated as moneylender-pawnbrokers, and people dreamed of a day to come, when the world would no longer be in a state of constant upheaval.
Most of what has come down to us from this period was written by aristocratic diarists and so is somewhat skewed in its focus. Until recently there has been very little written in English (and what there is is mostly academic) about this particular portion of the Sengoku Jidai, and much of what I have written about the “civilian” population of the city (and certainly of its female half) is based on conjecture. In many respects, though, I believe that people are people and their basic desires don’t change much over time.
If I could recommend one book to readers interested in this period, it would be Mary Elizabeth Berry’s The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. She does a far better job than I could of making sense of the convoluted personal and political conflicts of the period.
Next: Glossary
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Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14
Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18
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