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(★)(This book received its inspiration between 1951 and 1952 when I spent my first extended period of residence in Okayama Prefecture and succumbed to the area´s lure as a subject for historical study. Okayama offers its history freely as an exciting and moving panorama. It begins with the visible signs that in human memory most of the land of the Okayama plain had been sea and that the hills which rise above its broad stretches of rice fields were once islands. It comes alive in the present as one watches the reclaiming of still new land for modern industry and the scooping of new channels for ocean-going vessels. Man has lived long and industriously in the area of ancient Kibi, as the region used to be called, and the evidence of this long history, given unity by its geography of rivers and hills, provides a microcosmic record of the evolution of human society in Japan. (from ´PREFACE´)／ Japan´s growing role in world affairs has directed increasing attention to its historical past. The first Oriental nation to project itself upon the world stage, a country which in the last century has undergone the most startling of cultural changes, Japan appears as something of a modern prodigy whose history is probed for answers to the riddle of its restless emergence as a modern power. Histories of Japan there are in abundance, and among these many have described with imagination and skill the fascinating pageant of the past in Japan. Yet too often this history has appeared to Western eyes more exotic than real, more contradictory than plausible. Too often our writers have unrolled a brocade of oddly composed figures : of warlike tribal chieftains, elegant aristocrats emulating the arts of China, Buddhist monks engrossed in meditation, fanatical samurai fighting and dying for their lords, dedicated Christians and equally dedicated enemies of the Cross, docile subjects, and cold-blooded assassins.／ The following study of Japan in premodern times, embracing a span of nearly thirteen centuries, is directed toward the ilumination of some important elements of continuity in Japanese history. It is an effort to explain through the detailed analysis of a microcosm --the small province of Bizen-- the fundamental institutions of political organization and social and economic structure upon which Japanese government has rested. It seeks historical depth both by limiting the study in terms of its geographical scope and by restricting the number of variables to which it gives attention. The geographic base is the province of Bizen, one of sixty-six divisions of old Japan. In area it covered perhaps five hundred square miles, and by the eighteenth century it had acquired a population of something over 400,000 people. Within the confines of Bizen our attention is concentrated upon the unfolding of two sets of relationships : first, the combination of traditions and techniques by which the Japanese organized power and excercised authority and, second, the connections between the holders of power and the sources of wealth, mainly the land. Our study, therefore, deals chiefly with such subjects as theories of legitimacy and practices of administration, concepts of social stratification and social rights, and practices of land tenure and taxation. Within the limited world of Bizen it seeks to gain a sufficient intimacy with Japanese life to find meaning in the historic continuities and changes in the way premodern Japanese governed themselves. (from ´INTRODUCTION´)／ ▼CONTENTS／ ●Preface ●Introduction ●I.The Familial System in Early Kibi ●II.The Creation of the Imperial State System ●III.Bizen and the Institutions of Taihoo ●IV.The Shooen System and the Return to Familial Authority ●V.The Rise of the Bushi and the Origins of Feudal Authority ●VI.Bizen During the Kamakura Period ●VII.The Ashikaga Hegemony and the Rise of the Shugo-Daimyo ●VIII.Bizen Under the House of Akamatsu ●IX.Bizen and the Sengoku Daimyo ●X.Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and the Unification of the Daimyo ●XI.Bizen Under the House of Ukita ●XII.The Establishment of the Tokugawa Hegemony ●XIII.Bizen Under the Tokugawa Regime) |
BASE de DATOS, Biblioteca del Centro Cultural de la Embajada de Japon
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