The Origins of Japan's Medieval World: Courtiers, Clerics, Warriors, and Peasants in the Fourteenth Century

This pioneering collection of fifteen essays proposes to change the way we think about fourteenth-century Japan and what preceded and followed it. Most notable is the search for Japan’s medieval beginnings, which are found not in the developments flowing from the establishment of the first shogunate in the 1180’s, but rather in the shogunate’s collapse 150 years later.

In this admittedly controversial interpretation, the Kamakura age becomes the final episode in Japan’s late classical perio...