The Past in the Wake of the Mongols
223
in
The Water Mirror
that downplayed the impact of the Genpei War,
The
Mirror of the East
opens with the war that enables Yoritomo’s rise to power
and eventual occupation of the office of shogun. In this, I suggest it ac-
knowledges the Kamakura regime’s “original relation to war.”
73
Ricoeur’s writing on “founding violence” emphasizes the contingency
of such a result: “What we celebrate under the heading of founding events
are, essentially, violent acts legitimated after the fact by a precarious state
of right.”
74
The logic of
The Mirror of the East
can be interpreted as an
attempted refutation of a position such as this: what it celebrates should
not be precarious, because it is endorsed by gods and buddhas alike. As
already seen, otherworldly support is most dramatically invoked in the
founding war, but it is also reaffirmed in those military clashes that un-
successfully threaten to unseat the
bakufu
. Each time, cosmological aid
works in favor of the Kamakura-based powers. Specifically, it rallies
behind the regent, who is nominally acting on behalf of the shogun.
In fact, by recording the codification of the
bakufu
’s ritual, military,
civil, and judicial practices,
The Mirror of the East
offers a means of self-
legitimization that is derived from the “institutionalization” of
bakufu
au-
thority in all of its facets. The repetition of ritual acts across the
bakufu
’s
would-be sphere of authority can be read as intended, to borrow Ricoeur’s
words affirmatively this time, to “[tie] together values, norms, models of
relations and behaviors, roles.”
75
It reminds readers of
The Mirror of the
East
that the law of the
bakufu
(in all senses) is the law of an increasing
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