The China
Mirror
is analyzed as a product of a newly and violently consolidated H
ō
j
ō
family rule in the east. The chapter contends that turning away from the
Japanese court as subject matter and taking up the history of continental
China is an intellectual power play, the ramifications of which are ex-
plored via coeval representations of China in two other didactic texts.
Chapte
r
4 confronts the flowering and bifurcation of the
Mirror
genre. It
interrogates the stylistic and thematic features of
The Mirror of the East
and
The Mirror of the Watchman in the Fields
as two very diff erent proj-
ects that both appear in the wake of the attempted Mongol invasions in
1274 and 1281. Although
Watchman
is not a historiographic
Mirror
per
se, its engagement with several of the elements found in the earlier
Mir-
rors
demonstrates the productive porousness of what are now often
thought of as medieval categories. The fork in the
Mirror
road suggested
by
Watchman
and the
Mirror of the East
speaks to the increasingly wide-
spread appeal of the
Mirrors
as textual vehicles even as it simultaneously
calls attention to the variety of agendas the genre is used to support. Lastly,
32
Introduction
chapte
r
5 examines the impact of the late Kamakura divergence of paths
on the Muromachi
Mirrors
. It begins with an examination of the influ-
ence of
Mirrors
on non
-Mirror
historiography from the early to the mid-
fourteenth century.
The Mirror of the Gods
and
The Clear Mirror
, the fruit
of the division identified in chapte
r
4, are then read against the trends
and concerns suggested by this experimentation. In light of how these
last two
Mirrors
, as well as the contemporary
Mirror
-shaded historio-
graphic efforts that come immediately before them, navigate the events
of the early fourteenth century, I argue that both
The Clear Mirror
and
The Mirror of the Gods
reflect an engagement with their predecessors that
is more nostalgic than productive. The epilogue reflects on the medieval
Mirrors
’ legacies for the early modern period.
The result of bringing all of the
Mirrors
together is neither simple nor
tidy. However, this fuller story of their legacy shows how problematic
some of the hoary binaries—especially China versus Japan and literature
versus history—are in discussions of medieval Japan. Furthermore, de-
centering the “tale” as the definitive prose category and introducing the
Mirror
genre as another major point of reference sheds new light on the
complicated intertextual nature of medieval writing and the discourses
that shaped it.
Conclusion
In the interest of full disclosure, there are no “smoking guns” in this study.
I cannot offer a definitive account of why an individual writer chose to
relate the past as he did. Rather, the aim of this project is a better under-
standing of the various general demands that people in the late eleventh
through the mid-fifteenth centuries placed on the narration of the past.
How did prominent thinkers present the past? Why? What worked? What
did not? And how did all of these things change, depending upon the
historical context in which works were written as well as the political al-
legiance of the presumed author? In other words, which permutations of
attitudes, rhetorical tropes, and languages conveyed authority during the
three centuries that saw some of the most significant reapportioning of
institutional and actual power in Japan’s history?
Introduction
33
These questions, in turn, invite still more questions at an abstract
level. Medieval Japan can be read as a case study for broader inquiries about
the historiographic enterprise: What are the institutions people turn to
when the world around them is in flux? How does the claim to interpret the
past provide authority in the present? What balance of old and new pre-
serves just enough tradition to be persuasive, yet is innovative enough to
break free from the confines of a regime exposed as fallible? What are the
symbolic centers that resonate despite social and/or political reorganiza-
tion? And what cachet is provided by the claim that the gods (or buddhas)
are on one’s side? The answers vary with time and place, but these are issues
that are no less relevant to understanding the twenty-first-century United
States than they are to interpreting thirteenth-century Japan.
With respect to medieval Japan, the answers to these questions chal-
lenge narratives that continue to haunt the field today and compel us to
always keep in mind what has been gained and lost in the interest of can-
onization. At the same time, I hope these answers will not only reveal
more about intellectual developments in medieval Japan but also contrib-
ute more generally to an understanding of how historical realities can
become casualties of a nationalist narrative of exceptionalism and remind
us of the ever-present risks of accepting any version of the past as is.
Main texts (in chronological order)
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