| This dissertation is about eastern Japan during the century of disorder (1455-1555) known as the Age of Warring States, which followed the collapse of the institutions that had been in place since the early fourteenth century. It concludes with the establishment of a new regime in the Kanto region, which began to reshape the way the plain was ruled and rethink the way authority was justified.;In this study I attempt to make sense of the chaos of a hundred years of seemingly aimless strife, and to account for what appears to be an extraordinary lack of political imagination and resourcefulness on the part of the region's elite. In particular, I draw attention to the organization of space and place, and to the political significance contemporaries attached to land. Using a variety of sources, from letters to memoirs, from chronicles to archeological surveys, I discuss the new conditions created by the disintegration of the medieval polity, and the ways in which rejection or acceptance of the new constraints and possibilities produced by endemic warfare shaped Kanto warriors' perception of their role and their relation to the land.;My dissertation shows how elite warrior houses struggled to free themselves of an attachment to land conceived as a marker of a family's continuing prestige. The shift away from this perception of land as genealogical validation was particularly arduous for families with nominal authority over vast regions and landed interests that were broadly dispersed. The greatest challenge they faced---and mostly failed to overcome---was not so much the logistical and practical one of consolidating their interests as much as the conceptual one of re-imagining themselves as lords of a locale, disengaged from the vast networks of patronage they had woven and from the system of values from which they derived their prestige. By focusing on cultural contexts, my dissertation seeks to understand how contemporaries understood the options they faced, and to reveal how the resilience of established ways of thinking conditioned changes, not just as an obstacle but as a part of change itself. |
