Book Review: Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan edited by Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott

Abstract

Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott, eds. Land, Power, and the Sacred: The Estate System in Medieval Japan . Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press 2018. 570 pages. ISBN 978-0824872939. $64.95. Land, Power, and the Sacred is a welcome introduction to a topic that has not received its due attention by English-writing historians for far too long, and it does it in an inspiring and informative way. While the medieval Japanese estate system has been discussed extensively by Japanese historians, very few scholars in the West have taken on the task of discussing the estate system in detail, so the publication of this important anthology is cause for celebration. As the introductory and first chapters, as well as the last historiographical chapter of the volume all suggest, the paucity of research or teaching material on the Japanese estate system might be due to the fact that it has often been seen as boring and unengaging, buried deep in dry tax ledgers and land surveys. Outside the contexts of political maneuvers of the elite and the land struggles of the emerging warrior class, the estate system has langured for many years. This anthology edited by Janet R. Goodwin and Joan R. Piggott does an amazing job at filling this gap by providing overarching arguments about the estate system as an historiographical concept as well as close studies of individual estates. It is a thorough and hermeneutic study that is weakened only by the obvious challenges of being within an anthology where the relations between micro-level findings are picked up and used for more generalizing arguments only with difficulty. The anthology is the physical product of a conference held at University of Southern California in 2012 on various aspects of the premodern Japanese estates as well as of the collaborative efforts of a group of scholars and graduate students at USC working on the Ōbe estate and its connection to the monk Chōgen. This focus is carried over into the anthology, where 8 …