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OTÁVIO, Kauê - 'Um Guerreiro Com o Valor de Mil Homens'

2024, "Um Guerreiro Com o Valor de Mil Homens": O estamento guerreiro japonês no século XIV

Abstract

ver a long period of time in its history, warfare in Japan was the special, although not exclusive, perquisite of a specific group of men from certain families perceived as warrior houses (tsuwamono no ie, and later, buke). Its members, the warriors—tsuwamono, musha, bushi—are also largely known as samurai. During the fourteenth century, more than ever before, those warriors played a key role in the political and social history of Japan, ending with the domination by the bakufu of the Japanese Imperial bureaucratic machinery in the late fourteenth century. This study, supported by some analytical categories such as “estate”, “war”, and Mary Elizabeth Berry's formulation of the “Complex Corporatist State”, proposes an empirical investigation of the war tales (gunkimonogatari), legal and administrative documents (komonjo), as well as other types of sources, seeking to examine the characteristics, organization, function and transformation endured by the warrior estate throughout the fourteenth century, while it also traces the continuity of certain social groups while acting as warriors during the preceding centuries. To study the warriors through the lenses of a social estate forces us to examine certain practices, discourses, and ideals that set them apart from the rest of society, as well as to seek how permeable was the social matrix that gave form to fourteenth century Japan, be at the top or the bottom of society, be at the center—the world of the capital, revolving around Kyōto—or at the peripheries—the so-called provincial world, integrating therefore a history of the “major players” with a “bottom-up” view of history, and seeking to decipher the many facets and dynamics of power, politics, and ideals of fourteenth century Japan.