In the Name of the Realm: The Loyal Service of House Hosokawa in Sixteenth-Century Japan
Japan’s sengoku—warring states—period (1467–1615) has been popularized in the West by the 2024 television adaptation of James Clavell’s 1975 novel Shōgun. But the period has not received scholarly attention in the West commensurate with its popularity—this is a natural consequence of the considerable time required to master the Japanese language (not to mention premodern Japanese epistolary style). This dissertation sheds light on the Age of Unification (roughly 1565–1600), during which three successive warlords—the so-called “unifiers” Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598), and Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616)—united the Japanese archipelago by dint of military might and political maneuvering, ushering in Japan’s peaceful early modern era. I focus on House Hosokawa, which holds the distinction of being the only warrior house with origins in the Ashikaga shogunate (1336–1573) to serve each of the unifiers at the highest levels. I maintain that the Hosokawa rendered loyal service to their masters in the form of cultural, social, and symbolic capital, which warrants a reconsideration of which factors were determinants of success during an age of endemic warfare. The Hosokawa provided Nobunaga with gifts available only in the ancient capital of Kyoto; they instructed Hideyoshi in court etiquette and poetry; and they prepared Ieyasu with a record of the customs and practices of the old shogunate, enabling the final unifier to bolster the legitimacy of his own polity. In short, the Hosokawa—particularly Hosokawa Fujitaka (1534–1610), better known as Yūsai—left an indelible mark on Japanese history by working behind the scenes to enable the rise of the “unifiers” and facilitating the appropriation of cultural capital by the warrior class. This study also explores notions of loyalty in premodern Japan. Many letters dating from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries addressed to warriors from their daimyo, or lords, extolled chūsetsu or “loyal service,” despite numerous instances of disloyalty, including desertion, leaving the service of one lord in favor of another, and even open rebellion. My dissertation addresses whether or not loyalty was part of the Japanese warrior ethos, what “loyal service” actually entailed, and the methods by which lords attempted to ensure the loyalty of their retainers. I argue that what I style “teleological loyalty”—rewarding “loyal service” with land—was widely recognized by lords and their followers; this contractual relationship was covered in a veneer of morality that took the form of the language of loyalty. Beginning in the late medieval age, however, some lords also began demanding the loyalty of others by conflating themselves with the “state” (kokka) or “realm” (tenka), a phenomenon which I style “deontological loyalty.”
Sixteenth-Century Japanese History, Medieval Japanese History, Early Modern Japanese History, Hosokawa Fujitaka, Hosokawa Gracia, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Akechi Mitsuhide, Hosokawa Tadaoki
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