![]() The Kojiki brushes over genealogical discontinuities among Japan’s emperors, which was its principal purpose in narrating the land’s creation myth. ![]() The Heavenly Sovereigns, following their earlier Yamato trajectory, developed into chief priests and imperial ‘living gods’, who shared, at least in the pages of the Kojiki (Record of ancient matters, 712), divine ancestors with the Sun Goddess. The Nara court constructed an elaborate Buddhist theocracy and Chinese-style administrative bureaucracy, which it relied upon for managing the affairs of state. They are best described as Jômon remnants: people who stood outside the ritsuryô (penal and administrative) codes that incrementally defined life in Japan’s core provinces by the seventh century. The development of Japan’s courtly age began with the Nara court’s conquest of the Emishi, a tribe of hunter-gatherers in the northeastern section of the archipelago, people largely removed from the Chinese-inspired changes that had swept Japan since the fourth century. Importantly, the natural aesthetic of the Heian period, particularly as preserved in poetry, shaped enduring Japanese attitudes towards the natural world. His mood is perennially sensitive and melancholic, always touched by the sadness of this fleeting world: a Buddhist aesthetic inspired by the transience of things. A fictional master of his artful age, Prince Genji writes exquisitely learned poetry, romances such tragic beauties as Yûgao (Evening Face), croons with acquaintances about singing warblers and chirping insects, and moves through the social intricacies of the Heian court with dexterous grace. In Japan, this courtly age served as the domain of the fictional Prince Genji, a literary creation of writer Murasaki Shikibu ( c.978–1014). The fledgling imperial regime’s history shares much in common with other nascent monarchies around the world: frontier war and conquest, implementation of judicial and administrative bureaucracies, capital planning, elite monopolization of surplus, and the flowering of a rarefied court culture. Using new and little-known material from archives as well as Ainu oral traditions and archaeology, Walker poses an exciting new set of questions and issues that have yet to be approached in so innovative and thorough a fashion.With the emergence of the Yamato state and the advent of its imperial line, Japan entered the Nara (710–94) and Heian periods (794–1185). ![]() Rather than presenting a mere juxtaposition of oppression and resistance, he offers a subtle analysis of how material and ecological changes induced by trade with Japan set in motion a reorientation of the whole northern culture and landscape. Walker takes a fresh and original approach. By framing his study between the cultural and ecological worlds of the Ainu before and after two centuries of sustained contact with the Japanese, the author demonstrates with great clarity just how far the Ainu were incorporated into the Japanese political economy and just how much their ceremonial and material life-not to mention disease ecology, medical culture, and their physical environment-had been infiltrated by Japanese cultural artifacts, practices, and epidemiology by the early nineteenth century. Inspired by "new Western" historians of the United States, Walker positions Ezo not as Japan's northern "frontier" but as a borderland or middle ground. ![]() This model monograph is the first scholarly study to put the Ainu-the native people living in Ezo, the northernmost island of the Japanese archipelago-at the center of an exploration of Japanese expansion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the height of the Tokugawa shogunal era.
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