AHIS10003 Chap.7 Violence and Power in Medieval Japan
Violence and Power in Medieval Japan
Part 3 opens with two objects that could hardly look less alike: a handscroll of the second half of the thirteenth century, 41.3 by 700.3 centimetres, depicting a night of insurrection, and an unremarkable timber-frame hall of 1486 in a Kyoto temple. The week's claim is that both organise power, one by controlling how a viewer moves through a story and the other by controlling how bodies are arranged in a room.
The scroll's format is the argument: at seventeen to one it is unrolled in sections, so nobody sees beginning and end together, and the week describes the resulting effects as cinematic. The scroll also depicts a twelfth-century event roughly a century after it happened, through a story that had already been shaped by a performance tradition.
What this chapter covers
- 01
A scroll and a hall, and the claim that both are machines for organising power
- 02
Why a handscroll is not a picture you stand in front of
- 03
The depiction gap between an event of 1159 and a painting of the later thirteenth century
- 04
The biwa hoshi, and a story sung before it was painted
- 05
What the painter chose to depict, and what was left out
- 06
The Heian period, the Heiji Rebellion and the Genpei War
- 07
Tsukuri-e: building an image in stages, and why that supports a planned reading
- 08
Emaki, handscroll, and shinden-mode architecture as vocabulary
- 09
Intended and non-intended audiences, and whether meaning changes between them
- 10
Testing a scholar's reading against what the object emphasises
- 11
The Togudo: an unremarkable exterior around a consequential interior
- 12
Origin, significance and evolution as a three-part method
- 13
Architecture as a signifier of authority, approached from two directions
Using the intended-audience question properly
- 1Start from the measurable format: 41.3 by 700.3 centimetres, unrolled in sections at close range.
- 1Derive what that does to viewing: it addresses one or two people at a time and fixes the order in which the narrative arrives.
- 1Connect that to an audience already familiar with the event and with the sung tradition through which the story circulated.
- 1Take the non-intended audience seriously by naming a concrete modern condition, such as a flat museum display that shows the whole scroll at once.
Key terms
- Heian period
- 794 to 1180. The era in which court culture, art and literature flourished, taking its name from the capital, Heian-kyo, now Kyoto.
- Genpei War
- 1180 to 1185. A civil war between the Taira and Minamoto clans. The Minamoto won the decisive battle at Dan-no-ura, and the Kamakura Shogunate was founded on that victory.
- Heiji Rebellion
- 1159. The insurrection the scroll depicts, in which a Fujiwara-clan figure briefly seized control of the court before his alliance failed.
- Shogunate
- Government by a shogun and his military administration, which held real power while the emperor stayed a symbolic figurehead.
- Biwa hoshi
- Blind monks who travelled performing narrative songs to the biwa lute; their best-known repertoire was The Tale of the Heike.
- Tsukuri-e
- A Heian painting technique for narrative scrolls: line drawing first, then colour in layers, then final detailing.
- Emaki
- The narrative picture-scroll form, named in the work's Japanese title.
- Shinden-mode
- The Heian aristocratic residential typology, and the kind of complex the scroll depicts under attack.
- Shoin-mode
- The interior mode whose origins the week locates in the Togudo, described as the single most characteristic form Japanese architecture has produced.
Violence and Power in Medieval Japan FAQ
Why does it matter that the scroll was painted a century after the event?
Because it changes what the picture is evidence for. It was made after the Kamakura Shogunate was established, so it shows how a settled political order chose to remember the disorder that produced it. A contemporaneous image would tell you about 1159; this one tells you about 1159 and about the thirteenth century's use of it.
What does the week mean by calling the scroll cinematic?
It is a claim about the format doing narrative work, not a loose comparison to film. At 41.3 by 700.3 centimetres the scroll is unrolled section by section, so the viewer receives sequencing, pacing and shifts of viewpoint in a controlled order and cannot see the whole at once.
Is the glossary for this week filed under the right name?
No, and it is worth knowing. The Japanese glossary for this week sits under a filename suggesting it belongs to week 5. Its contents are entirely Part 3 material: the Heian period, The Tale of Genji, the shogunate, the Genpei War, the biwa hoshi and tsukuri-e. Route it by content, not by filename.
Why is a modest timber hall paired with a battle scroll?
Both are about architecture as a signifier of authority, approached from opposite sides. The scroll shows an aristocratic residence at the moment it is attacked and burned, so the building appears as something whose destruction is the political event. The hall organises hierarchy quietly through interior arrangement, which is power made so ordinary it looks like joinery.
Exam move
Learn the periodisation as a spine, because almost every claim in this week hangs off it: Heian to 1180, the Heiji Rebellion in 1159, the Genpei War from 1180 to 1185, then the shogunates. Then practise the two questions the week hands you. What did the painter select from the written source, and what did they omit. And who was this made for, answered from the format rather than asserted.
Pick one convention for macrons and use it consistently through an essay; the subject's own materials transliterate both ways and the choice itself is not assessed.
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