A History of Japan, 1334-1615

The next volume in Sansom's important work on Japanese history, A History of Japan, 1334-1615, continues from the decline of the Kamakura Bakufu to the Ashikaga Bakufu, Warring States era, and the eventual rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate. While losing our interest during some of the minutiae of the Ashikaga Shoguns and their struggles to maintain authority in the first half of the text, Sansom's second half delves into more interesting topics like Christianity, Japanese relations with Asia and the West, the rise of merchants, peasant uprisings, and the successful warlords who eventually restored national unity. 

Finally, there is some analysis of peasant uprisings and how changes in agriculture, markets, internal and external trade, and roads impacted the peasantry and ji-samurai (kokujin) who often rebelled against the government. According to Sansom, it is unclear to what extent rural rebellions were planned or led by free peasants, but the common occurrence of rural disturbances definitely tells us something about the growth of the Japanese economy in the these centuries and the slippery division between peasants and warriors until Hideyoshi's Land Survey and disarmament. Peasants formed associations, benefitted from the expansion of markets to sell their produce and continued to abscond when it was in their interest to do so.

Even more intriguing are the Japanese traders, pirates, mercenaries and others established in other parts of Asia during the 1500s, from Burma to the Philippines. The expansionist invasion of Korea by Hideyoshi and his talk of India, Persia, Philippines, and other regions alongside the Japanese economic interests and trade with Asia and Europe potentially illustrate how non-Europeans like Japan under Tokugawa Ieyasu, could have, had there been a will to do so, engaged in colonial conquest or at least large-scale trading expeditions around the Pacific and Indian Oceans. We shall revisit this in future readings.