Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan by Janet R.GoodwinReview by: Martin CollcuttThe American Historical Review, Vol. 100, No. 4 (Oct., 1995), pp. 1274-1275Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2168280 .

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1274 Reviews of Books

is imbricated in social scientific and humanistic dis- course, restricting specialists on Japan (and other nation-states). One analytic problem is the use of a reflexive duality-self/other-that usually affirms the very concepts that one seeks to problematize. Al- though within a professed epistemology of change, process, and construction (see the first and last chapters), the use of this binary form reinforces the immanent nation (p. 131). The other problem is external to Japan, "rice became a different rice each time the Japanese self encountered a different other" (p. 129). Exteriority is defined by non-Japanese (Chi- na, the West, the Stranger Deity), reinforcing a collective singular, Japan, as a nation-state, here, dated from the ancient period (pp. 101-02). Such a dualism fits within centripetal tendencies of a na- tional language that help formulate the collective singular. Connections occur within the common sense of the nation-state: "rice consumption, polity, rice production, harvest ritual, and human reproduc- tion are all equivalent in meaning" (p. 57). The very concepts and connections that were often formulated as the nation-state was being defined are reified.

If one recognizes a dialogic rather than dualistic interaction, then evidence marshaled to show conti- nuity might demonstrate the lack of a national belief. For example, the cosmology in the Nihonshoki (A.D.

720), which is written largely in Classical Chinese using the style of Chinese dynastic histories, could also have been written to distinguish the Yamato from commoners or competing elite families, using the similitude of China to give authority to Yamato hege- mony. Peasants, too, might be exterior; folk beliefs (a modern category) might be evidence of the lack of nation, that local beliefs were not tied together by abstract singularities, such as rice as Japanese, but by their understanding of their immediate environs. The centrality of rice paddies in Ohnuki-Tierney's analysis as the node that ties earth and human together into the nation quite possibly indicates a series of auton- omous localities in premodern societies rather than the romanticized agrarian landscape of modern and postindustrial societies. The plural inherent to a dialogic framework is not a quibble (see p. 7 for caveat); the relation between the data and the histo- ricities that give meaning to that data must be inter- rogated. Failure to do so results in an uncomfortable confluence of body, space, culture as an inherent unit, the very modernist discourse that reifies the nation-state as transparent (see, for example, pp. 10, 57).

Historians must not dismiss such needs to distin- guish between discourses embedded in sources, con- temporary accounts, and our frameworks as the prob- lem of an anthropologist. This is common in historical studies. There is much to learn from this book: it furthers our understanding of contemporary belief in the Japanese nation-state, and it is an impor-

tant step in our efforts to interrogate the interrelation between nation-state and common sense.

STEFAN TANAKA

University of California, San Diego

JANET R. GOODWIN. Alms and Vagabonds: Buddhist Temples and Popular Patronage in Medieval Japan. Ho- nolulu: University of Hawaii Press. 1994. Pp. viii, 181. $27.00.

In this book, Janet R. Goodwin provides the first extensive study in English of the various nationwide campaigns to collect donations for the building, or rebuilding, of Buddhist temples. These were known as kanjin campaigns. They were led by clerical fund raisers, including monks of the Ritsu school and wandering mendicants or ascetics known as kanjin hijira who traveled the country presenting Buddhist teachings to high and low in such a way as to maximize the efficacy of their campaigns.

In her opening chapter Goodwin rightly argues that the surge in popularization associated with Ka- makura Buddhism cannot be fully understood simply as a doctrinal development. It should also be under- stood in its socioeconomic context: the interaction between temples and patrons, proselytizers and the proselytized. In succeeding chapters she examines the earliest kanjin campaigns led by Gyoki (668-749), Jokei's campaign to revitalize Kasagidera between 1182 and 1203, Chogen's massive effort to restore Todaiji between 1181 and 1203, and the role of Ritsu monks in restoring Daigoji and Saidaiji in the mid- thirteenth century.

Goodwin does more than catalog these campaigns. She shows that the popularization of Japanese Bud- dhism in these centuries was not due solely to the efforts of the leaders of the new pietistic current of Pure Land Buddhism to spread "new" teachings and practices. Fund raisers for older temples also contrib- uted to the popularization and revitalization of Bud- dhism. She also shows that the economics of the construction of temples-the physical edifice of Bud- dhism-drew from, and contributed to, doctrinal and institutional development.

The central theme of her book is the "interaction between Buddhist institutions and lay society, as demonstrated by kanjin campaigns" (p. 5). She draws on Amino's Yoshihiko's notions of marginality or non-attachment, muen, in arguing that such cam- paigns were frequently conducted not from the cen- ter by the power holders of the day but by smaller temples, from the provinces, and by marginal figures, muen hijiri or "vagabonds." She also uses Victor Turner's notions of "anti-structure" and "communi- tas" in arguing that the collection of donations involved the creation of local communities of donors on the margins of society bonded not by the institu- tionalized social structure but by common religious purposes in the realm of anti-structure. "Communi-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1995

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Asia 1275

tas" forged by kanjin campaigns, she asserts, tran- scended the actual moment of the fund raising effort to provide an enduring anti-structure in local society.

The activities of kanjin hijiri were important, and Goodwin's approach does much to open new terrain in the study of medieval Japanese Buddhism and society. By looking at Buddhist temples and their patrons, small as well as large, she is able to expose both the interaction of Buddhism in society and what might be called the economics of salvation. She is also able to transcend the uninformative, but much used, distinction between "new" and "old" Buddhism.

Her reliance on Turner and Amino for theoretical framework both helps and hinders her efforts. It helps in providing a clear and concise structure for her book. It hinders in that it forces her to assert that kanjin hijiri were more marginal than perhaps they actually were. It is hard to argue that Jokei of Kasagidera or Chonen of Todaiji were marginal fig- ures in their age. Further, the attainment, through such kanjin campaigns, of an enduring "communitas" at the local level is asserted rather than demonstrated. Even with these weaknesses, Goodwin's book is still well worth reading by those interested in the workings of medieval Japanese society and religion.

MARTIN COLLCUTT Princeton University

MARY ELIZABETH BERRY. The Culture of Civil War in Kyoto. (A Philip E. Lilienthal Book.) Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1994. Pp. xxxii, 373. $45.00.

This is an important book. Examining Kyoto during the crucial hundred years from 1467 to 1568, Mary Elizabeth Berry ranges from the intricacies of endless succession disputes in elite military households to an analysis of the screen paintings that depict common- ers' lives, yet she achieves a remarkable coherency for all her breadth of coverage. Her organizing principles are the "culture of lawlessness" that permitted the violent rupturing of norms and expectations and the "politics of demonstration" through which violence was both displayed and controlled (p. 11). Coherence is reinforced by Berry's distinctive voice; this is clearly her retelling of wartime Japan and none other. She makes sense of disparate issues-why the massing of enormous armies resulted in relatively little killing or why commoners danced in the streets-by pointing to parallels between them. Her depiction of how the warlords and their minions betrayed kin, friend, and master constitutes a stunning expose of the politics of self-interest; her demonstration that what mattered in the end were the practices of commoners, who held the city together while shaping it anew, gives this book lasting significance.

Berry's ability to tease out diverse layers of meaning in the events and practices she discusses is notewor- thy. To take one example, her analysis of the Hokke league and insurrection draws on a careful marshal-

ing of scattered comments to illustrate how the league's adherents sought to intimidate the govern- ing elite into accepting them as a political power. In a telling use of scarce resources, Berry cites a number of documents in varying contexts to support vastly different arguments regarding everything from the disorder that plagued the city to the innovations by commoners that replaced corporate hierarchies with horizontal, class-based neighborhood associations. Il- lustrations, some in color, plus liberal quotations from diaries, petitions, and directives enable her to reconstruct a persuasive picture of the mental uni- verse of a wide range of people, literate and other- wise.

In interpreting elite motivations and behavior, Ber- ry's conclusions are straightforward. In depicting the commoners, she presents two interpretations-one that emphasizes passivity and elite cooptation, and another that makes the case for agency and subjectiv- ity-and then defends the latter. The history of fractional fighting among the warlords, paralleled by the development of commoner institutions of self- rule, is a complicated tale sometimes confusing in the telling, but her extended meditations on perfor- mance and play comprise a tour-de-force effort to find meaning in the dynamics of diverse social inter- actions, from the waves of commoners dancing en masse to tea rituals.

This book is so rich in insight and so filled with information on wartime patterns of behavior, beliefs, and identities that asking for anything more must seem gratuitous. Yet, rather than so many long- winded formulations and reformulations of what doc- uments might imply, some acknowledgment of work done by other scholars would have been in order. As it stands now, the book appears to have arisen wholly out of Berry's own head, and her debts to Japanese scholars remain buried in the endnotes. While no one would disagree with her interpretation of the place of precedent in the commoners' view of their relations with their patrons, Hitomi Tonomura's evidence ("Forging the Past: Medieval Counterfeit Docu- ments," Monumenta Nipponica 40.1 [Spring 1985]: 69-96) showing that precedents were often forged suggests the possibility that commoners manipulated this relationship more than Berry acknowledges. Both Tom Keirstead (The Geography of Power in Medieval Japan [1992]) and Herman Ooms (Tokugawa Ideology [1985]) have created much more sophisticated argu- ments regarding power, legitimacy, and authority in medieval and early modern Japan than those found here. Finally, an already powerful statement regard- ing the social function of tea could have easily been put in the context of Pierre Bourdieu's ideas about cultural capital (Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste [1984]). The obverse of Berry's close reading of documents is her relentless refusal to engage theory.

These caveats should not detract from a book to be mined for information and studied for insight. People

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 1995

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