Andrew Fischer, a Harding Scholar in the second year of a PhD in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, will present his first conference paper, "Hardly a Virtue: Loyal Service in Medieval Japan", at the Loyalty in the Medieval World conference.
The conference will be held at the University of Lincoln and sponsored by the Haskins Society, the Battle Conference on Anglo-Norman Studies, the Leverhulme Trust, and the Lincoln Record Society.
An abstract of the paper is as follows:
"Japan’s medieval age has long been subject to scholarly treatment in the West. The twentieth-century historian John Whitney Hall imposed the feudal paradigm – now disregarded by many historians – on the Japanese case, hoping to highlight the similarities between Japan and the medieval societies of Europe. What are we to make of loyalty in premodern Japan? James Murdoch, one of the earliest Western scholars of Japan, described fourteenth-century Japan as ‘a golden age, not merely of turncoats, but of mediocrities’, a far cry from the persistent trope of the loyal samurai. 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 favour of another, and even open rebellion. This paper addresses whether or not loyalty was part of the Japanese warrior ethos, what ‘loyalty’ actually entailed, and the methods by which lords attempted to ensure the loyalty of their retainers. It will be argued that the concept of transactional loyalty – rewarding ‘loyal service’ with land – was widely recognised by lords and their followers; this contractual relationship was covered in a veneer of morality that took the form of the language of loyalty."