Dr Andrew Fischer

PhD thesis

In the Name of the Realm: The Loyal Service of House Hosokawa in Sixteenth-Century Japan

My thesis focuses on the conceptualisation of loyalty and the rise of the Hosokawa family – particularly Hosokawa Fujitaka (1534–1610), better known as Yūsai – in late medieval and early modern Japan. I elucidate the ways in which the Hosokawa leveraged their cultural, social, and symbolic capital to achieve political and economic aggrandisement. The consistent role of the Hosokawa – as followers who offered support and legitimacy to authority – provides me with a stable lens through which to trace and analyse the notion of loyalty over an extended period of time. 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 and even open rebellion. I address whether or not loyalty was part of the Japanese warrior ethos, what ‘loyal service’ actually entailed, and the methods by which lords attempted to ensure the loyalty of their retainers. I argue that what I style ‘teleological 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. Beginning in the late medieval age, however, some lords also began demanding the loyalty of others by conflating themselves with the ‘state’ (kokka) or ‘realm’ (tenka), a phenomenon which I term ‘deontological loyalty’. ‘Deontological loyalty’, ‘teleological loyalty’, and ‘emotional loyalty’ constitute my theory of loyalty; I posit that one (or more) of these three notions 1) impel(s) one to be loyal; and 2) is/are invoked by those seeking the loyalty of others. From October 2024 to September 2025, I studied the documents of the Hosokawa at Kumamoto University with the support of a Japan Foundation Japanese Studies Fellowship.

After the PhD

I hope to revise my thesis for publication as a monograph and continue my research on loyalty in late medieval and early modern Japan.