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Inventing Medieval Japan: The History and Politics of National Identity

Department of History, SUNY at Buffalo, 546 Park Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260-4130, USA

In contrast to the situation in other Asian nations, the Japanese public readily accepted the notion that Japan had had a Middle Age. In the Meiji period, the medieval—perhaps the most European epoch—was easily indigenised. Accounts of this process emphasise Japan's desire to pattern itself after the West. Analysing the work of the first Japanese medievalists, this article argues that more was at stake. By claiming for Japan a medieval era, historians made two further claims that were crucial to the project of fashioning a modern, Japanese identity. By locating the roots of the modern nation in the Middle Ages, historians allowed that Japan might join the West while remaining quintessentially Japanese. And, second, the era provides Japan's point of departure from the rest of Asia: the transition from ancient to medieval Japan, as a move beyond China and its overvalued cultural products, is a move from the cultural to the historical, from the oriental to the modern.

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