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Heavenly Warriors: The Evolution of Japan's Military. 500-1300. By William Wayne Farris. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. Harvard East Asian Monographs No. 157. Photographs. Graphs. Appendix. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xvi, 486. $37.00.
This is an ambitious book. It sets out to revise no less than eight centuries of Japanese military history. Not altogether revolutionary but useful and comprehensive is Farris's demolishing of what he calls the Western-analogue theory of Japanese feudalism, which has held most of the field in Japanese as well as Western studies of the rise of the warrior since the days of the great Asakawa Kan'ichi. In its place the author constructs an evolutionary model of the Japanese warrior as created by the the very institutions which, according to the theory under attack, through their disappearance were supposed to have left a power vacuum that was eventually filled by the very same warrior. There can be no doubt that in presenting this argument Farris has established himself as the foremost Western authority on the...