Forgery in Motion: Cross-Status Networks, Authority, and Documentary Culture in Medieval Japan

Abstract

During Japan’s sixteenth century, financially insolvent courtiers, competing warlords, and laboring commoners struggled for survival in a dynamic and uncertain environment. Despite the destabilization of institutions that had long shaped society, particularly the imperial court and military shogunate, their bureaucratic frameworks of operation remained both relevant to and recognized by medieval peoples. This dissertation argues that the documentary culture and practices that underpinned these formal centers of governance were crucial to the maintenance of elite authority, and that forgery production and use in the late medieval period provides a window into an important means by which non-elite persons helped to structure and even reinforce that authority. Specifically, I examine the creation and exploitation of counterfeit documents by metal caster artisan organizations in collusion with the low-ranking courtier Matsugi Hisanao and his community of court-based supporters. Using archival evidence of falsified court documents, texts alleging economic prerogatives, and diaries of Kyoto-based aristocrats, I reconstruct patronage networks of social and economic exchange among metal casters, courtiers, and warriors from the twelfth to sixteenth centuries that were premised on original and forged documents.

By tracing how these texts were created and deployed, as well as how dubious writings related to caster histories and economic privileges functioned to link casters to the court as imperial purveyors (kugonin), this dissertation shows how documentary practices shared across social groups proffered new financial and social opportunities, in this case through the revival of centuries-old patronage ties. The strategic deployment of history and historicity within written claims, vividly evident in forgeries, were used to manifest the symbolic, sociocultural valences of the highest figures and offices. This process both contributed to the interpretation of counterfeits as authentic and, ultimately, served to reify imperial authority. In part due to contributions of the non-elite—casters actively and collaboratively mediating the documents that defined their privileges and legacies—seemingly subversive counterfeits paradoxically sustained institutional structures like the imperial court by operating as authentic texts.