Paper short abstract:

Widespread adoption of heirs in sixteenth-century warrior houses signaled not disregard for kinship ties, but rather an open acknowledgment of the constructedness of familial attachment and succession, and a need to extend the boundaries of the familial (and political) group beyond consanguinity.

Paper long abstract:

The adoption of heirs (both infant sons and adult sons-in-law) was widespread in premodern Japan. Heirs could be adopted from near or distant kin or from non-kin, not only to compensate for a lack of male offspring but also to shore up the allegiance of collaterals or to forge truces or political alliances with neighbors and rivals. During the volatile years of the civil war, when instability was the only certainty and doom on the battlefield a near-constant threat, adoptions of male offspring came to be little different from marriage alliances, in which daughters were given away as brides and virtual hostages. While such adoptions guaranteed the nominal continuity of a lineage, they also exposed the fiction of ties of blood, offering warrior houses maximum adaptability at the cost of minimal consanguinity. Given the social acceptability of adoption, it is not surprising that in contemporary discourse "blood" does not figure prominently as shorthand for ties of kinship.

Yet kinship, sometimes pictured as a river delta of sorts, flowing ever more disparately from a common fount, was central to social identity and political imagination alike. The war-torn sixteenth century is well known as an age of betrayals; most unsettling to chroniclers were the stories of brothers feuding and sons betraying fathers, though more numerous are those of adoptive heirs serving their new families loyally. Indeed, it is clear that contemporaries took ties of kinship seriously even when these ties were visibly constructed.

In this paper I argue that adoptions and marriage alliances, far from denoting unequivocally the malleability of familial ties, signaled instead the complex and creative (if at times contradictory) ways in which kinship bonds were invoked to stabilize a dangerously unstable world.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore why narratives and practices focused on the Blood Bowl Sutra, a short, apocryphal text that damns women to a special hell for the sin of polluting the earth with uterine blood, may have appealed to men and women living in the tumultuous years of the Sengkoku era.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will explore why narratives and practices focused on the Blood Bowl Hell may have appealed to men and women living in the tumultuous years of the Sengkoku era. The short, apocryphal Blood Bowl Sutra (血盆経 Ketsubonkyō, Chns. Xuepenjing) was composed in China sometime around the tenth century. Versions of this text, which damns women to a hell comprised of uterine blood for the sin of polluting the earth with the blood of menses and childbirth, appeared in Japan as early as the late Kamakura period but did not gain currency until the Sengoku era. By the early sixteenth century, graphic descriptions of tortures endured by women in the Blood Bowl Hell appeared in vernacular literature such as otogizōshi and in the paintings utilized by the itinerant Kumano bikuni. Over the course of the sixteenth century, ideas about the Blood Bowl Hell spurred the development of dozens of cults throughout the Japanese islands. These cults offered women and their loved ones the opportunity to counter uterine blood pollution with talismans and merit-making rites.

We know that shrines had been actively promoting their own avoidance protocol regulations (bukkiryō) during the late medieval period, thereby spreading knowledge that ultimately aided in the intensification of uterine blood and other pollution taboos. But is also worth observing the broader political background of increasing concern with pollution. Some scholars have suggested that the spread and intensification of rigid pollution regulations in the Sengoku period stand in great contrast to the uncertain political conditions of the period. May it have been the case that discourses of pollution were especially comforting during periods of political violence and upheaval, when social systems were under great pressure? Expanding on the work of Mary Douglas, some anthropologists, such as Karen and Jeffrey Paige, for example, have suggested that menstrual taboos intensify during times of political instability. Perhaps heightened concerns about the containment of pollution--concerns that made the Blood Bowl Sutra so attractive during this period--emerged in reaction to the social and political volatility of the time. This presentation will explore that possibility.

Paper short abstract:

The practice of dripping or smearing blood on one's signature (kaō) increased in frequency amidst the 16th-century spread of violence. We probe the causes for and meanings behind this development, and speculate its relationship to the act of jigai (self-killing) and the discourse of seppuku.

Paper long abstract:

My paper considers the complex meanings blood acquired in times of violence. Medieval wars were bloody. In tales such as the Taiheiki (the Record of Grand Pacification), we read about the flesh, limbs, head, and bones that become torn and mutilated in small clashes and large battles. These casualties released blood that stained the earth and turned the river crimson. In sengoku society, the heightened level of violence doubtless increased the sum of bloody discharge on the battlefield. Perhaps analogous to this period-defining development, blood itself came to be coded with deeper meanings and was assigned complex functionalities. When induced by self-cutting, instead of a cut caused by others, blood began to convey a level of emotional commitment that could not be accomplished in spoken or written words. The practice of imprinting blood, as a seal that doubly authenticated the written signature of one's name, came to be adopted by vassals, sometimes enthusiastically on their own initiative and at other times forced by the lord. Rupturing one's own skin and letting the blood drip on one's name came to solidify the truth value associated with the signer's name. My paper focuses on the development of blood seal practice from the 1370s through the end of the sixteenth century, examines the documentary content, and analyzes the functions the blood seal accomplished in relation to the particular circumstances that invited or required it. The paper then considers the potential meaning associated with the act of self-cutting of one's finger to draw blood for the sake of an audience, or the outer society, as a sign of conviction and communication. Finally, we consider how this act relates to the increased practice of jigai (self-killing) and the language of seppuku, which presumed discharging of blood, the most fundamental inner substance of life, and most readily visible sign of human destruction as well.