MEDIEVAL JAPANESE CONSTRUCTIONS OF PEACE AND LIBERTY: MUEN, KUGAI AND RAKU, SUPPLEMENTARY NOTES

Abstract

The main text upon which these notes are based (Muen, kugai, raku) was first published as a chapter in a book of essentially the same name in 1978. When the revised edition of the work was published in 1996, voluminous notes were added as an appendix, as a way for Amino to reply to his critics. The present article consists of three notes, one on raku, one on kugai and one comparing the three raku, kugai and muen with the idea of “liberty” (Amino's preferred translation for the Japanese term jiyū). To recapitulate the main text (whose translation appeared in IJAS 4:1), all three terms, originally Buddhist, were used as secular concepts in medieval times to denote people and places outside the control of the political authority. All were characterized by certain “freedoms” or “liberties”, but such connotations disappeared in the course of the seventeenth century with the unification of the country.