Organizer: Karl Friday, University of Georgia
Chair: Joan R. Piggott, Cornell University
Discussant: Kelly DeVries, Loyola College
Is technology the engine or the artifact of historical change? The advance of the physical sciences and the accompanying waves of innovation in weaponry since the industrial revolution have reified in the popular mind the equation of technology with military science—to the extent that few today would question the proposition that the history of warfare has been driven largely by inventors, and shaped by efforts to acquire and maintain technological superiority. And yet, a growing body of international scholarship suggests that this idea is far from self-evident, or even very old.
This panel examines the relationship between the conduct of war and technological innovation in medieval Japan, demonstrating that while wars predominated during the most innovative periods of Japanese history, the correlation between technology, war, and societal evolution is far more nuanced than is generally appreciated. For science and technology operate on a logic that is different, often even opposed to that which governs human conflict and war. The former is linear, predicated on efficiency and repeatability; the latter is paradoxical, demanding uniqueness within convention and deliberately embracing redundancy and slack.
The acuity of historical hindsight often makes the adoption of specific military technologies seem alternatively inevitable or quixotic. But the papers offered in this panel demonstrate that the interaction between technology and war is complex and multifarious, and that the "technology" governing and governed by warfare must be conceived of broadly. War shapes and is shaped by technology in all its forms, including statecraft and other socio-cultural imperatives.
Taking Up the Bow: Polity, Culture and the Technology of War
Karl Friday, University of Georgia
The technology that produced and defined the samurai was mounted archery. While early modern warriors would revere the sword as "the soul of the samurai," the professional fighting men of the ninth to fourteenth centuries styled themselves "men of the way of horse and bow."
Using a bow and arrow from horseback is a difficult art to master, and reliance on cavalry severely limits a commander’s ability to direct and control his troops. The Japanese were, moreover, already acquainted with more sophisticated technologies, such as crossbows, drilled infantry, and coordinated mixed forces tactics. And yet horse-borne archers became the premier military technology of the classical and early medieval era. In sieges, skirmishes in the capital, and other situations that circumscribed the arena of combat, fighting men on foot played a major part. When, however, battles were fought on open ground, they were decided mainly by encounters between mounted samurai. Foot soldiers present on this sort of battlefield were not just attendants and lackeys (as has often been suggested), but they were also of far less consequence than the cavalry. Indeed, armed forces were often counted in numbers of horsemen alone.
This paper will focus on why mounted archery dominated the battlefields of the Heian, Kamakura and Nanbokuchô periods, arguing that this form of fighting best served the needs of both the state and the warrior order that defended it. It will also briefly examine why bow-wielding cavalry was supplanted by pike-bearing infantry during the Muromachi age.
Innovation or Application? The Influence of Technology on the Waging of War
Tom Conlan, Bowdoin College
Did technological innovation constitute a primary agent of historical change? A survey of Japan from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries illuminates the degree in which innovation, as manifested by the adoption of two new weapons (pikes and guns), influenced the waging of war.
Because wounds were precisely described in contemporary military documents, a quantitative analysis reveals that technological innovations did not immediately translate into changes in tactics or, for that matter, transformations in state and society. For example, pikes achieved widespread popularity over a century after their initial development. Pikes became the preferred weapon of combat only after military organization had become sophisticated enough to sustain large armies of infantry. Likewise, the introduction of guns proved to be less epochal than has been generally assumed, for their adoption entailed no revolutionary shifts in tactics or military organization.
Thus, in both cases, technological innovation possessed little transformative power. To conclude, the adoption of new technologies was primarily expressive of change and not instrumental to it.
On The Cutting Edge: Warfare and Wound Medicine in Medieval Japan
Andrew E. Goble, University of Oregon
Little attention has been given to the human impact of war and battle, particularly with respect to issues of death and injury. This paper will address part of this issue by looking at the field of wound medicine.
There is a clear correlation between the appearance of endemic warfare and the appearance of works on wound medicine. Wound medicine, which became a new area of medical specialization, was a response to an obvious need (i.e. the treatment of traumatic injury). But it also connoted a reassessment of existing knowledge of wound treatment beyond the essentially "cuts and scratches" level of prevailing clinical knowledge. We see too, renewed attention to Japan’s native pharmaceutical ecology, based on the need to have medicines readily available (cf. imported) and "at hand," thus encouraging a re-validation of traditions of folk medicine that had always relied upon indigenous minerals, flora, and fauna. I will also suggest that enhanced knowledge of medicines became a new addition to the overall armory of the warrior.
Some attention will be given to wound surgery sections of comprehensive medical works, but the primary focus will be on works in the new genre of indigenous writing on wound surgery, including the fourteenth-century Kinsô ryôjishô (from the Sôda collection), and the fifteenth-century Reiranshû of Hosokawa Katsumoto (from the Conlan collection).