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Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no shō 1004–1304 (review)

Judith Fröhlich’s Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no shô 1004–1304 provides a case study of the Ategawa estate (shô) and explores the topic of literacy in medieval Japan. The monograph’s argument is that “literacy coexisted and interacted with orality” (p. 201). By analyzing phonetically written petitions pertaining to land disputes, Fröhlich reveals how peasants from estates such as Ategawa understood their world through oral tales and images, which were transcribed into written records. Fröhlich thoroughly analyzes secondary scholarship regarding literacy, but she tends to overly distill arguments, causing important points to be lost. For example, she cites Michael Clanchy’s From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307 as providing useful categories for examining the “making, using and keeping” of documents (p. 25), but she fails to acknowledge Clanchy’s argument that “the medium is not the message.”1 Pace Clanchy, Fröhlich believes that the medium is the message. “Orality . . . influenced . . . the ways of thought and expression of the peasants. The borrowing of structures of narration from other text genres indicates that in rural society, strict limits did not yet exist between oral and literate forms of narration, be it petitions, gossip or tales” (p. 193). Thus, petitions matter because they were drawn up “for purposes of self-representation” or “vocalizing resistance” by peasants (pp. 155–56) who “composed documents out of their own will.” (p. 191). To Fröhlich, orality represented a distinct (“rural”) mode of thought involving forms of expression (genres) different from those employed by the literate. A peasant’s world view, or “referential system,” used images (p. 189), but peasants could not “relate to something that was not part of a set narrative tradition” (p. 190). Why Fröhlich believes that statements transcribed into “Chinese written style” (p. 156) are fundamentally different from “oralising” (phonetic) scripts such as katakana (p. 196) is not clear, particularly because, as she recognizes, estate managers helped “the peasants” in writing their katakana petitions (p. 162). Fröhlich is ready to imagine the peasantry’s reaction to oral recitations—going so far as to “see with their mind’s eye the meadows and wooded mountains of Ategawa no shô in the fall” (p. 181). Her vision fails, however, when she tries to define who