Kōnodai senki: Traditional Narrative and Warrior Ideology in Sixteenth-Century Japan

“Tradition ” is routinely invoked as an appeal to the past in order to legitimate the interests of the present. So, too, traditional narratives—in whole, in part, or in new combinations—are marshalled to legitimate new or foreign ideologies. For example, the author of Beowulf effectively combined traditional Anglo-Saxon prosody, Scandinavian history, folk tale, and myth both to present an idealization of traditional kingship and to condemn it: not even the best of kings, not even a Beowulf, is capable of fending off forever the inevitable and ineluctable disasters of internecine warfare arising from the horizontal and egalitarian structure of Germanic-Scandinavian society and the very competition for kingship itself. In Japan, too, traditional narratives and narrative strategies have been employed to legitimate new power centers and their sources of authority. This pattern is clearly seen in Kōnoda isenki (Chronicle of the Battle of Kōnodai),1 a sixteenth-century account of the battle in 1538 that finalized the transition of power from the old shogunal (military dictatorship) ruling family to a new warlord family in the area, still called the Kantō, around what is now Tokyo