This dissertation examines the role of intermediaries and ritual in reconciling conflicting interests in fifteenth century Japan. The first half of the century was a moment of comparative peace but also desperate improvisation. Administrative and judicial institutions survived but overlapped and were mutable, bending to the erratic demands of warlords. The dissertation argues that oaths and ceremonies provided certainty where institutions no longer could, structuring communities to enable conflict resolution at relatively predictable intervals. Unofficial intermediaries, here called conciliators, stepped in for devalued official ones, using their prestige to intercede with authority figures and buffer disputes or reinforce settlements. These pragmatic expedients fueled the personalization of power, revealing the process by which individuals absorbed the power of institutions.Central Japan in the fifteenth century produced an unusual preponderance of materials that reveal the negotiations underlying official action. These include diary-chronicles (kanbun nikki), many of them by professional intermediaries and others by people who relied on their aid; the lists, drafts, social poetry, and other semi-ephemeral documents on the reverse sides of the paper used to produce the diary-chronicles (shihai monjo); and the meeting records of councils that governed a large and wealthy temple. These, supplemented by sources more focused on final outcomes, are analyzed through two primary lenses: ritual and communication via intermediaries. Both intermediaries and ritual, individually and in concert, bridged the gaps between institutional structures and what the people inhabiting them could achieve and accept. By examining the ways that these strategies served communities’ needs while widening the very gaps they bridged, the dissertation illuminates a change often dismissed as mere decline: the loss of interconnected multi-regional institutions—even as inter-regional trade and communication expanded—in favor of the increased authority of individuals over their immediate communities.

The Ise shrines are known throughout Japan as the residence of the mythical progenitor of the Japanese Imperial line, the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. Ise has held long-lasting importance in legitimating the Japanese imperial line and operating as an important site for state-sponsored rituals. Ise maintains an image of unchanged continuity reaching deep into the foundational myths of the country. In fact, Ise fell into ruin in the mid-fifteenth century. The physical destruction of the Ise shrines has long been thought to coincide with the collapse of the Japanese state during a period of internal conflict at the end of the fifteenth century. Conversely, this dissertation posits that the Ise region was selectively ignored by the imperial court who supported the Yoshida family, an ambitious sect of Shintō ritualists, in place of the Ise shrines. The interactions between the court and the Ise shrines reveal a shift in the meaning of Ise as a place of political and religious significance, and not the collapse of the state itself. The Yoshida moved important sites where deities were worshipped and determined the sacred geography of Japan. They relocated Amaterasu’s shrine, first to the capital in Kyoto, and then eventually to the city of Yamaguchi in western Japan. In response to this reconfiguration, local pilgrimage facilitators known as onshi propagated an image of Ise as a desirable location for travel and ritual observance. It was during the important period of division with the Yoshida family that much of the imagery and meaning of what Ise became was developed and came to play a central role in the forms of cultural, religious, and political legitimacy that exist in Japan to this day. The shrines were similarly threatened economically and politically by local actors within their home province. This dissertation also examines the Kitabatake family of Ise province to provide insight into the larger picture of economic and political change that took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This dissertation aims to provide insight into this dynamic period of contestation and present a new vista of religious and political behavior in Japan.