Oaths and Divine Punishments in Warring States Japan from the Princeton University Collection. Medieval Worlds|Oaths in Premodern Japan and Premodern Europe - Volume 19. 2023 medieval worlds Volume 19. 2023|

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This article introduces five oaths (kishōmon) from sixteenth-century Japan, currently held by the East Asian Library, Princeton University, United States. Each of these documents can be identified as one half of an oath passed down to the Saji family, a local warrior (samurai) family based in Kōga district, Ōmi province, central Japan (the other half was separated). Local warriors of Kōga are well known for their multi-layered networks and organizations called collectives (sō), which served as mediators in local disputes. Combining these Princeton oaths (we shall keep to this English term for the Japanese kishōmon) with other documents that survived in the Saji’s hereditary archive, this article discusses their function. We have here a case study of Kōga that reconstructs local disputes and mediation by local warriors and sheds light on their collective organizations. This article also explores how medieval people envisioned divine punishments for breaking promises to deities. The diary of Yoshida Kanemi, a Shintō priest in Kyoto, contains valuable information: people of Kōga and its surrounding areas often visited Kanemi and asked him for prayers to cancel the oaths they had written. Kanemi’s diary shows that the people of Kōga on the one hand did indeed fear divine punishments but, on the other, tried to avoid them by drawing on new practices offered by Yoshida Shintō. After the destruction of the Kōga gunchū sō, a district-wide collective of local warriors of Kōga, in 1585, the Saji and other local warriors were banished from Kōga. They later returned to their homeland but lost their warrior privileges in the region. In this process, the Saji lost some of their inherited documents, including those currently held by Princeton University. Thus, the Princeton oaths not only tell us how medieval oaths functioned in Warring States Japan but also describe the hardship one local warrior family experienced in the socio-political transition from the medieval to the early modern (Tokugawa) period.