It is a testimony to Yoshihiko Amino's influential legacy that his once iconoclastic views regarding Japanese history have now become mainstream. This bad boy of Japanese historiography from the 1970s until his death in 2004 questioned many prevailing views about Japan's history and in the process dispatched more than a few sacred cows. It is telling that the translator, who deserves special kudos for such an excellent rendering, felt obliged to provide a synopsis of exactly what Amino was arguing against precisely because his revisionist interpretations have prevailed.
Amino unflinchingly scrutinizes conservative assertions about the unbroken line of emperors and nature of the imperial system while also challenging the Marxist analysis of feudal Japan. Amino's great contribution, however, is in convincingly recasting the role of those often marginalized in previous historical accounts of the pre-Meiji eras. By closely examining local historical records, he reveals a far more dynamic society than many other historians had assumed.
Peasants, for example, were often portrayed in a monochromatic, monolithic manner that belied the rich diversity in their lives and how they earned their living. Usually the term used in Japanese for peasant, hyakusho, meant someone living in an isolated village engaged in cultivating rice and struggling to maintain a bare subsistence living. Amino shows why such tropes of history are misleading, tapping a variety of sources from all over Japan that clearly demonstrate that hyakusho was a broad category that obscures considerable variation in living standards, how peasants made their living and the extent of their participation in trading networks. In doing so, he also subverts cliches about isolated, self-sufficient rural villages as repositories of timeless traditions.