This book borrows its title from an expression used about the Minamoto warrior family, who was said to be “the teeth and claws” of the noble Fujiwara family. In this most welcome work Adolphson addresses another set of teeth and claws – the armed forces of the Buddhist temples in medieval Japan. This subject has not until now received its fair share of attention from Western scholars. The image of monastic fighters has moreover been considerably distorted by many early modern and post-war Japanese historians, not least in the creation of the image of sōhei, or ‘warrior monks’, so often encountered in works of popular history, manga, PC games, and TV dramas.

Throughout the book Adolphson thoroughly deconstructs these images and places the monastic fighters in the social matrices where they belong. The book is an excellent example of how we can avoid reproducing distorted images, and it should be required reading for any student of premodern Japanese history. The book is very insightful and is based on a wide range of both primary and secondary Japanese material. It is easy to read, and its many illustrations are interesting, relevant and informative.

While his earlier work, The Gates of Power (2000), focused on forceful protests and the political power of the larger religious institutions, “Teeth and Claws” introduces the reader to the more martial side of monastic power struggles.

Adolphson addresses this issue through five chapters and a short concluding chapter, which the author suggests can be read more or less separately. However, it is not marred by unnecessary repetitions, and the reader will probably get a better understanding of this complex subject if the book is read in the order it is written.

In the first chapter ‘Discourses on Religious Violence and Armed Clerics’, Adolphson introduces us to the historiography of the sōhei phenomenon. In scholarship during the first half of the twentieth century, the sōhei were predominantly seen as proof of decline of Buddhism and they became instrumental in the search for the origin of the miserable state of the religious institutions. For this reason, sōhei research was mostly concerned with the questions of when the sōhei phenomenon first appeared and not least of whom to blame for this degenerate development. Adolphson skilfully challenges the presumption that the sōhei were a medieval phenomenon and that the concept is historically significant and meaningful to a modern reader.

In Chapter Two, Adolphson first looks more closely at the historical precedents for violence committed by monastic forces in China and early Heian period Japan. From this survey it becomes clear that violence committed by clerics was not a phenomenon, which suddenly appeared in the late Heian period. Religious forces had not at this point become an integrated part of the monastic institutions, although there appears to have been an increased tendency for both temples and secular lords from the tenth century onward to use armed violence in conflict situations. Adolphson suggests the phrase ‘partial militarization’ (p. 35) about the situation in the tenth century where families, individuals, and religious institutions would use armed men when necessity demanded it in their factional struggles. The armed temple forces of this period were therefore not standing contingents of monk-warriors but consisted primarily of lower ranking clerics or warriors from the estates of the temples, a point which is further illuminated in Chapter Three. By the late eleventh century, however, fierce competition for land and religious status drove the leading temples to implement increasingly violent means. Adolphson divides the inter-temple armed conflicts into two categories: struggles for supremacy of a monastic lineage, and conflicts over resources and land. Through this the reader gets a good idea of the secular problems and political ambitions, which drew the monastic leaders to subscribe to a ‘partial militarization’.

The social background of the fighting men of the temples is the topic of Chapter Three, and Adolphson asks the very relevant question of what exactly makes a warrior a monastic warrior, or sōhei. He furthermore asks “if a broad distinction between religious and secular warriors can be usefully applied to premodern societies” (p. 57). Adolphson has already prepared the ground for the answer to this question in the preceding chapter where he states that “monastic fighting was no different from that involving the secular elites. Moreover, monastics were fighting for the same reasons as secular elites, and anyone looking for larger religious motivations will be disappointed” (p. 37). Thus, monastic forces did not constitute a ‘separate category’ in late Heian armed conflicts, and viewing them as such will only obscure “the actual nature of the conflicts”. In his search for a more precise picture of the men fighting for the temples, Adolphson guides the reader through a large number of sources from the Heian and Kamakura periods, where we learn about warriors living inside the temples as well as warriors living in the temples’ provincial estates. The armed forces of the temples were much more complex in their organisation than usually described by historians, and they included an interesting mixture of temple servants with only little martial training, professional warriors serving as estate managers, and many other social groups in between. Neither the estate managers nor most of the temple servants should be described as ‘monks’, and they should therefore not be referred to as ‘monk-warriors’ just because they fought for a monastic lord. Instead Adolphson suggests the term jihei, ‘temple-warriors’ (p. 85), which denotes their affiliations with temples but does not imply any religious training as such. This is a valuable point, and even though Adolphson renames this category into ‘monastic warriors’ in the following, it does not change its validity. Since most of the monastic warriors had a secular background and powerbase, it is not surprising that the battles and strategies of these forces were quite similar to the ones of other secular warriors. This further underlines Adolphson's important point that we cannot draw a clear line between ‘religious’ and ‘secular’ forces.

The search for the identity of the monastic warriors continues in Chapter Four, where the commanders of the monastic forces are being discussed through a sample of the careers of some of the most prominent commanders from each of the largest temples, Jōjin and Hōyaku Zenshi of Enryakuji, Shinjitsu of Kōfukuji, Kakunin of Tōdaiji, and Sōken of Mt. Kōya. The successful commanders had to rely on their background as members of the aristocratic elite, but martial prowess became increasingly important during the Kamakura period. Through the examples chosen by Adolphson it is clear that imperial offspring and other aristocrats not only came to dominate the monastic institutions but also became a power in their own right outside their temples through the establishment of monzeki, or noble cloisters. This eventually led to friction, divided loyalties, and armed conflicts even within temple organisations. These leaders were therefore not monks, who took up arms and became warriors, but rather aristocratic warriors continuing secular struggles within a monastic framework.

In Chapter Five, the terminology and images of sōhei are explained in their historical contexts. Adolphson skilfully argues that the image of sōhei as monastic forces clad in white robes and head cowls and armed with glaives (naginata), is in fact a construct of a later time. In a refreshingly critical reading of picture scrolls, Adolphson deconstructs this image of the monastic warriors, and he breaks it down to largely artistic imaginations, which have been “recycled as ‘evidence’ or truthful illustrations of the sōhei by numerous scholars” (p. 127). The creation of this image of monastic warriors as sōhei was further strengthened by writers and modernisers in the late nineteenth century, to whom the image of “evil, degenerate, and armed monks” well suited the aims of the official promotion of State Shintō at the expense of the Buddhist sects. The very term most commonly used about the monastic warriors, sōhei, might actually have been imported from Korea, and the earliest Japanese example that we have of it being used is in a text from 1715, more than half a millennium after the phenomenon it is supposed to represent (p. 146).

“Teeth and Claws” is a unique work on a very welcome subject. It confronts key issues, which have been neglected for too long, and it raises some very important questions for future research. How do we understand the secular role played by the monastic institutions? What can we make of the violence committed by monastic forces? Does it make sense to categorise their acts as ‘religious violence’? This last question is raised by Adolphson in the first chapter of the book, but he does not seem to come up with a solution to the problem. For example, he apparently uses phrases like ‘religious violence’, ‘cleric violence’, and ‘monastic violence’ interchangeably, at one point even in the same paragraph (p. 157). It is not clear if Adolphson considers these three phrases to be synonyms or if some differentiation is intended. In the latter case the differences were lost on this reader. In any case, the definition of these phrases should probably be reconsidered, especially since Adolphson rightfully concludes that monastic forces did not constitute a ‘separate category’, as seen above. If these forces were no different from other armed forces, their actions should probably not be seen as constituting a ‘separate category’ of violence either, i.e. as ‘religious violence’.

What is thus called for in future research on this subject is, among other things, a general discussion on how we perceive medieval violence. Certainly, it is an act of violence when members and associates of a temple burn down buildings belonging to a rival temple. However, is it not also a violent act to burn down one's own temple buildings to put pressure on the Imperial Court, as was done by the Enryakuji in 1264?Footnote ¹ Likewise, when monks from powerful temples marched on the capital armed with transportable shrines or other religious relics, fear of the wrath of the gods put enormous pressure on the Court.Footnote ² To a modern observer such acts could be seen as peaceful devices, but this view does not take into account the terror, which these symbolic displays could inflict on people in medieval Japan. After all, “invisible violence” like curses, spells and magic could inflict very physical pain and suffering on believers. However invisible violence possesses terrifying power only as long as people believe in it and fear it. This might partly explain why monastic institutions gradually had to arm themselves with more physical means of violence, i.e. armed forces, as the power of the warrior government grew at the expense of the more god-fearing Imperial Court.

Aside from this more general discussion on the meaning(s) of violence, Adolphson does an outstanding job of re-incorporating armed monastic struggles into a wider socio-political and cultural context of medieval Japan.