Reddit reviews Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850

This question gets asked fairly frequently and rarely answered, I think partly because it does sound so much like a homework question and partly because current Japanese historians basically reject the idea of Japanese feudalism. I've talked to a fair amount of European medievalists who find the term problematic for Europe as well. So there isn't much to compare or contrast since the term is basically something we spend a lot of time arguing against.

A common way of defining feudalism is as a top-down system in which you have a lord and subjects in different positions (i.e. king-local lord, local lord-knight/landowner, landowner-peasant) where the lower ranking "vassals" or "serfs" owe their livelihood to their "lord". This is something that at no point in pre-modern Japan actually existed. Arguably in the Tokugawa period you get something close but not really. It was far more centralized than feudal systems are supposed to be.

Japanese medievalists use the terms "lord" and "vassal" with a lot of caveats. Vassals were not necessarily bound to obeying/defending/fighting-for/whatever their lord, and they only did so insofar as their lord kept paying them to do so. Unless they were slaves, then they're not considered vassals and there is none of the reciprocity you get with the "traditional" lord-vassal relationship. That's just among warrior households, which, at least in the later medieval period, didn't so much "obey" anybody unless it was in their financial interest. Local lords (Daimyo) were technically below the shogun and imperial court and largely ignored them both unless seeking favors. Vassals of Daimyo frequently switched sides in wars and occasionally assassinated Daimyo to take power themselves.

On top of all of this, "peasants" were actually a fairly strong force to be reckoned with. Ikki groups, religious and local, had a considerable amount of power and were specifically targeted during the process of centralization (generally called "Unification") because of the threat they posed to any central authority, or any authority in general.

All that said (as I said, we spend a lot of time arguing against the use of the word), this question has been answered several times. Here's one example. You might also want to read Japan Emerging, specifically chapters 4, 17, and 26. Those chapters give a more in-depth overview of the ideas I talked about here. And if this is a homework question, give your teacher the Amazon link to that book.

[Japan Emerging: Premodern History to 1850, edited by Karl Friday]
(http://www.amazon.com/Japan-Emerging-Premodern-History-1850/dp/0813344832/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1373561568&sr=8-1)

This is an excellent compilation of short but informative scholarly articles on various topics in premodern Japanese history. All the articles are written by scholars who are expert researchers on their field, and because the articles are modified for the format of the book, they never get too in-depth or tedious as many academic works do.

I read the whole thing cover to cover and ended up using some of the articles, and more importantly works cited in my senior graduation thesis on historical revisionism in protohistorical Japan and Korea. If you are interested in any of the topics it has references of where to go from there. I recommend this book to anyone interested in Japanese history up to the Meiji era. Check the table of contents on Amazon's Look Inside to see if they are what you are looking for.

Needless to say, as scholarship progresses, Sansom is getting pretty dated. His coverage of pre-Asuka Japan can be downright incorrect (although, in his favor, the data didn't exist at the time).

For a brief coverage of Japan's premodern history, the latest work out there is Japan Emerging, edited by Karl Friday.

It is not as detailed as Sansom (as it moves much faster), but it incorporates the latest methodologies and scholarly consensus. I would consider it a good introduction.