ABSTRACT
This chapter considers how a few historians have periodized their narratives of Japan's earliest recorded epoch. It examines how they name their periods and the historical trajectories that characterized those periods. Periodization system utilizes the family name of key power holders: the Soga period in the sixth and seventh centuries and the Fujiwara Regency period, from the later ninth through the early twelfth centuries. A major influence on Totman's system of periodization was the historiography of Kuroda Toshio (1926–1993). Kuroda argued that traditional descriptions of the medieval polity focusing on the leading role of warrior organizations, the shogunates, is not sufficient. He insisted that people considers the effect of powerful households from various orders of society—aristocratic, military, and religious—that headed up realmwide chains of cliency relations and that he called "the gates of power". Cultural historians have also articulated the process by which intellectuals became increasingly conscious of Japan's distinctiveness from continental realms.
