People refer to the Shogunate periods of Japan as "feudal," at least colloquially. On the one hand, one would imagine that since the concept was created to describe Europe and applied to Japan by metaphor it would be even more useless there. But on the other hand, it the Japanese context it seems to refer to a more tight period of time and to roughly one polity rather than the millennium of diverse states that we call "medieval Europe," so one could imagine it actually describing one coherent system there.

Do serious historians use the term for Japan? Is there a coherent system for that period of Japan that it could describe? Or are we just falling into using the same imprecise term for an even more different society?