Japan

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Nobunaga and Hideyoshi

The thrust by Imagawa Yoshimoto toward Kyoto in 1560 was frustrated by a minor daimyo, Oda Nobunaga (15341582) of Owari. Nobunaga himself successfully occupied Kyoto in 1568 and began the process of consolidation. By the time of his death, he had destroyed the power of the Buddhist establishment based at Enryaku-ji outside of Kyoto and had eliminated or gained the allegiance of the daimyo of the approximately one third of Japan that lay in the strategic central portion of the country.

Upon his assassination in 1582, Nobunaga was succeeded by his foremost general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (15361598), who, having eliminated the Buddhist stronghold at Osaka, turned to the conquest of the daimyo who remained outside his system of alliance. Establishing his headquarters at Osaka, Hideyoshi sent a force of over 200,000 men into Shikoku in 1585. The conquest of Kyushu followed in 1587. The successful destruction of the Hojo stronghold in the Kanto in 1590, an operation in which Tokugawa Ieyasu served as principal ally, brought the daimyo of all Japan under Hideyoshi's command. After the victory, Ieyasu was obliged to exchange his lands for those of the defeated Hojo. He moved his headquarters to Edo, the modern Tokyo, where he was to inherit the supreme power little more than 10 years later.

Meanwhile, the momentum of Hideyoshi's victories had turned his attention to the continent. In 1592 he sent the forces of his vassal daimyo into Korea with the ultimate intention of conquering China and setting up a vast East Asian empire. Japanese armies drove to the Yalu, where they confronted forces sent by the Chinese Ming dynasty, but supply problems caused their eventual withdrawal. A second expedition in 1597 was primarily punitive. It was hastily withdrawn after Hideyoshi's death.

Hideyoshi did not become shogun but instead relied on imperial prestige to back his power. Gaining adoption into the Fujiwara family, he made himself eligible for the title of kampaku, which he took in 1585 as a sign of legitimacy. Hideyoshi's government took the form of a hegemony placed over about 100 daimyo. His own territories made up roughly one tenth of the entire realm and were well placed in central Japan around Kyoto and Osaka, thus permitting him to dominate the economic heart of the country.

The remainder of the country was divided among his vassal daimyo, who in turn enfeoffed their own retainers. Daimyo were responsible for the governance of their own territories, for military assistance, and for labor and material for public works. They pledged their loyalty to Hideyoshi by oath and ensured it by giving hostages. Hideyoshi developed his castle at Osaka as his main military establishment and built a grand palace at Momoyama as his residential center, to which he assembled the daimyo and their hostages.

Social and Economic Reforms. Hideyoshi died before he had created a stable political structure and an assured succession. Yet he was to preside over a literal revolution in the country's institutions of social and economic organization. Nobunaga had already begun the effort to unify weights and measures and to break the economic hold of the guilds by creating free markets; Hideyoshi continued these measures, striking new coins of gold in 1588, thereby unifying the currency.

In 1585, Hideyoshi began a systematic land delineation resurvey (kenchi), which, by requiring the use of a new unit of measurement, forced the entire country to reassess its land base. Superior land rights were now completely redefined so as to rest entirely in the authority of the national overlord and through him in the daimyo. Fields were registered in the name of free peasant cultivators (hyakusho), who were thereby protected in their tenures but made responsible for the dues. Hyakusho families were grouped into villages (mura) that now became the standard fiscal and administrative units in the countryside. Fields were graded by quality and assessed according to yield in measures of koku (about 5 bushels). Taxes were calculated on the basis of these assessment figures.

Hideyoshi's survey became the basis for a separation of status between peasant and samurai. A tendency of the samurai to move off the land, where they had served as land managers, and to congregate in the castle headquarters of the daimyo had been under way before Hideyoshi's time, for the new style of warfare placed emphasis on garrisoned fortresses and large mobile armies. Increasingly, the lesser ranks of bushi left the villages to live as stipended retainers in the castle towns of the daimyo. The new land survey drew a rigid line through Japanese society that divided the farming from the nonfarming classes. Those listed on the land registry books were peasants. Those recorded on the daimyo's rolls as fief holders or stipendiaries were bushi. Hideyoshi's so-called "sword hunt" (katana-gari) of 1585, by which the peasantry was disarmed, made the separation of classes final and irreversible. An accompanying edict prevented bushi from returning to the villages or the common people from changing occupations. Thus the basis of the four-class system was laid whereby samurai, peasants, artisans, and merchants were given separate legal identity for the next 300 years.

Hideyoshi and his daimyo followers set a new style of cultural life for the high military aristocracy. Bushi life was now increasingly confined to the castle and its environs. In the palaces that adjoined their castles the daimyo built with boldness and with an eye for display. Hideyoshi's residence at Momoyama has perpetuated its name through the gilded screens that typically adorned the walls or formed partitions in these residences. Gold or silver leaf formed the background of these screens, on which were painted vividly colored and boldly executed designs of flowers, birds, and fantastic animals.

Tokugawa Period
Hideyoshi's death left the balance of power in a precarious state, and before long the daimyo were at odds. In a great battle at Sekigahara in 1600, the so-called "eastern faction" led by Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated the "western faction" under Mori Terumoto that professed loyalty to Hideyoshi's infant heir. Ieyasu was now the paramount power in Japan, although it was not until 1615 that he managed to destroy Osaka castle and erase all memory of Hideyoshi's supremacy. In 1603, Ieyasu obtained the title of shogun, and his castle at Edo became the military and political center of the land. By the time of his death he had laid the foundations of a political system that was to last until 1867.

Balance of Power. Ieyasu continued the practice of decentralized administration that relied on daimyo as local rulers. But now the shogun played a vastly more prominent role in the total polity. By 1650, following the efforts of the first three shoguns, the Tokugawa lands, together with those of their retainers, amounted to nearly one quarter of the realm. This area of direct control included the major commercial cities, the most important mines, and a number of strategically placed castles.

The "balance of loyalty" among the daimyo was also greatly in the Tokugawa favor. Collateral branches (shimpan, of which there were 23 by the 18th century) were relied on as major supports, while trusted house-daimyo (fudai, numbering 145) were used as counterweights against those who had joined Ieyasu as allies (tozama, numbering 98) during the struggle for power following Hideyoshi's death. The shogun's direct retainers included some 17,000 stipended housemen (gokenin) and 5,000 enfeoffed bannermen (hatamoto).

The Tokugawa shoguns acknowledged the titular supremacy of the emperor and paid outward respect to the imperial court, providing sustenance lands for the emperor and the few remaining noble families. On the other hand, the emperor and courtiers were confined to Kyoto and prevented from interference in governmental affairs or free association with the daimyo. The court was reminded of the shogun's power by the presence of a Tokugawa governor-general (shoshidai) who commanded a large garrison at Nijo Castle adjacent to the imperial palace.

Daimyo were joined by oaths to the shogun and received their domain patents as grants of benefice. Governed by the shogun's Code of Military Houses (Buke-sho-hatto), they were placed under a variety of restrictionsfor example, marriages and title successions had to be approved, and the size of military establishments was strictly regulated.

The most effective control measure was the alternate attendance (sankin-kotai) requirement that made it mandatory for the daimyo to establish a residence in Edo, where they left their wives and heirs as permanent hostages. They themselves were permitted to alternate residence between Edo and their castle headquarters on either a yearly or half-yearly basis. While in Edo, the daimyo periodically gathered at the shogun's castle for ceremonial and other functions. The necessity of maintaining dual establishments and the requirements of travel back and forth in aristocratic style became a financial drain on the daimyo and put unusual emphasis on protocol and ceremonial concerns. But the alternate attendance system, more than anything else, knit the Tokugawa ruling elite into a single cohesive body and made political subversion difficult, if not impossible. The Tokugawa hegemony did not collapse until the foreign problem had forced a drastic relaxation of alternate attendance in 1862.

Government. The government of shogun and daimyo (called the baku-han system by modern historians) provided a thorough and rigorously enforced administration for the country. Administration above the level of village and town-ward self-government was staffed entirely by samurai. Using their large bands of samurai retainers, which had accumulated during the wars of unification, the daimyo organized bureaucracies for peacetime civil control. They depended on their foremost vassals for counsel and on their lesser retainers to head offices that handled such matters as rural administration, taxation, finance, police inspection, superintendence of the castle town, of religious bodies, and educational institutions.

The shogunate (or bakufu, as it was commonly called) relied on only the fudai daimyo and direct retainers for administrative service. A board of senior fudai daimyo served as elders (roju), who made basic policy, kept watch over the daimyo, and exercised authority over the major administrative offices. A board of lesser fudai served as junior elders (wakadoshiyori), who supervised the shogun's retainers, maintained the guard groups, and the corps of inspectors (metsuke).

Rule by Status. The Tokugawa government was noteworthy for the attention it gave to national policy and the development of public law. For the first time since the Nara period, Japan began to acquire a legal framework for the state as a whole. The laws and regulations that flowed from the shogunate and the daimyo headquarters reflected a new effort at bringing order to society and government. Administrative procedure increasingly referred to legal precedents, and the compilation of legal codes for public use was also begun.

Tokugawa law was based on the premise that the existing hierarchy of social classes was part of the natural order. Continuing the class divisions established by Hideyoshi, Tokugawa law went on to clarify the boundaries between the classes and to define the behavior appropriate to each. The concept of four classes, now backed by Confucian theory, drew a particularly firm line between the bushi, as an aristocracy, privileged to bear a surname and wear two swords, and the common classes.

Tokugawa government can thus be called "rule by status," whereby each individual was treated in accordance with the status to which he was born. Yet within his status the individual received treatment under the law identical with that of his peers. To this extent, Tokugawa law was an advance over the localized rule of custom that had existed since the breakdown of the Taiho institutions.

Confucian Revival. Furnishing philosophical support to the Tokugawa legal institutions were the concepts of Confucianism, which now received renewed attention. The Tokugawa rulers, as they turned from military organization to civil administration, picked up Chinese texts for guidance in matters of government, society, and economics. The principal Confucian advisers came from the family of Hayashi Razan (15831657), who had drafted the samurai code. A bakufu center of learning began to take shape in Edo by 1630. Daimyo followed suit, so that by the end of the 17th century most domains provided educational facilities for their retainers. Increasingly, samurai were urged to cultivate both learning and military skills.

The tendency of the Tokugawa bushi to become an urbanized, administrative official class was marked by absorption of Confucian concepts of morality and Confucian justification for the exercise of political authority. Benevolent rule (jinsei) became the samurai's rationale for government, while the principles of bushido, which combined the military virtues of loyalty and bravery with Confucian moral qualities, became the samurai's ideal.

Policy of Seclusion. The final touch of the Tokugawa polity was added by the policy of seclusion. Tokugawa Ieyasu had favored the expansion of overseas trade, but fear of subversion by Christianity proved a more powerful influence. Arrival of the Dutch and the English after 1600 offered the possibility of trade without religion. But the Tokugawa failed to develop Edo as a port; Kyushu, which remained a stronghold of tozama daimyo, continued to be the preferred center for trade.

Thus the Tokugawa adopted a dual policy, seeking to eradicate Christianity and to channel trade into a shogunal monopoly at the port of Nagasaki on Kyushu. When an edict expelling missionaries failed in 1614, vigorous persecutions followed. In 1622 the first major execution of Christians took the lives of 120 missionaries and Japanese converts. Soon all Japanese were obliged to register at Buddhist temples as a sign of their freedom from Christian contamination. Known Christians were subject to torture and execution. The Catholic Church records over 3,000 martyrdoms in Japan at this time.

Meanwhile, the seclusion policy had crystallized. The Spanish had been expelled in 1624, and trade had been restricted to Hirado and Nagasaki. In 1635 the Tokugawa prohibited its own people from going abroad. In 1637 a rebellion broke out at Shimabara (near Nagasaki) and involved some 20,000 peasants and displaced samurai, many of them Christian. Put down by 1638 with great slaughter, this event encouraged the last drastic steps toward seclusion.

The Portuguese were expelled in 1637, and the Dutch were confined to the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki harbor in 1641. The Chinese were likewise confined to special quarters at Nagasaki. Thus foreign trade, with the exception of the minor trade with Korea conducted by the So of Tsushima, was brought fully under Tokugawa control. The controversial seclusion (sakoku) policy has been blamed for taking Japan out of the stream of world influence at the time when the peoples of the West were taking their first steps toward modern nationhood. It is also demonstrable that isolation provided Japan with a period of peace and stability that was greatly needed after a century of incessant warfare.

Development of Tokugawa Japan
Despite its withdrawal from free contact with the outside world and the limitations this imposed upon the national economy, Japan underwent a number of significant changes during the Tokugawa period. For over a century after the establishment of the "Great Peace," the agrarian base was expanded through the efforts of the shogunate and the daimyo; land under cultivation may have doubled by 1730. Population increased by over 50% to something just over 30 million. But the most startling changes followed the trend in increased urbanization. Edo grew to include perhaps a million inhabitants by the beginning of the 18th century. Kyoto and Osaka each had populations of over 300,000. Another 40 or 50 cities, most of the castle towns, had populations of over 10,000. Some 10% of the Japanese people were engaged in an entirely urban way of life.

Rise of the Merchant Class. The commercial quarters of the new Japanese cities flourished as the samurai depended on merchants to convert their rice stipends to cash and to supply their special needs. Merchant families, denied access to aristocratic society or influence in government, increased their wealth and developed their own social and cultural life. Thus, despite the contempt in which the samurai held the merchants, something of an alliance of interest developed between the two classes.

Osaka and Edo developed as the two great economic centers of the country. Transportation facilities (mostly coastal shipping), a unified currency, and privately developed exchange facilities and wholesaling organizations gave rise to a national market economy. Merchant "princes" controlled the Osaka rice exchange and served as financial agents for the daimyo. Before long, daimyo domains and individual samurai were deeply in debt to merchant financiers. Many daimyo tried the expedients of floating loans with paper currency or of making profitable monopolies out of local domain products.

Cultural Life in the Cities. In the great cities, first in Osaka and Kyoto and then in Edo, merchant communities developed their own style of life and supported new arts and pastimes. Best described in the realistic novels of Ihara Saikaku (16421693), it was a life centered on the "floating world" (ukiyo) of the licensed quarters, its courtesans and theaters. Chikamatsu Monzaemon (16531724), writing for both the puppet (Joruri) and Kabuki theaters, made plays out of the tensions between love and duty that plagued the lives of the townspeople.

Woodblock printing made possible the illustration of popular literature and ultimately the multicolored depictions of actors by Sharaku, geisha by Kiyonaga, and famous sights along the popular travel routes by Hokusai and Hiroshige. Poetry also became popularized through the spread of the 17-syllable haiku, perfected by Matsuo Basho (16441694). Such art forms, though considered vulgar by the samurai, nonetheless became the basis of an urban culture enjoyed by the samurai as well as by the townsmen.

Confucianism and Nationalism. As for the samurai, their creative talents went into the fields of scholarship and philosophy. Leisure and the promotion of Confucian learning led to important intellectual developments. The early and fairly routine studies of neo-Confucian texts had given way, by the beginning of the 18th century, to a number of heterodox schools of thought and particularly to more rational treatments of the political and economic problems that were plaguing Japanese society.

Men such as Ogyu Sorai (16661728) urged the shogunate to assert a more absolute control of the country, while Sato Nobuhiro (17681850) wrote numerous works on world geography, agricultural improvement, and local administration. A revival of interest in Japanese history and a search for a body of "Japanese classics" led to the development of a school of "national learning" (kokugaku). Motoori Norinaga (17301801), the most prominent scholar in this tradition, spent a lifetime studying the Kojiki and expounding the existence of an ancient Japanese "way" that existed before it was contaminated by Chinese influence.

Later scholars, particularly the school subsidized by the Mito branch of the Tokugawa house, placed emphasis on the revival of Shinto beliefs and the importance of reverence toward the emperor as symbol of a sacred Japanese homeland.

Despite strict control of contact with foreigners at Nagasaki, knowledge of the West was acquired by scholars who pursued "Dutch learning" (Rangaku). Restrictions on the imports of books had been relaxed in 1720, and thereafter interest grew in Western medicine, military science, geography, and astronomy. Through such avenues the Japanese samurai intellectuals acquired something of an understanding of the nature of the outside world and the power of the Western states. The revival of national learning decreased their dependence upon China as model in matters of government and philosophy. The late Tokugawa intellectual scene was varied and vigorous, reacting to a variety of stimuli of both internal and external origin.

Decline of the Shogunate. By the turn into the 19th century the Tokugawa regime was facing a number of fundamental problems. Discrepancies in wealth divided a prosperous village upper class from a landless poor, and wealthy merchants from an urban proletariat. The samurai class was almost generally in financial difficulty, while the bakufu and daimyo domains were deeply in debt.

Efforts at shogunal reform, usually by attempting to curtail expenditures and the spread of money economy, had failed, although a few of the daimyo domains, because of the smaller and more controllable size of their economies, had had some success with the practice of "domain monopolies."

Danger signals became frequent as the famines that followed crop failures led to peasant violence and as the urban poor looted the premises of rice merchants. A major alarm was sounded in 1838, when a former shogunal official by the name of Oshio led a plot to take over Osaka castle and to share the wealth of the city with the poor. The plot was put down but not before the weakness and indecisiveness of the bakufu police had been demonstrated.

Meanwhile, the authorities became aware of new pressure on Japan's frontiers from abroad. The Russians, who had reached the Pacific across Siberia by the 17th century, had begun exploration of the es. In 1792, Lieutenant Laxman entered Nemuro harbor in Ezo (now Hokkaido) and asked for the privileges of trade. Edo's response was rapid and firm. By 1802 the shogunate had placed the northern island under its direct jurisdiction and had begun a program of colonization and defense. An effort by the Russian entrepreneur Nikolai Petrovich Rezanov to negotiate formally at Nagasaki was rejected in 1804.

Soon the British began to appear in Japanese waters. The British vessel Phaeton, flying the Dutch flag, tried to break into the Nagasaki trade in 1808. Though the ship was driven off, the incident caused the disgraced magistrate of Nagasaki to perform ritual suicide. In the ensuing decade the frequent attempts of British whalers to obtain supplies from the Japanese caused the Tokugawa authorities to issue an order in 1825 that all foreign vessels, no matter what their intentions, must be driven away from Japan's shores.

The most serious concern over the foreign menace came, however, as the news of the British encroachment in China became known to the Japanese, generally through the Dutch. News of the British victory over China in the Opium War of 18391842 was particularly disturbing. And this, coupled with an awareness of domestic weakness, created a sense of crisis shared by many leaders in the shogunate and in the daimyo domains.

Tokugawa Nariaki (18001860), head of the Mito branch of the house, was particularly vociferous in his call for a firm stand coupled with a military buildup. Yet most bakufu officials were immobilized by the rigidity of the existing administrative system or were only too aware of Japan's weakness. When Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Uraga Bay in 1853, he set in motion a chain of events that rapidly led to the opening of Japan and the demise of the Tokugawa regime.

John W. Hall,
Yale University

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