The Dutch, more interested in trade than theology, consequently did better after the shogun Hideyoshi turned against a Christian beachhead that appeared to be taking political form. The motives of Europeans were further questioned when Portuguese missionaries, showing a greater enthusiasm for gold than God, began plundering Japan’s reserves. In an early purge, the generalissimo ordered the crucifixion of 26 Franciscans in 1597. The arrival of the English in 1613 further complicated the situation, introducing unwelcome Catholic-Protestant rivalries. The methods of suppression, though on a smaller scale, were no less severe than those practised by Catholic states like Portugal and Spain on subjects who resisted conversion. Those who refused to recant perished after miserable tortures and ordeals: hung by the feet for days, raped by crowds, boiled alive, thrown into tubs of vipers, or crucified.
Seclusion
After the suppression in 1637 of a largely Christian revolt in Shimabara on the southern island of Kyushu, Japan entered into a period of seclusion known as sakoku, one that would last for almost 250 years. Under this system the building of ocean-going ships was prohibited and sailors who found themselves shipwrecked beyond the territorial waters of Japan returned at their own peril; even those Japanese engaged in trade in such places as Southeast Asia were excluded from returning to their homeland. One troupe of hapless entertainers and their wives, working on the Indonesian island of Java, were never to return home. Under the iron grip of the Tokugawa regime, the influence of foreigners swiftly declined. The motives involved more than mere xenophobia. The Tokugawas were aware of a papal decree dividing the known world into Catholic and Protestant halves. The Philippines had already undergone forced conversion under the Spanish, while the Portuguese held sway over the trading enclave of Macau.
The Dutch, meanwhile, having endeared themselves to a later shogun by supplying a warship to fight against rebelling Christians, were given sole, though still limited, trading rights. Confined to a tiny artificial island in Nagasaki called Dejima, the Dutch and Chinese provided Japan with its only window on the world for the next two centuries. Though a tiny breach in the defences of the country, it allowed for a trickle of scientific and medical knowledge to seep in from Europe. Scientists and scholars like Thunberg, Siebold and Kaempfer were posted to Dejima, and on their return to Europe wrote the first foreign accounts of the country.
As the only westerners tolerated by the new regime, the Dutch were required to demean themselves with displays of cajoling flattery and obeisance in their mandatory visits to the shogun’s palace, a practice that continued well into the nineteenth century. The ever-expedient Dutch seem to have felt that the brief humiliation was worth it. Granted an audience in 1822, a Dutch warehouse master by the name of Fischer recorded what was required of a foreigner to make the right impression as he entered the Hall of the Hundred Mats:
The whole ceremony consists in making the Japanese compliment upon the appointed spot, and remaining for some seconds with the head touching the mats, while the words Capitan Holanda are proclaimed aloud. A stillness as of death prevails, broken only by the buzzing sound made by the Japanese to express profound veneration.
The exclusion policy, from which the Dutch and their Chinese rivals were exempted, doubtless hindered the development of the country in many ways, but it also promoted a sense of independence, and a culture less dependent on continental Asia.
Pax Tokugawa
The duties of the warrior class in Edo, liegemen in one way or other to the shogun himself, ranged from fairly humble posts guarding the castle gates and blockhouses to senior positions as councillors to leading daimyo. Samurai of any rank could be called to attend or participate in mandatory ceremonies.
The samurai alone had the right to go armed, his two swords, the handles of a long and short weapon protruding from scabbards, differentiating him from the townspeople who were allowed to carry one short and rather blunter sword for self-defence. Farmers had to protect themselves with agricultural tools and implements in the manner of peasants the world over.
With the separation of the warrior and farmer classes, the samurai moved into the jokamachi, or “under-castle towns” close to the city fortifications, a pattern that was duplicated throughout the country and formed the standard for urban development at the time. All functions were directed towards Edo castle, the central command organism.
Numbers of samurai, whose masters had been deprived of their positions or who had simply foresworn their allegiance to a lord, roamed the streets of Edo, creating social disorder. Known as ronin (wave men), they had no official income or right to fixed residence within the jokamachi. The life of the ronin was a mixed blessing, as they were accorded less respect than fully affiliated samurai in a country where identification was, and to some degree still is, consonant with respectability and recognition. The members of this dispossessed class eked out a living as best they could, hiring themselves as bodyguards to affluent merchants, or as instructors in military science: swordsmanship, equestrian skills and archery. The more intellectually gifted became writers and calligraphy teachers, Confucian scholars or instructors in philosophy and Chinese literature. While employed they could live moderately well. Between posts they were reduced to sleeping in rudimentary shelters or beneath the deep eaves of temple roofs. While their existence may have been precarious, they enjoyed a degree of freedom almost unheard of in a city expressly conceived to inhibit personal choices and freedom of movement.
Swashbuckling and potentially violent gangs of hatamoto (bannermen), young samurai who worked directly for the shogunate, were a common feature of life during the early days of Edo. Short of money, they would refuse to settle their bills; when flush, they became violent at an imagined slight when a shopkeeper might offer change for a bill paid. The “White Hilt Gang” was typical of this unstable element on the streets of the city. Their longer than average swords were decorated like their obi (sashes) with white fittings. In summer they chose - perversely - to wear long kimonos, in winter short ones, placing lead in the bottom hems and edges of their cloths to make them swing, an effect intended to lend a swagger to their movements.
Swords and Ink Brushes
The disciplines and moral rectitude of bushido, the “way of the warrior”, did not preclude blade testing on unwary victims. New swords were routinely tested on bundles of straw, fresh corpses and the dead or still breathing bodies of condemned criminals. With the right to kill any merchant or peasant who failed to show the correct degree of respect, a samurai, selecting some lonely part of the city at night, might easily cut off the head or limb of the first passer-by he met. Needless to say, this privilege, however infrequently put into practice, did not endear the samurai to the townspeople. The retainer of a hereditary post, Yamada Asaemon, otherwise known as Yamada the Beheader, was the most skilful of the Tokugawa executioners and sword-testers.
A massive armed class posed its own problems for the authorities, as rebellions had always arisen from within this group. An edict issued in 1615 requiring samurai to study and master the literary arts with the same vigour they had applied to the martial arts was an attempt, based on the Confucian idea that the pen and sword should be equally matched, to temper the warrior instincts of the samurai. Yamaga Soko, a masterless samurai and instructor in Confucian studies, addressed the delicate question of the peacetime role of the samurai in his work Shido, published in 1665: “Within his heart he keeps to the ways of peace, but without he keeps his weapons ready for use...”
Seeking an ideology to legitimize the new order, the authorities created a form of Tokugawa neo-Confucianism that would endorse a strict and confining hierarchical structuring of the classes, one based on laws that could be presented as immutable. The scholar Hayashi Razan, founder of a Confucian academy in Edo, is generally credited with promulgating the philosophy, imported from China, in his capacity as an official Confucian adviser to the shogunate. Razan strove to unify Confucian propriety and its firm rules of conduct with the laws
of nature, as this passage from one of his treatises explains:
Heaven is above and earth is below... we cannot allow disorder in the relations between ruler and subject, between those above and those below. The separation into four classes of samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants, like the five relationships, is part of the principles of heaven and is the Way which was taught by the Sage.
The Sage, of course, was Confucius. Removing the metaphysics required in Chinese tradition, Hayashi created a system of governance offering an ethical basis that would promote the political presuppositions of a new state ideology requiring total obedience to superiors. Confucianism’s leaden, didactic literature, however, had a stifling influence on the arts, especially painting. Beholden to the patronage of the Tokugawa court, painters of the great Kano school of artists, for example, sacrificed creativity in their bid to please their masters.
The core hierarchy of the castle and its military personnel, together with a massive concentration of samurai and their retainers, daimyo mansions and a growing number of shrines and temples, required the services of artisans, craftsmen, merchants and labourers, as well as tremendous quantities of consumer goods. Creating the new city that radiated around the castle produced a further workforce of skilled workers: draughtsmen, surveyors, carpenters, plasterers, tatami makers, armourers, administrators, scholars and artists. The lively interaction between these practitioners from different classes generated a creative fusion that led to one of the most vibrant cultures in Asia. Such was the influence of the city on Japanese culture that the era came to be known as the Edo period.
Merchants were despised by the ruling elite as their existence was considered to be based solely on the amassing of wealth. As the fortunes of the daimyo were progressively leached by the heavy levies they were forced to pay in maintaining estates both at home and in Edo, merchants and financiers, nominally members of the lower classes, became indispensable to the growth of the city. With an irony increasingly relished by the merchants themselves, their increasing wealth and power led not only to the decline of the old class system, with some chonin (townspeople) gaining the upper hand financially, but also to an efflorescence of culture that, to a very real degree, was their creation.
An urban structure was already apparent: the hilly, more prestigious bluffs of the yamanote to the west of the castle, a diluvial terrace with good views across the city, was where the samurai residences could be found, while artisans and merchants were confined to the shitamachi or Low City to the east, the marshy, alluvial area most likely to suffer rising tides from the bay and flooding from the river. The expressions High City and Low City first appear in a storybook called the Eda sangoyu (Beads of Coral) published in 1690, but the distinction was already well established. The translation of the word shita (down) and machi (town), the English “downtown”, falls short of its acquired meaning. Far more than a mere geographical co-ordinate, shitamachi is a concept and is in many respects regarded as the birthplace of Edo culture, expressed in printmaking, Kabuki and the refined mannerisms of the pleasure quarters. On a more mundane level, the people who inhabited the shitamachi were responsible for provisioning the daimyo and samurai families with food, goods and services. Their contribution to the life of Edo, though, belied their low status in the city’s social ranking. Their discontent over the long period of the Pax Tokugawa would produce a spirit of defiance.
The citadel and its matrix of subordinate zones and buildings were secure for the time being. The forces that were to eventually subvert the prevailing order were not the rising hordes of fractious warrior clans the Tokugawas so feared, but the relentless tread and grind of culture.
Edo Culture
The Flowering Margins
1638-1707
The citadel might have been built to outlast the ages, but no one was under any illusions about the precariousness of life in Edo, a city periodically traumatized by earthquakes, typhoons, tidal waves, floods, epidemics and famine. There was also the ever-present risk of fire among a population living cheek-by-jowl in homes made primarily of wood and paper.
An early test of Edo’s ability to withstand disaster and renew itself came on the morning of 18 January 1657, during the rule of the fourth shogun, Ietsuna, when a fire broke out in Maruyama Honmyo-ji, a temple in the present-day district of Hongo. Known as the Meireki Fire, the conflagration followed a drought that had left wells, riverbeds and other water courses depleted and buildings as dry as tinder. Adding to what many townspeople were beginning to think of as divine retribution was a strong wind blowing up clouds of red dust that fanned the flames, driving them over streets and walls. When the doors of a prison at Denma-cho were opened to save its inmates, a rumour spread that criminals were running amok. Responding to the news, the keeper of the town gate at Asakusa hastily ordered the great wooden doors closed. Thousands of townspeople and inmates were roasted alive, jammed against the gate as they tried to flee the flames. When the wind finally abated, a heavy snowfall blanketed the city. People made homeless by the fires perished in the blizzard as they huddled in the cold. The fires and snowstorm are said to have taken some 108,000 lives and obliterated sixty per cent of the city.
Despite its stone and water perimeters the fire had penetrated the castle grounds and fortifications. We can only imagine the sumptuously decorated interiors of the castle, the work of the great court painter Kano Tanyu, that were lost to the fire. The main keep was burnt to the ground. The fire was also strong enough to melt all the gold that was stored in the cellars of the keep. The scene was recorded by the chief stonemason’s son:
All around us it grew darker and darker, the people were lighting lanterns to show them the way. About then, the gunpowder stored in the towers began to ignite, and the sound of the explosions rent heaven and earth. With a thunderous roar, the towers crashed burning to the ground.
If the speed of destruction was astonishing, so was the reconstruction. The entire castle, minus the main keep, was rebuilt within two years. A fire-fighting group had already been set up in 1629; now further regulations were introduced to reduce the risk of fire. Thatched roofs were prohibited, streets widened to create firebreaks and fire towers with bells to sound the alarm were erected throughout the city. Despite these measures there were twenty major fires recorded during the Edo period. The shogun’s fire brigade was formed some time after the Meireki Fire. Many lords had their own brigades, commoners forming their own volunteer bands. The tattooed bodies and splendid banners of these dashing heroes are celebrated in the colourful ukiyo-e woodblock prints of the time. Though fires were an occupational hazard of living in Edo, the townspeople grew philosophical about natural disasters in general. Seeing a redeeming beauty in the fires, they called them Edo no hana, the “flowers of Edo”.
Unabated, fires continued to be the scourge of Edo life. The cramped downtown districts where merchants and craftsmen lived and worked were especially vulnerable to conflagrations, many the result of arson. The common people, resigned to losing their property and merchandise to fires, came to accept them as part of the price of living in Japan’s most dynamic and prosperous city, where even devastating loses could be recouped. Although Edo represented an extremely heterogeneous society, designed to stifle any correspondence or commonality between its segregated classes, the relocation of residents while central parts of the city were being rebuilt had the unplanned effect of blending social classes, with samurai now living, albeit temporarily, at close quarters with craftsmen, resulting in a reciprocal exchange of ideas and skills.
Defining the EDOKKO
Living conditions were probably no worse in Edo than any other urban centre in Japan, but as the city grew, its population swelled. The relative isolation of the country spared it many of the diseases common to parts of the world colonized by the western powers, especially the islands and archipelagos of the Pacific, where natives had come into contact with infected European crews. Relatively high standards of cleanliness and personal hygiene, as
sisted by the introduction of public baths, helped to keep disease in check, but the living conditions of the lower orders were conducive to the rapid spread of epidemics. The preponderance of water, a blessing in normal circumstances, only exacerbated sanitary problems. The Sumida could be counted on to flood twice a year. Filthy fish markets, foul odours and swarms of insects created the perfect setting for frequent outbreaks of cholera.
Among the discomforts of the humid summers were the swarms of mosquitoes that bred in the pools, canals and puddles of the city. Wealthy merchants lived along the more spacious, better ventilated front streets. These solid, fire-resistant homes were usually two storeys high, with attractive tiled roofs. Built of lath and plaster, the walls were finished in a lustrous black paint made from lime, India ink and the ash from incinerated oyster shells, creating an elegantly eerie sheen.
Tokyo: A Cultural and Literary History (Cities of the Imagination Book 34) Page 4