The missionaries’ intolerance of other religions, however, resulted in strong resistance to them by the Buddhist clergy, and Hideyoshi, after reuniting the country, began to look on Christianity as possibly subversive to unified rule. The Japanese were not unaware of the Spanish political conquest that had accompanied the introduction of Christianity to the Philippines, and some of them began to fear that Christian loyalties directed toward a distant papacy could undermine a feudal system based on purely local loyalties. The Spanish began to come to Japan from the Philippines in 1592, bringing with them Franciscan friars, who quarreled with the Portuguese-dominated Jesuits. The Protestant Dutch in 1609 and English in 1613, who had no thought of proselytizing and were quick to criticize the Catholic Portuguese and Spaniards, also set up trading stations on Hirado, an island off the northwest coast of Kyushu, showing that trade with the Europeans could exist without tolerating their religion.
Kobe Municipal Art Gallery
A decorative screen showing “Southern Barbarians” landing in Japan.
Even before the arrival of the Protestant Europeans, Hideyoshi officially banned Christianity in 1587 and in 1597 suddenly began to enforce this edict by crucifying nine missionaries and seventeen of their converts. At first Ieyasu was more tolerant. But in 1606 he began issuing anti-Christian edicts, and he started a full persecution in 1612, culminating in large-scale executions two years later. From then on the missionaries were methodically driven out and native Christians forced into apostasy or martyrdom. Suspects were made to trample on a Christian icon, known as a fumie or “treading picture.” The Catholic church officially recognizes more than 3,000 martyrs in Japan, fewer than 70 of whom were Europeans. The final destruction of Christianity in Japan came with the defeat and annihilation in 1637–1638 of upward of 20,000 Christian peasants who, desperate over religious persecution and economic oppression, had broken out in revolt, basing themselves on an old castle at Shimabara in Kyushu. Christianity lingered on until the second half of the nineteenth century only in clandestine form in a few isolated Kyushu communities.
The suppression of Christianity soon led to the virtual isolation of Japan from the outside world. European traders were limited to Nagasaki and Hirado in 1616. In 1623 the English voluntarily closed their trading post as unprofitable. The Spanish were expelled the next year, to be followed in 1639 by the Portuguese. This left only the Dutch, who were confined in virtual imprisonment on the small island of Deshima in the harbor of Nagasaki. More important, in an effort to keep the virus of Christianity out of Japan, all Japanese were prohibited in 1636 from leaving Japan or from returning to Japan if already abroad, and ships large enough to sail to foreign countries were banned. As a result, sizable colonies of Japanese in Southeast Asia, who for a century had played a large role there as traders, pirates, and mercenaries, were left to wither away, and Japanese contact with the outside world was reduced to a strictly controlled trickle. Chinese traders and the Dutch could still come under careful restrictions to Nagasaki, and contacts with Korea continued through Tsushima and with China through the Ryukyu Islands. In the case of the Ryukyu Islands, which are inhabited by a branch of the Japanese people, the southern Kyushu domain of Satsuma had conquered the islands in 1609, making their kings vassals of the Shimazu daimyo of Satsuma but permitting them to continue trade contacts with China in the guise of tributary relations.
Japan, thus, was not completely cut off from the rest of the world, but it was isolated enough to remove all foreign pressures on the political and economic system. Japan slowly dropped out of the consciousness of the Europeans and began to lag technologically behind the now rapidly developing West. This situation, together with the reassertion of power at this time by a warrior class through a feudal type of political organization, has given rise to the concept that the Tokugawa period was a time of stagnation, but this was far from being the case. Peace and order brought rapid economic growth and a great increase in population. Japan was also large and diverse enough and had sufficient contact with the outside world to continue a rapid and even brilliant cultural development.
7
THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE LATE FEUDAL SYSTEM
The Tokugawa were supremely successful in achieving the political stability they sought. Between the mid-seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries they maintained conditions of absolute peace, internal as well as external, which is a record unmatched over a comparable period of time by any other large nation. No foreign war, revolution, uprising, or coup d’état in any way threatened their rule. People became accustomed to living peacefully according to accepted law and custom. The brawling, bellicose Japanese people of the sixteenth century gradually changed into an extremely orderly, even docile people. They learned to live together in their cramped islands with relatively few outward signs of friction. Nowhere in the world was proper decorum more rigorously observed by all classes, and nowhere else was physical violence less in evidence in everyday life. The peace and order of the land was broken only by occasional and sporadic outbursts of man and nature—great fires in Edo, destructive earthquakes, the last great eruption in 1707 of the now-extinct volcano of Fuji, an occasional outbreak by impoverished city dwellers (the worst was in Osaka in 1837), scattered riots by still more impoverished peasants demanding relief from crushing taxes or unjust officials—but nothing on a national scale and nothing that could shake the existing political or social order.
Perhaps the best idea of the carefully guarded political tranquillity of the time can be gained from the story of the only political incident that stirred the nation, at least emotionally, during these two hundred years and became a favorite literary and dramatic theme. This was the incident of the Forty-seven Ronin, which took place between 1701 and 1703. A minor daimyo was so grievously insulted by an important official of the shogun’s court that in a rage he drew his sword and wounded his tormentor. To have drawn his sword within the castle grounds of Edo was an offense punishable by death, and the Edo authorities ordered the unlucky man to commit suicide and confiscated his domain. His feudal retainers lost their status as full-fledged samurai and became ronin, which was a term for a masterless samurai who had lost his normal place in society.
Forty-seven of these ronin vowed to take vengeance upon the lord who had caused their master’s downfall, but realizing that the government would be watching for just such a move on their part, they decided first to lull its suspicions. They bided their time for two years, while their leader took up a life of debauchery to indicate that nothing was to be feared from him. Then, on a snowy winter night, they assembled in Edo, broke into the residence of their lord’s old enemy, and avenged themselves by taking his head. By this act they of course flouted the authority of the bakufu, but their self-sacrificing loyalty to their master made them at once national heroes. After much debate, the government finally permitted them to atone for their crime by the honorable death of seppuku.
Tranquillity and order do not necessarily put an end to change. In fact, they can encourage peaceful evolution. The reunification of the land and then complete peace, which lasted from 1638 until the 1860s, naturally brought growth, and growth inevitably produced change. The outward political structure of the Tokugawa system was virtually the same in the mid-nineteenth century as it had been two centuries earlier. And yet, behind this unchanged façade, Japan altered a great deal internally. By late Tokugawa times, Japan was a far different country from what it had been at the beginning of the seventeenth century.
For one thing, a great increase in productivity had taken place. All the domains were naturally eager to expand the agricultural lands on which their wealth depended. This they did by the reclamation of swamps and other wastelands, which was particularly possible in the more peripheral, less densely inhabited areas. Agricultural technology also made steady progress, and by the late eighteenth century an extensive literature on improved farming techniques was being written. While the offic
ial production figures for domains tended to remain static after the middle of the seventeenth century, agricultural yields in many domains came in fact to far exceed these figures.
A steady improvement of technology and the consequent increase in production also took place in other economic fields, and trade grew by leaps and bounds, especially in the first century of Tokugawa rule. There were two main reasons for this rapid growth of trade. One was that all the major cities and much of the most advanced central part of the country were in the shogun’s realm, which thus constituted a large free-trade zone. The merchants of this area, as the shogun’s direct subjects, also enjoyed the bakufu’s protection in their dealings with the domains. The other reason was that the system of “alternate attendance” required all the domains to maintain costly establishments in Edo and pay for the expensive annual trips of the daimyo and their retinues to and from the shogun’s capital. To obtain the necessary funds, no domain, however large, could maintain an isolated, self-supporting economy, as was their natural inclination, but had to produce excess rice or other specialized crops or manufactures for sale on the national market. The chief consuming areas were the great cities in the shogun’s domain, such as Kyoto and Osaka, each of which had upward of 300,000 people, and Edo, which by the early eighteenth century had a population of at least a million and may have been the largest city in the world at that time.
Thus although Japan was politically divided in a feudal manner, it was economically united and developed the economic institutions appropriate to a unified economy. Most of the domains in western Japan maintained economic agencies in Osaka, which became the major entrepôt for trade in that part of the country, while Kyoto reestablished its position as the center of production for fine handicrafts. The economy became thoroughly monetized. Both the shogun’s realm and some daimyo domains issued paper money, and paper credits of all sorts came into common use. Rice exchanges, with daily fluctuating quotations, developed at Edo and Osaka. People became accustomed to paying fixed prices in stores rather than haggling over each item, as was the rule everywhere else in the world until comparatively recent times. Toward the end of the period, landless peasants and other marginal groups worked increasingly for wages, rather than remaining in feudal subordination to some patron. All in all, the economy became far more commercialized and sophisticated than one would expect in a politically feudal land.
Though merchants were theoretically the lowest of the four classes, they came to play roles of great importance in the domains as well as in the shogun’s realm by cooperating closely with the political authorities. Starting as brewers of sake, the Japanese rice wine, or as moneylenders or dealers in dry goods, many of the merchants of the shogun’s cities built up extremely prosperous enterprises with branches in several cities. A good example is the house of Mitsui, which, starting in the early seventeenth century, survived the drastic changes at the end of Tokugawa rule to become one of the largest economic empires the world has ever seen. The city merchants took the lead in the expansion of trade in the seventeenth century, but then their economic activities leveled off, as Japan began to reach the limits of economic growth possible in an isolated country at its level of technological development. In the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, however, there was a new burst of commercial growth, this time led by rural entrepreneurs, who processed and sold the products of local agriculture, such as silk, indigo, and miso, or fermented bean paste.
During the seventeenth century, which was the period of most rapid economic development, the population more or less kept pace, almost doubling by the end of the century to close to 30 million, which was far in excess of any European country at that time. Thereafter, while improving technology and increasing levels of trade showed continuing economic growth, the population remained stable, producing what must have been an overall rise in standards of living, and thus defying the Malthusian law that population will always outstrip production. We have in modern times become accustomed to constantly rising living standards through a combination of the discovery of new lands to exploit, as happened in early modern times in Europe, rapidly improving technology, and more recently birth control, but Japan’s case seems to be unique for an isolated premodern nation growing only slowly in technology.
What may explain this unusual situation is the Japanese system of inheritance through adoption. In most other countries, large numbers of children were necessary to ensure that at least one male heir would survive to continue the family line and provide the parents with security in their old age. In Japan, a daughter’s husband, a relative’s son, or some entirely unrelated person could serve through adoption as a perfectly satisfactory heir to the family farm or business or to the hereditary status and stipend of a member of the samurai class. Thus families could safely be kept small, even by infanticide if necessary, as happened among the poorer peasants. In any case, the Japanese population remained nearly static for a century and a half while production rose, and the Japanese probably became more affluent in per capita terms than any other Asian people. A sign of this can be seen in the rate of literacy, which in the first half of the nineteenth century may have risen as high as 35 percent, a figure quite comparable to that of Western countries at the time.
High literacy rates, to say nothing of economic growth, clearly indicated that society as a whole was far different from what it had been in medieval times. The change was probably greatest for the samurai, who had been transformed from rural, landowning warriors into peaceful city residents. Except for a few high-ranking retainers, who still held fiefs, the bulk of the samurai had been gathered into the shogun’s capital or those of the daimyo. Castle towns grew up around every daimyo headquarters, becoming the foundations for the bulk of the middle-sized cities and prefectural capitals of today. Constituting about 7 percent of the total population, the samurai alone made up a considerable urban population, which was doubled by about an equal number of merchants and other commoners who gathered in these capital cities to perform necessary economic services. Japan, despite its feudal government, had thus become a rather highly urbanized land for that period of history, with some 10 to 15 percent of its total population living in towns and cities.
An even greater change for the samurai was their gradual transformation from a professional feudal warrior class into salaried civil bureaucrats and petty functionaries. They continued to prize highly their two swords and their warrior traditions, making a virtual fetish of swordsmanship and the concept of feudal loyalty, but in fact they earned their living basically as wielders of the writing brush rather than the sword. After 1638 they never again had a chance to practice their military skills in battle, and the use of guns, the chief weapon of the late sixteenth century, all but atrophied. Instead, samurai found education and the arts of civil administration of far more real value than military prowess. Though many remained simple guardsmen and a sort of reserve police force, by the eighteenth century an illiterate warrior samurai was a rarity, and most large domains eventually founded schools for the advanced education of their samurai in Confucian texts written in classical Chinese.
The status of the samurai class changed greatly during the Tokugawa period in still another way. At the beginning of the period the wealth of the nation was overwhelmingly agricultural and was in large part channeled through heavy taxation of the peasantry to the shogun and daimyo and through them to their salaried samurai. As the commercial economy grew, however, the samurai class, wedded to its feudal reliance on agriculture, received a diminishing proportion of the nation’s wealth. Since standards of consumption were rising and city life became increasingly expensive, both the domains and their samurai fell heavily into debt to merchant moneylenders. This indebtedness of the top class to the theoretically lowest class was galling but was never corrected. The obvious solution—an adequate system of taxing trade—was never hit upon. Instead, various other schemes were tried, but without substantial success. The d
omains created monopolies to draw off the profits of certain particularly lucrative types of production, and the central government imposed fees on monopolistic associations of merchants. Sumptuary laws were repeatedly issued, and the salaries of the samurai were reduced to aid the finances of the domains. At times debts were canceled, and occasionally concerted efforts were made to stop or turn back the clock of economic change. The most notable efforts of this sort came in the 1720s and 1730s, again in the 1790s, and for a final time in the 1840s. The economic decline of the bakufu, the domains, and their samurai, however, continued unabated.
The reverse side of samurai decline, of course, was merchant prosperity. The chonin, or “townsmen,” as they were called, naturally had to pay strict deference to the samurai class and abide by the government’s rather harsh regulations, but they grew steadily in prosperity, managed their own internal affairs in the various villagelike units into which the commercial parts of the cities were divided, and developed a vigorous culture of their own in the larger cities. There were, of course, great differences in wealth between the different categories of townspeople, but the more affluent among them became thoroughly literate and quite cultured. The upper strata, which commonly worked closely with the government as its economic agents, were often given semi-samurai status, bearing family names and sometimes even wearing swords.
Japan Page 9