The bulk of the population remained in the countryside. But even for the peasants, life was changing. Villages had earlier replaced the shoen as the chief units of rural organization, and the draining of the samurai class from the land into Edo and the domain capitals and the establishing of sharp class lines between the peasantry and warriors, which had accompanied the reunification of the country, left these peasant villages in a far more autonomous position than ever before. The feudal authorities insisted on a strict enforcement of their laws through village headmen, whose selection they approved, and they held the villagers mutually accountable for each other’s actions, but the peasants, in fact, were left quite free to handle their internal affairs. A village assembly, made up of representatives of all the landowning families and in some cases tenant farmers as well, was the chief decision-making body. The villagers themselves selected the headman, always from among the top-ranking families in the village, to serve as the government’s agent and their liaison with the authorities. Each village had its own codes and customary practices, which it enforced by such measures as ostracism, considered to be the most severe punishment.
The villages were, of course, heavily taxed by the bakufu and domains. The tax rate was extraordinarily high, being originally around 40 or 50 percent. It should be remembered, however, that this tax yield supported not just the government but the whole samurai class, the top 7 percent of society. Moreover, strange though it may seem, agricultural taxes were not substantially increased after the first half of the seventeenth century, despite the substantial growth in production. This situation obviously left a larger share of what was produced to the peasantry. A quarter or more of the villagers tended to be tenant farmers or dependents of the richer farmers, who were often relatively affluent. These richer peasant families were themselves often of proud lineage, having been warriors in medieval times but having decided to stay with their lands rather than move to the daimyo’s headquarters at the time of national unification. Coming from such a background, they too bore family names and sometimes had the right to wear swords. They were usually literate, and the village commonly maintained a so-called temple school, so named because it was housed in a local Buddhist temple, in order to teach the rudiments of education to some of the village children.
This organization of rural Japan during the Tokugawa period had several important consequences. It provided a stable, well-ordered society in a countryside almost denuded of the ruling class. It produced the well-to-do peasant entrepreneurs who in late Tokugawa times increasingly concentrated on specialized cash crops and became the most dynamic commercial force of that period. It provided a class of sturdy, educated peasants who, after the collapse of Tokugawa rule, became the backbone of middle-level leadership and the emerging middle class in modern Japan. It left postfeudal Japan with no residue of estates owned by the old feudal aristocracy, like those that were prevalent in European countries until recent times. It also produced a growing class of tenant farmers, who, while providing the urban workers of modern days, also left a legacy of mounting social problems.
Despite the numerical preponderance of the peasantry and the political supremacy of the samurai class, it was the urban merchants who were in many ways the leaders in Tokugawa culture, and therefore it is not surprising to find the arts and literature of the time more the expression of their tastes than those of the other classes. The cities dominated Tokugawa culture, and in the cities the amusement quarters were the centers of social life. Here came the tired businessman and the “slumming” samurai for the free social contact with women denied them by the patterns of a society that confined women of breeding to their homes. This was the background for the development in more modern times of the geisha, the professional female entertainer, carefully trained in the arts of singing, dancing, and amusing conversation.
To a surprising degree, the art and literature of the time revolved around the amusement quarters. Artists of the Tokugawa period loved to portray the streets of these quarters and the famous beauties who lived there. The great seventeenth-century novelist Saikaku made the demimonde the usual subject of his amusing and somewhat risqué novels. Thanks to the greatly increased use of printing in the Tokugawa period, the novels of Saikaku and the works of other popular writers had a great vogue with city dwellers.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Art Fund, 1919
Woodblock print of the amusement quarters in Edo.
The drama of the age, like the novel, reflected the tastes of the city merchants. A puppet theater developed in the seventeenth century and, closely parallel to it, a new dramatic form known as Kabuki. Both are still alive today. Kabuki stressed realism of action and of setting. It utilized the revolving stage with great success, and the settings it developed were in many respects superior to those of the West. In sharp contrast to the slow-moving and sedate No drama of the Ashikaga period, Kabuki maintained a high degree of emotional tension and dealt freely with melodrama and violence. The greatest of the Tokugawa dramatists, Chikamatsu (1653–1724), drew both from great historical themes and the social drama of contemporary city life, such as double suicides of blighted lovers.
The most popular poetic form of the Tokugawa period, the haiku, was also well suited to the wit and sophistication of an urban population, though it displayed more of the Zen spirit than characterized the city bourgeoisie and was, in any case, a natural outgrowth of the classical “short poem.” The haiku was even briefer—a reduction from thirty-one syllables to a mere seventeen—but, in the hands of a master like the seventeenth-century poet-monk Basho, it could be a superbly clever creation, conjuring up a whole scene and its emotional overtones in a simple phrase or two.
The major artistic trends of Ashikaga times continued into the Tokugawa, but the great unifiers of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries also showed a love of grandeur and display quite unlike that of earlier times. Major efforts were made to erect and decorate sumptuous palaces. Gorgeous decorative screens and panels, with brightly colored scenes and designs laid on backgrounds of gold leaf, were typical of the time. The expansive spirit of the age is well illustrated by the greatly increased scale of landscape gardening and by the elaborateness of architecture. This Baroque age of Japanese architecture is exemplified by the temple-mausoleums of the early Tokugawa shogun erected in a beautiful forest and mountain setting at Nikko, north of Edo. It is interesting that at this same time the very austere architecture and refined gardens of the detached imperial estate of Katsura near Kyoto were being created in the spirit of the Zen art of the preceding period.
While the major schools of Ashikaga painting were still patronized by the ruling class, a new popular art grew up in the cities in Tokugawa times. It was called ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world,” a Buddhist term for the transience of human life, which came simply to imply up-to-date stylishness. The development of woodblock printing, in which a number of differently colored wood blocks would be printed over one another to form a multicolored print, made it possible to reproduce many copies of colored ukiyo-e pictures and to sell them at reasonable prices. The subject matter was at first famous actors and well-known courtesans and other beautiful women, sometimes with erotic touches, but later beautiful or famous scenes—the precursors of the picture postcard—became popular. This was the world’s first art for the masses, and it reached a glorious culmination in the early nineteenth century in the landscape prints of two great masters, Hokusai and Hiroshige. The woodblock prints of these popular though not much respected artists were the first form of Japanese art to be highly esteemed in the West.
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Louise E. McBurney Gift Fund, 1953
Decorative iris screen by Ogata Korin (1658–1716).
The increased industrial output of the Tokugawa period resulted in great advances in the industrial arts. The making of fine pottery and beautiful porcelain ware, at first under the guidance of Korea
n potters brought back by Hideyoshi’s armies, became a great industry with high artistic standards. Gorgeous silk brocades were produced by the expanding textile industry, and lacquerware of great decorative beauty was made in quantity. In the industrial arts as well as in decorative screens and panels for buildings, the Japanese showed great skill in using elements from nature basically as designs verging on the abstract. This form of Japanese esthetics, called Rimpa from the name of its greatest figure, Ogata Korin (1658–1716), has proved to have great appeal in the contemporary West.
In the realm of thought, the bakufu, and most domains in imitation of it, embraced the Neo-Confucian doctrines of Chu Hsi, which stressed the moral basis of political authority and the need for absolute loyalty. The more theoretical and removed from the realities of the time the inherited warrior code became, the more rigidly the samurai adhered to it and to Confucianism, developing an idealized combination of Confucianism and feudal ethics that came to be known as bushido, or “the way of the warrior.”
This Confucian orthodoxy and outmoded feudal ethics were intellectually stultifying, but many thinkers drew on other strands of Chinese thought to create a lively intellectual ferment. Some tried to get away from Chu Hsi to earlier Confucian concepts or a more practical interpretation of Confucian doctrines. Many showed a deep and very pragmatic concern with the obvious economic problems of the day. Some were influenced by the Chinese philosopher Wang Yang-ming (1472–1529, known as Oyomei in Japan), who emphasized the individual’s intuitive moral sense and the need to combine thought and action. Such concepts, of course, could be subversive, and it is interesting to note that many of the leaders of the movement that overthrew the Tokugawa in the nineteenth century had in fact been influenced by Wang Yang-ming’s teachings.
Another aspect of Tokugawa thought was the rise of national self-consciousness and an eventual revival of interest in the imperial line. The Tokugawa was undoubtedly the most Confucian age in Japanese history, but Confucianism brought with it a stress on history, and this led to a looking back into Japan’s past. There was a revival of history writing, which naturally called attention to the imperial rule of antiquity. A rising interest in ancient Japanese literature was another source for a renewed attention to the past. In the late eighteenth century Motoori Norinaga produced a great exegesis on Japan’s first history, the Kojiki of 712, and his followers, in a movement called kokugaku, or “national learning,” went on to espouse a great reverence for the emperors and even a belief that they had the right to rule.
Later Tokugawa thought was also enlivened by influences from the West. An earlier ban on all books from the Occident was lifted in 1720 for writings not containing Christian doctrines. This permitted a small group of scholars, centered around the Dutch in Nagasaki, to begin to study the scientific advances of the West. Working laboriously through the Dutch language, from which their work came to be known as “Dutch learning,” they concentrated on such obviously useful subjects as gunnery, medicine, smelting, cartography, and astronomy. Though few in number, they had, by the early nineteenth century, built up a considerable body of knowledge about the contemporary West and its science and had imbibed some ideas that were inevitably subversive to Tokugawa rule. Other influences from the West can be found in the realism and the Occidental sense of perspective seen in the work of some Japanese artists of the time.
In all these various ways, the Tokugawa period was a time of slow but great change, when the economic, social, and intellectual foundations for modern Japan were established. The Japanese had had a chance to work over and perfect their own cultural heritage. They were stimulated by new influences from China and to a lesser extent from the West. Despite their relative isolation from the rest of the world and the stability of their feudal political system, the economy and society did not stagnate but showed signs of steady growth and constant ferment.
As economic, social, and even cultural conditions differed increasingly from the rather rigid political patterns established in the first half of the seventeenth century, strains and stresses also developed in society. The bakufu and domains for the most part fell into serious financial straits. The sharp lines between the classes were becoming increasingly blurred, as impoverished samurai married daughters of affluent merchant families in order to salvage their finances and ambitious merchants and even peasants found ways to win samurai status. Lower samurai of ability became outspokenly dissatisfied with a system in which positions in government were largely determined by birth and there was little opportunity for advancement through merit. At a higher intellectual level, ideas subversive to Tokugawa rule or even to the whole feudal system had emerged from historical studies or foreign influences and were harbored by some daring thinkers.
Among the commoners, the richer and better educated peasants had managed to shift a disproportionately large share of the tax burden to their poorer fellow villagers, accentuating the differences in wealth. During the second half of the Tokugawa period, there was a steady increase in the number and severity of uprisings by both peasants and city dwellers, probably reflecting an increasing maldistribution of wealth, a breakdown of the paternalistic feudal relationships that had earlier given more security to the poor, and a general rise in economic expectations. One sign of the malaise among the lower classes was the development of new popular religious sects, drawing largely on Shinto concepts and founded commonly by women. There were even occasional outbursts of a sort of millenarian religious excitement.
All these signs of change during the Tokugawa period have encouraged Japanese historians to label it the “modern” or “early modern” period, in keeping with the terminology used for European history. Japan indeed was probably a more self-conscious and self-contained national unit during most of this time than any of the countries of Europe and was more thoroughly bureaucratized. In many other features, too, it paralleled changes taking place in the West. But it was largely deficient in the belief in progress, the scientific method, the worldwide contacts of the West, and the beginnings of industrialization, which were starting to transform Europe. Though there were indeed great changes in Japan, the country’s social and political system remained mired in feudalism.
However great the changes in Japan during the Tokugawa period and however many the parallels with the West, they were as nothing compared to those that were to follow the collapse of the Tokugawa in the middle of the nineteenth century. Japanese history falls quite clearly into a premodern period preceding this great change and a modern period that followed it. The Tokugawa system was showing many signs of erosion, but up until the mid-nineteenth century there was no hint of imminent collapse, such as had destroyed the Kamakura and Ashikaga bakufu. As late as 1850 a basic restructuring of the existing system or even a major challenge to it was almost unimaginable, despite the growing discrepancies between theory and reality. But the situation suddenly changed in the 1850s. The West, now vastly more powerful than it had been when driven away by the Japanese in the seventeenth century, was beginning once again to press upon the country. In less than two decades the whole Tokugawa system was swept away, clearing the ground for the building of a new Japan, which is the fully modernized, industrialized land we know today.
PART TWO
MODERNIZING JAPAN
8
THE TRANSITION TO A MODERN STATE
When Japan had closed its doors to the Europeans in the first half of the seventeenth century, it had stood abreast of the Occident technologically, but by the nineteenth century rapid scientific progress and the beginning of the industrial revolution had made the countries of the West incomparably stronger in military and economic power. After their expulsion from Japan, the Europeans had for a while all but forgotten this distant island nation, but now their own steadily expanding economic interests brought them close once again to Japan’s shores. Observant Japanese were not unaware of European colonial expansion and especially the military disasters and national humilia
tion the British inflicted on great China itself in 1839 to 1842 and again, together with the French, in 1856 to 1858.
In the last years of the eighteenth century, the Russians, who had slowly pushed their way across the vast expanse of Siberia and reached the Pacific, began to attempt to establish contact with the Japanese, and Russian and Japanese expeditions would sometimes encounter each other in the islands north of Japan. The British, who by this time had supplanted the Portuguese and Dutch as the chief traders in eastern waters, found their commercial interests growing rapidly in China and were beginning to look toward the Japanese islands that lay beyond.
It was the Americans, however, who were the most interested in Japan, since their whaling vessels were active off its coasts and their clipper ships, bound for the Canton trade, sailed past its shores. Japanese ports where American vessels could take refuge or replenish their water supplies were particularly attractive to them, and as steamships came into use the need for coaling stations in Japan, the other side of the long Pacific crossing, added a new urgency to the availability of such ports. All the Western nations were also concerned about the treatment of sailors shipwrecked on Japan’s shores. Japanese law decreed death for all intruders, and even though this was not normally enforced, Western castaways who eventually got out of Japan by way of Nagasaki usually had tales of extreme hardships to recount.
In the first half of the nineteenth century the Americans, British, and Russians repeatedly sent expeditions to Japan in efforts to persuade the Japanese to open their ports to foreign ships, and the Dutch urged the Tokugawa to accede to these demands. But Edo stood firm on its old policy. A few students of “Dutch learning” bravely advocated the opening of Japan, but the vast majority of the people, long accustomed to isolation from the rest of the world, were bitterly opposed to allowing foreigners into their land.
Japan Page 10