An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

The chief emporium of the trade with China in the early Ashikaga period was of course Hakata in Kyushu as before. As the family of the Ôuchi, however, held the strait of Shimonoseki, the gateway of the Inland Sea, and as Hakata itself came afterwards under the rule of the same family, the Chinese trade had been for a long time controlled or rather monopolised by this lord of the province of Nagato. The prosperity of the inland city of Yamaguchi, the residential seat of the Ôuchi family, is to be ascribed also to the same circumstance. Moreover, the growth of the port of Sakai in the easternmost recess of the Inland Sea owes its origin to the fact that the city was once under the lordship of the same Ôuchi, and a close historical connection was thereby created between it and the port of Shimonoseki. It was by the co-operation of many other political causes, however, that the centre of the foreign trade was shifted from Hakata to Sakai, and when intercourse with western nations was opened, it was the latter and not the former, which became the staple market of import and export.

The growth of the Japanese cities, actuated by the political and commercial conditions of the country as stated above, is a phenomenon which had much to do with the progress of our civilization in general. Notwithstanding the manifold drawbacks necessarily accompanying urban life, cities have been, since very ancient times, one of the most potent agents in the history of the East as well as of the West, in raising the general standard of culture to a high level. Rural life, whatever sonorous praise be chanted for it, would not have been able by itself to elevate the standard of manners and behaviour much above a blunt rustic naïveté. In this respect we can observe a remarkable difference between the Ashikaga and the preceding ages, a difference quite similar in nature to that which existed between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries in the history of Europe. The sudden increase, in Japan, of printed books in number and variety shows it more than clearly.

The history of printing in Japan goes back to the middle of the eighth century, but at the beginning the matter printed was limited to detached leaflets. What was printed the earliest in the form of a book and is still extant, bears the date of 1088. After that, however, very few books had been printed for a long time. Moreover, those few were exclusively religious. It was in the year 1247 that one of the commentaries on the Lun-yü, the famous work of the teachings of Confucius, was put into a reprint, after the model of a contemporary Chinese edition, that is to say, of the Sung age. That this non-religious or non-Buddhist work was first edited in Japan in the middle of the Kamakura period, proves the enlargement of the circle of readers in Chinese classics by the participation of the warrior-class. Such editing of secular Chinese works, however, was discontinued for three-quarters of a century, and was not resumed until 1322, only ten years before the outbreak of the long civil war. The book printed at the latter date was after one of the Chinese editions of the Shu-king, another piece of Confucian literature. This was followed by the reprinting of many other non-religious Chinese works. The civil war too astonishes us not only in that it did not hinder the continuance of the reprints of useful Chinese originals, but also in that the number of books reprinted has suddenly increased in general since this period. Among the books issued during the war, a commentary on the Lun-yü, of a text different from that above mentioned, and said to have been made at Sakai, was the most remarkable. The edition was dated 1364, and reprinted again and again in several places. In this case the place where the printing was first undertaken demands also our attention. Hitherto almost all the books had been published in Kyoto, except some tomes of Buddhist literature, which occasionally had been edited in the convents at Nara or Kôya. But now printing began to be undertaken not only in these historical and sacred places, but in purely commercial cities of quite recent growth, as Sakai. It is said that about this time several kinds of books of Chinese literature were edited in the city of Hakata, and that it was a naturalised Chinese who had started the undertaking there. Another tradition tells us that two Chinese block-engravers came and settled at Hakata, and engaged in their professional business, which contributed much to the increase of reprinted books. Shortly after the civil war, in the beginning of the fifteenth century, books were printed in other places more remotely situated in the provinces, such as Yamaguchi and Ashikaga. The last-named was the cradle of the Shogunate House of the Ashikaga, and there just at this time a college was founded, or according to some, restored, by Norizane Uyesugi, one of the most influential retainers of the Shogunate in eastern Japan. Thus, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, the reprinting of Chinese classics became a fashion throughout the empire. In addition to the ever-increasing number of books reprinted at Kyoto and Sakai, we find now those printed at places as far remote as Kagoshima in the west. In the east there seems to have lived in the neighborhood of Odawara, a new political centre, at least one engraver, engaged in block-cutting for books. Summing up what has been stated above, the increase of the number of book-editing localities meant the increase of minor cultural centres in the provinces, that is to say, the wider diffusion of civilisation in the empire.

Another important fact to be specially noticed is that the varieties of books reprinted became gradually multifarious. Though those books printed in the Ashikaga age were mostly reproductions of Chinese works, and very few purely Japanese books were edited until the end of the age, yet those Chinese works themselves, which were reprinted, became more and more diversified in kind. Not only Buddhist and Confucian classics, and works of purely literary character, especially poetical works and books on versification, but several medical works also were reprinted and issued in the later Ashikaga age. The study of medicine had been revived since the civil war by the intercourse with China, and soon after the war, some Japanese students went abroad to learn the science there. The reprinting of medical books, therefore, was to be considered as a token of the growing necessity for medical students ever increasing in our country, and the beginning of the revival of scientific education.

As to the works of Japanese authors which were put into print, the first publication seems to have been that of religious treatise in Chinese by the priest Hônen, printed at the beginning of the Kamakura period, and the work was many times reprinted afterwards. Another work by the same priest, which was written in Japanese, was issued at the end of the same period. During the civil war numerous works, mostly in Chinese, by the Japanese Zen priests were published, among which the history of Buddhism in Japan, entitled the Genkô-shakusho, was the most noteworthy, and was therefore reprinted over and over again. A chronological table of the history of Japan, and two editions of the Jôyei Laws were subsequently printed. A text-book for children, to train them in the use of Chinese ideographs, was first printed at the close of the Ashikaga period, and the demand for the appearance of such a book proves that the education of children began to arouse the general attention.

From what is said above, we can safely conclude that during the course of the Ashikaga period, the level of civilisation of our country had been raised in a marked degree, and that at the same time there arose one after another numerous cultural centres in the provinces, which were in their main features nothing but Kyoto on a small scale, but nevertheless contributed not the least to the betterment of national civilisation in general owing to their common rivalry. One would perhaps entertain some doubt as to the veracity of the assertion, that in an age such as of the Ashikaga, when political anarchy was in full play, so remarkable an advancement had been steadily achieved by our forefathers. If he would, however, look at the history of the Italian renaissance, then he would not be at a loss to see that political disorder does not necessarily thwart the progress of civilisation, but on the contrary often stimulates it.

The territories owned by great feudatories or daimyo in the Ashikaga age were by no means compact entities definitely bounded. Their frontiers constantly shifted to and fro according to frequently recurring waxings and wanings in strength of this or that daimyo, and these fluctuations depended, in their turn, on the results sometimes of petty skirmishes and sometimes of political intrigues, so that an unwavering steadiness was the least thing to be expected at that time. This politically unsettled condition of Japan, however, was in a certain sense a boon to our country, for it took away all the hindrances which lay in the way of internal communication, and paved the path to the ultimate political unity of the empire. I do not say of course that travelling at that time was quite safe from any kind of molestation, but the main obstacles to communication were rather of a social than of a political nature. In other words, they were of kinds which could not be got rid of in a like stage of civilisation, even if Japan had been politically not dismembered, and adventurous merchants did not shrink from facing such difficulties. No need to speak of those piratical traders, who went out from the western islands and the coastal regions of the Inland Sea on their devastating errands to the Korean and the Chinese coasts. The less warlike merchants ventured to trade with the Ainu, who had retired into the island of Hokkaidô, and had not been heard of since the beginning of the Ashikaga period.

Among the itinerants travelling a long distance may be counted the professional literati also, the experts in the art of composing the renga, the short Japanese poems. They went about throughout the provinces, visiting feudal lords in their castles, teaching them the literary pastimes, thus imparting their first lesson in æsthetic education to those who had never tasted it. Courtiers, too, weakminded as they were, travelled great distances, to call on some rich bourgeois or powerful daimyo, who were thinking of becoming their munificent patrons, and taught them, besides the afore-said art of composing Japanese poems, the sport of kicking leather balls and other leisurely pastimes which had been the favourites among the courtiers in Kyoto, and received in return a generous hospitality and fees for the lessons which they gave. Buddhist priests were the third set of busy travellers of the time. Missionary activities had not much relaxed since the Kamakura period, though no influential sect had been started in this age. Every nook and corner of the island empire had received the footprints of these religious itinerants, and some of the more enterprising priests even crossed the sea to the island of what is now Hokkaidô in order to preach to the Ainu dwelling there. Pilgrims to the shrines of Ise, where the ancestress of the Imperial line was enshrined, may also be counted among the busy interprovincial travellers.

All these wanderers served not only to transmit to distant provincial towns the culture engendered and nourished in the metropolis, but also to make the intercourse between the minor cultural centres more intimate than before, so as to spread a civilisation of a uniform standard and nature throughout the whole of the empire. Japan was thus for the first time unified in her civilisation in order to prepare herself for a solid political unification.

Let me repeat that Japan of the Ashikaga age had within herself no constant political boundaries nor any other artificial barriers to impede the people of one province nor of the territory of one daimyo from going to another province or the territory of another daimyo, and this, in a great measure, facilitated communications between the inhabitants of different provinces. The fact that the college at Ashikaga in eastern Japan was, notwithstanding its insufficient accommodation, thronged with pupils from various parts of the country, even from a province so far off from Kyoto as Satsuma, proves that bad roads and poor means of conveyance did not obstruct the Japanese of that time from traversing great distances in order to get a liberal education, and such activity and lively traffic would naturally tend to the formation of big emporiums here and there within the empire. Unfortunately the geographical features of our country did not allow it to see a great number of such large commercial cities formed within it, as the Hanseatic towns had been formed in medieval Germany, although we find very close resemblances between Germany of the twelfth and of the thirteenth century and Japan under the Ashikaga régime as regards their political conditions. The only one of the Japanese cities which had ever attained such a height of prosperity as to be fairly matched with the free cities of the Hansa was Sakai in the province of Idzumi.