An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

The city of Sakai, as its name, which means in the Japanese tongue "the Boundary," denotes, was situated just on the boundary line of the two adjoining provinces Settsu and Idzumi, and at the quondam estuary of the river Yamato. The frontier-line, however, and the course of the river, were afterwards changed, so that the city is now entirely included within the province of Idzumi, and there is no river running near the city. The fact that it was once a border town shows that it could never have been the seat of the provincial government. Neither had it ever been the residence of any powerful feudal lord during the whole military régime. Moreover, nature has bestowed no special favour on the city. The bay of Sakai is very widely open, affording no protection against the west wind. In addition to that, it has been very shallow since old times. Even in an undeveloped stage of ship-building, the port was unfit for the mooring of vessels of a size as large as the junks trading with China were at that time, so that they had to be equipped somewhere else in a neighbouring harbour, and then brought and anchored far off from the shore in the bay of Sakai. The only geographical advantage of the port lay in the fact that the shortest sea-route to the island of Shikoku started thence. The first impulse to the development of the city seems to have been given during the civil war, for it was the nearest access to the sea for one of the parties which had its stronghold in the mountainous region of the province of Yamato, adjacent to Idzumi. At the end of the war, the port came, as before stated, under the rule of the family of Ôuchi, and from Ôuchi it passed into the hands of the family of Hosokawa, also one of the chief vassals of the Ashikaga Shogunate, holding the north-eastern part of the island of Shikoku, and Sakai serving the family always as the landing-place of its followers, when they were on their way to Kyoto, to pay their respects to the Shogun or to fight there for their own interests. On account of this usefulness the harbour-city of Sakai had been granted privileges by the hereditary chief of the Hosokawa, as a recompense for the assistance given by the merchants of the city, and those same privileges, in extent, amounted to almost as much as the municipal freedom enjoyed by the free cities of Europe. The administration of the city was in the hands of a few wealthy merchants, and was rarely interfered with by its feudal lord. Among the merchants there were ten, at first, who monopolised the municipal government, each of them being very rich as the proprietors of certain storehouses on the beach, the rents of which paid them a good income. In the later Ashikaga age, however, we hear the names of the thirty-six municipal councillors of Sakai. This increase in the number might perhaps have been the result of the growth in opulence of the citizens. In short, though the city had been under the oligarchical rule of the wealthy merchants of the city, like Venice and Florence in medieval Italy, yet it was none the less autonomous, which is quite an exceptional case in the whole course of the history of our country.

The golden age of the city of Sakai dates from the year 1476 or thereabouts, when a squadron trading with China first sailed out from the harbour. Until that time all the vessels plying between this country and China used to set out from Hakata or from Hyogo, which is nearly the same thing as Kobe. Although the adventurous merchants of Sakai carried their trade before this time as far as the islands of Loo-choo, and often participated in the Chinese trade also, yet no vessel had ever started from there for China till then. That Sakai became at this date a chief trading port dealing with China might presumably have been owing to the intercession of its hereditary lord Hosokawa, but the determining cause of this assumption of such an honourable position among the commercial cities of Japan must have been the indisputable superiority of the material strength of the city. Many of the higher vassals of the Shogunate borrowed money from the merchants of Sakai in order to equip their soldiers. Nay, even the Shogunate itself had often to mortgage its landed estates to the merchants of the city in order to save its treasury from running short. The wealth of the citizens enabled them to fortify their city very strongly, by surrounding it with a deep moat, and to enlist into their service a great number of knights-errant, who abounded in Japan at that time. These, together with the consciousness of indispensable assistance rendered to the Shogunate, to various great feudatories and condottieri, emboldened the citizens to defy the otherwise formidable military powers, and those warriors, on the other hand, who owed much to the pecuniary aid of the Sakai merchants, could but treat the latter with great consideration, which was unwonted at that time. Although the citizens of Sakai were not entirely free from the sufferings of the war, for they had often to quarter soldiers in their houses, yet no battle was allowed to be fought within the city, notwithstanding that a most sanguinary war was raging all around in the empire.

It was natural, therefore, that, after the civil war of the Ohnin era, Sakai should be considered safer to live in than Kyoto. Sakai became the asylum for the civilisation of Japan, to save it from utter destruction. Poets, painters, musicians, and singers, who had found living in the turbulent metropolis intolerably hard, sought shelter in Sakai, and there occupied themselves quietly with their own professions. Various handicrafts, such as lacquering, porcelain-making, and weaving were all started there with enormous success. Especially as to the weaving, it is said that this industry, which had once flourished and been afterwards abandoned in Kyoto on account of the political disturbances there, was not only continued at Sakai, but also improved by the Chinese weavers, who repaired to the city and taught the natives the art of making various costly textiles of Chinese invention. In some respects the textiles of the Nishijin, now one of the specialties of Kyoto, may be said to be the continuation of the Sakai looms.

Another kind of industry, which developed in the city in the later Ashikaga period, was the manufacture of fire-arms. Immediately after the introduction of fire-arms by a Portuguese in the year 1541, a merchant of Sakai happened to learn the art of making guns somewhere or other in Kyushu, and after his return to the city he began to practise there the business he had learnt. Sakai thus became the origin of the propagation, in central and eastern Japan, of the use of the new arm.

From what has been described above, the reader would easily understand that the intellectual level of the citizens of Sakai stood much higher than that of the average Japanese of that time. Wit and pleasantry were the accomplishments highly prized there, so that the city produced out of its inhabitants a large number of versatile diplomatists, story-tellers, and buffoons. As their economic conditions were very easy, the social life of the city was polished, enlightened, and even luxurious. The manufacture of saké, the Japanese favourite drink made from rice, was highly developed in the city, and the fame of the Sakai-tub was renowned the country round. To protect the brewers, the Shogunate issued an order forbidding the importation of saké into the city. The tea-ceremony and the flower-trimming, two fashionable pastimes already in vogue at that time, were eagerly practised here by wealthy merchants. Many famous experts in this sort of amusement were found among the inhabitants of the city, and they were generally connoisseurs highly skilled in the fine arts, as Sen-no-Rikyû, for example. Various curios, native and foreign, were bought and sold there at exorbitant high prices.

The prosperous condition of the city induced many Buddhists, especially the priests of the Jôdo-shinshû, the most active sect of Japanese Buddhism at that time, to try their propaganda in the city. They had numerous temples built, and by lending to the merchants their influence at the Shogun's court obtained from it the privilege of trading with China, thus making common cause with the citizens of that port. The earlier Christian missionaries, too, endeavoured to make this city the centre of their movement. It was indeed at the end of the year 1550, that Francis Xavier, who was not only the greatest missionary whom Japan has ever received from the West, but also one of the greatest men in the world too, arrived at the city from Yamaguchi on his way to Kyoto. Though he could achieve nothing noteworthy during his short stay here, on account of illness, yet by him the first seed of Christianity was sown in the central regions of the empire, and ten years later the first Christian hymn was sung in the church founded in the city.

The civilisation of the city of Sakai represented that of the whole empire in the later Ashikaga age, manifested in its most glaring colours. The essential character of the civilisation was not aristocratic, but bourgeois. The lower strata of the people still had nothing to do with it. It is true that we can recognise already at this period the beginning of the proletariat movement. The frequent disturbances raised by apaches in the streets of Kyoto and the insurrections of agricultural workers in the provinces, remind us of the Peasants' War in the time of the Reformation in Europe. Their demands as well as their connection with the religious agitation of the time closely resembled those of the followers of Goetz von Berlichingen. They could not, however, secure any permanent result by their insurrections, so that the character of the civilisation remained essentially bourgeois, not having suffered any marked change from those disturbances.

The civilisation of the bourgeois cannot but be individualistic, and its main difference from that of the aristocracy lies also herein. It has been so in Europe, and it could not have been otherwise in our country. The fact that individualism got the upper hand in the Ashikaga age may be proved by a phenomenon in the history of Japanese art. Portrait-painting had made some progress already in the Kamakura period, as was stated in the foregoing chapter. The artistic development in this branch of painting made it independent of religious pictures. The portrait-paintings of the age, however, even those executed by such eminent masters as Takanobu and Nobuzane, are only images of the typical courtier or warrior, not to mention the stiffness of the style. Very little of the individuality of the persons represented was manifested in them. The scroll-paintings, to which the attention of most of the artists of the age was directed, contained pictures of many persons, but to depict scenes was the chief aim of scroll-paintings, so that no serious pains were taken in the delineation of individuals. That portrait-painting remained thus long in an undeveloped stage cannot be explained away simply by the tardiness of the progress of arts in general. The chief cause must be attributed to the fact that the contemporary civilisation was lacking in individualistic elements. Unless there is a rise of the individualistic spirit in a certain measure, no real progress in portraiture can be expected.

In the Ashikaga period, a large number of scroll-paintings had been produced as before, but they were mostly inferior in quality to those of the preceding age. On the other hand, we notice a vast improvement in the portrait-painting of this period. It may be due to some extent to the influence of the Zen sect, the sect which prevailed among the upper class of that time, for its creed is said to be strongly individualistic. Mainly, however, it must have come from the general spirit of the age, which, though it could not be said to have been free from the influence of the same sect, was induced to become individualistic more by social and economical reasons than by religious ones. By painters of the schools of Tosa and Kano were painted numerous portraits of eminent personages, such as the Shogun, courtiers, great feudatories, priests, especially of the Zen sect, literati, artists, experts in tea-ceremony, and so forth. Their pictures were generally made after death by order of the near relatives, friends, vassals or disciples of the deceased, to be a memorial of the person whom they adored or revered. Not a small number of those paintings are extant to this day, showing vividly the characteristics of those illustrious figures in Japanese history.

The political anarchy combined with the individualistic tendency of the age could not fail to lead to the moral dissolution of the people. To the same effect, too, the literature of the time, which was a revival of that of the Fujiwara period, contributed. The classical authors of Japanese literature at the height of the Fujiwara period were now perused, commented upon, and elucidated with devouring eagerness, the most adored among them being Murasaki-Shikibu, whose famous novel, Genji-monogatari, was regarded mystically and held to be almost divine. The nature of this literature was for the most part realistic, or rather sentimental, verging sometimes on sensuality. It was, however, clad in the exquisitely refined costume of beautiful diction and choice turns of phrase, borrowed or metamorphosed from the inexhaustible stores of Chinese literature. As to the revived form of literature in the Ashikaga period, the difference between it and that of the old time was so remarkable, that it could not be overlooked. Vulgarisation usurping the place of refinement, and coarse sensuality reigning rampant was the outcome of the cultivation of the classical literature. The moral tone of the stories and novels produced in this decadent age unmistakably reflects how low was the ebb of the sense of decency of that period, fostered by the naturalistic tendency manifested in the Fujiwara classics.