An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

CHAPTER XI

THE TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE,—ITS POLITICAL RÉGIME

The spirit of the coming age was loudly heralded by Nobunaga. Most of the hindrances which had persistently obstructed the national progress for a long while were cleared away at his peremptory call. Then out of the quarry opened by him the stones for the new pieces of sculpture were hewn out by his successor Hideyoshi. The blocks, however, which were only rough-cut by the latter, were left unfinished, awaiting the final touch of wise and prudent Iyeyasu. The Shogunate which he set up at Yedo, now Tokyo, in the province of Musashi, continued for more than two centuries and a half. Not only was it the longest in duration among our Shogunates, but it exceeded most of the European dynasties in the number of years which it covered, being a little longer than the reign of the Bourbons in France, including that of the branch of Orleans and of the Restoration. During this long régime of the single house of the Tokugawa, Japan had been able to prepare herself slowly to attain the stage on which all the world witnesses her now standing.

The history of Japan under this Shogunate shows that throughout the whole epoch our country had not yet been entirely stripped of her medieval garments, but it is absurd at the same time to designate the period as essentially not modern. For long years we have been on our forward march, always dragging along with us the ever-accumulating residue of the civilisation of the past. If any one, however, should venture to judge us by the enormous heaps of these souvenirs of a by-gone civilisation overburdening us, and should say that the Japanese had been standing still these two centuries and a half, then he would be entirely mistaken. The overestimation of Japan of the Meidji era by a great many foreigners is, though seconded by not a few Japanese, a fault which had its origin in this misapprehension about our country under the Tokugawa régime. The attention of these observers was engrossed, when they took their first views of the land and people, by those things which seemed to them strange and curious, being quite different from what they themselves possessed at home, or which were thought by them anachronistic, on account of having been abandoned by them long ago, though once they had them also in their own countries. As regards what they had been accustomed to at home, they took very little notice of it in Japan, and considered the existence of such things in our country as a matter of course, if they happened to come across them. Most of them came over to Japan, prepossessed already by their expectations of finding here a unique country, and were thus unconsciously led, after their view of the country itself, to depict it in a very quaint light, as something entirely different from anything they had ever experienced anywhere; an error which even the most studious and acute observer, such as Engelhardt Kaempfer, was not able to escape. No need to mention the rest, especially those missionaries who wished to extol their own merits at the expense of the Japanese. We are still suffering from misconceptions about our country on the part of Europeans,—misconceptions which are the legacy of the misrepresentation of Japan by those early observers. By no means, however, do I presume to try to exhibit Japan only in her brightest colours. Far from it, and what I ask foreign readers not to forget is that the history of Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the period which was essentially modern, should not be superficially judged by its abundance of feudal trammels fondly described by contemporary Europeans. In this chapter, I shall first make manifest which were the things medieval retained in the time of the Tokugawa, and then treat about the essential character of the age which should be called all but modern.

In the foregoing chapter I spoke about some resemblances between our later Ashikaga period and the Italian renaissance of the Quattrocento. In the successive phases which followed in the East and in the West, there might be found some other similarities. History, however, has not been ordained to run in streams exactly parallel to one another in all countries, and to be a counterpart of the age of the Reformation, the epochs of the Oda and the Toyotomi are not more appropriate than the age of the Kamakura Shogunate. A style in Japanese art, prevalent during and after the régime of Hideyoshi and called "the Momoyama" by recent connoisseurs had a striking resemblance to the Empire style, which followed the Rococo in Europe, and in some respects indeed the later Ashikaga period of our history might be likened to Europe of the eighteenth century, without gross inappropriateness, while at other points it might be compared to the Renaissance with equal fairness. It would be very stupid, however, to surmise that Japan in the Tokugawa period attained to a culture which in its general aspect belonged almost to the same stage as that prevailing in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Art, though an important cultural factor, cannot be made the sole criterion of the civilisation of any nation or people. It is quite indisputable that Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate had many things about which we could not boast.

So long as war is a calamity unavoidable in this world, it is folly to expect in any country that the cruelty of men to men will entirely cease. But if the intensity of cruelty in warfare be taken as being in inverse ratio to the progress of civilisation, as it generally used to be, then the Tokugawa period evidently should not be lauded as an age of great enlightenment. Until the end of the Shogunate of this house it had been the custom for a warrior on the battlefield to cut off the head of the antagonist whom he had slain. Though we have had no such demoralising sort of warfare in our history as that carried on by mercenary troops in medieval Europe, where defeated warriors were taken prisoners in order to obtain from them as rich ransoms as they could afford to pay, in other words, though the nature of warfare in Japan was far more serious in general than in the West, it was on that account far more dangerous for the combatants engaged. It was the custom in any battle to reward that warrior who first decapitated an enemy's head as generously as one who was the first over the wall in an attack on a fortress. Moreover, during the ceremony in celebration of a victory on a battlefield, all those enemy heads were collected and brought for the inspection of the commanding general of the victorious army. Such a custom in warfare, however efficient it might have been in stimulating the martial courage of warriors, cannot be regarded as praiseworthy in any civilised country, even where war is considered as the highest occupation of the people.

The Japanese manner of suicide called hara-kiri or seppuku, a custom of world-wide celebrity, is another thing which is well to be commented on here. If any foreigner should suppose that seppuku has been very frequently committed in the same manner as we see it practised on the stage, he would be greatly misled in appreciating the true national character of the Japanese. On the contrary, seppuku has not been a matter of everyday occurrence, having taken place far less frequently than one hears now-a-days about railway accidents. Moreover, when it was performed, it was carried out in decent ways, if we may use the word decent here, and not in the grotesque mode displayed on the Japanese stage, accompanied by sardonic laughter, with bowels exposed after cutting the belly crosswise. The reason why the Japanese warrior resorted to seppuku in committing suicide was not to kill himself in a methodically cruel manner, but to die an honourable and manly death by his own hand. For such methods of committing suicide, as taking poison, drowning, strangling oneself, and the like, were considered very ignoble, and especially unworthy of warriors. Even to die by merely cutting one's throat was held to be rather effeminate. The fear of the protraction of the death agony was looked on as a token of cowardice, and therefore to be able to kill one's self in the most sober and circumstantial manner, and at the same time to do it with every consideration of others, was thought to be one of the requisite qualifications of a brave warrior in an emergency. In short, for a suicide to be honourable, it had to be proved that it was not the result of insanity. Thus we can see that not the spirit of cruelty but martial honour was the motive of committing seppuku, and it would be unfair to stigmatise the Japanese as a cruel people because of the practice. Still I am far from wishing to vindicate this custom in all its aspects. The fact that this method of killing one's self continued during the whole of the Tokugawa régime as a penalty, without loss of honour, for capital crimes of the samurai show that the humane culture of the age left much to be wished for.

Class distinction was another dark spot on the culture of the age. All sorts of people outside the fighting class were roughly classified into three bodies, that is to say, peasants, artisans, and merchants, and were held in utter subjection, as classes made simply to be governed. But the often-quoted tradition that warriors of that time had as their privilege the right to kill any of the commonalty at their sweet will and pleasure, without the risk of incurring the slightest punishment thereby, is erroneous, having no foundation in real historical fact. Those warriors who had committed a homicide were without prejudice called upon to justify their act before the proper authority. If they failed to prove that they were the provoked and injured party, they were sure to have severe penalties inflicted on them. On the whole, however, the common people in the Tokugawa age were looked down upon by warriors as inferiors in reasoning and understanding, and therefore as disqualified to participate in public affairs, social as well as political. That their intellectual defects must have been due to their neglected education was a matter clean put out of mind. As regards the respective professions of the above-mentioned three classes of plebeians, agriculture was thought to be the most honourable, on account of producing the staple food-material, so that warriors, especially of the lower classes, did not disdain to engage in tilling the lands allotted to them or in exploring new arable lands. The peasants themselves, however, were not so greatly esteemed on account of their engaging in a profession which was held honourable. Handicrafts in general and artisans employed in them had not been held particularly respectable by themselves, but as the profession was productive, it was recognised as indispensable, despised by no means. Moreover, many artistic geniuses, who had come out of the innumerable multitudes of artisans of various trades, have been held in very high regard in our country, where the people have the reputation of being one of the most artistic in the world; and those articles of rare talent unwittingly raised the esteem of the crafts in which they were engaged. That which was most despised as a profession was the business of merchants in all lines, for to gain by buying and selling was thought from times past to be a transaction approaching almost to chicanery, and therefore by no means to be encouraged from the standpoint of national and martial morals. Pedlars and small shop-keepers were therefore simply held in contempt. Great merchants, however, though not much esteemed on account of their profession, were generally treated with due consideration in virtue of their amassed wealth. Only too frequently had the Shogunate, as well as various daimyo, been obliged to stoop to court the goodwill of rich merchants in order to get money from them.

The methods of taxation were very arbitrary, and the person and the rights of property of individuals were not very highly respected at that time, the common people under the Shogunate being often subjected to hard and brutal treatment, their persons maltreated and injured and their properties confiscated on various trifling pretences. Though the way to petition was not absolutely debarred to them, it was made very irksome and perilous for plebeians to sue and obtain a hearing for their manifold complaints. On the other hand, as they were not recognised as a part of the nation to be necessarily consulted, and as the vox populi was not heeded in the management of public affairs, their education was not regarded as an indispensable duty of the government. No serious endeavour had ever been made to improve the common people intellectually, nor to raise their standard of living. If a number of them showed themselves able to behave like gentle folk, as if they had been warriors by birth and, therefore, well-educated, they were rewarded as men of extraordinary merits such as could not be reasonably expected of them.

The status of the political organisation of the country during the Tokugawa régime was also what ought to be called medieval, if we draw our conclusions from the materials ranged on the darker side only. The country had been divided into parcels, large and small, numbering in all a little less than three hundred, each with a territorial lord or a daimyo as its quasi-independent autocratic ruler. The frontier line dividing adjacent territories belonging to different daimyo used to be guarded very vigilantly on both sides, and passage, both in and out, was minutely scrutinised. For that purpose numerous barrier-gates were set up along and within the boundary. Any land bounded by such frontiers, and conferred on a daimyo by the Shogunate as his hereditary possession, was by its nature a self-constituted state, the political system prevailing within which having been modelled after that of the Shogunate itself. At the same time the territory of a daimyo was economically a self-providing, self-sufficient body. To become in such wise independent at least was the ideal of the daimyo possessing the territory or of the territorial statesmen under him. In other words, the territory of a daimyo was an entity, political and economical. In each territory certain kinds of produce from those confines had been strictly prohibited by regulation to be exported beyond the frontier, for fear that there might sometimes occur a scarcity of those commodities for the use of the inhabitants of the territory, or lest other territories should imitate the cultivation of like kinds of produce, so that the value of their own commodities might decrease thereby. In case of a famine, that is to say, of the failure of rice crops in a territory, a phenomenon which has by no means been of rare occurrence in our country, the export of cereals used to be forbidden in most of the neighboring territories, even when they had a "bumper crop." Such an internal embargo testifies that not only had Japan been closed against foreigners, but within herself each territory cared only for its own welfare, adhering to a mercantilist principle, as if it stood quite secluded from the rest of the country. Very little of the cohesion necessary to an integral state could be perceived in Japan of that time.