An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

CHAPTER XII

TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

In the previous chapter I have dwelt on the military and political organisation of the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate somewhat more fully than was appropriate for a book of such small compass as this. What was then the civilisation, which had been supported and sheltered by this organisation and régime? That must be told subsequently.

As the well-planned military régime of the Shogunate can be said to have been based on the assumption that war was a far-distant possibility, an imaginary danger, and as at the same time the Shogunate had watched jealously not to stir up daimyo and samurai to so warlike a pitch of self-confidence that they would believe themselves able to cope with the Shogun, there had lain the chief difficulty of sustaining the martial spirit of the nation in full strength, that is to say, of continuing the military régime as it had been at first. There were of course several gradations in the intensity of the fighting spirit of the people in different localities of the country. In both extremities of the Empire, in the south of Kyushu and in the north of Honto, where civilisation was rather at a low ebb, the martial spirit had continued not much abated since the time of the Ashikaga. On both sides of the boundary of two such adjoining territories, a difference of dialect was clearly perceivable, and an acute hostile feeling against each other prevailed. People were not allowed to marry their neighbors beyond the frontier, and this rule was strictly applied to all members of the warrior-class. In brief, they were always staring each other in the face, as if ready to fight at any time. As to the greater part of the Empire, however, including the territories situated between the two extremities, that is to say, in those regions of the country where the people were more enlightened, no such animosity between the peoples of neighboring daimyo was to be noticed. There marriages had been contracted freely between the subjects of different lords, a relationship which could only arise from the assumption that most probably there would occur no war between the two daimyo, and there would be no fear of such marriages becoming an awkward connection. Adjoining territories maintaining such intimate relations, being connected by the personalities of the inhabitants, should be considered not as quasi-independent states ranged side by side and in dangerous rivalry, verging almost on belligerency, but as neighboring governmental departments in the same well-centralised state. It may be gathered from these data that the more enlightened and by far the greater part of the Japanese nation were so peace-loving, that they organised all their ways of living on the assumption of a permanent peace. And that absolute peace had verily continued for more than two centuries in a country said to have been dominated by an absolute military régime, more than testifies how averse is the Japanese nation from wanton warfare. Foreigners should ponder this irrefutable fact in the history of Japan, a fact which can not elsewhere be found in abundance even in the history of European and American states, before they calumniate our nation as the most bellicose and dangerous in the world.

Without doubt Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate was a country governed by a military régime, feudalistic in form, but in truth peace brooded over the land, the utmost peace which could be expected from any military régime. As tranquillity had continued so long, our civilisation had been able meanwhile to make a wonderful progress. If war can be eulogised with some justice to be a stimulating and compulsive factor of civilisation, with no less certainty peace may be complimented as a factor, the most efficient, in fostering the same. In the preceding chapters I have spoken of the propagation of culture throughout the country, notwithstanding its anarchical condition, and of that very culture, which was in the main humanistic. This humanistic culture had now its successor in a civilisation higher in form and in quality. That the progress was apparently retarded for a while on account of wars, which rapidly succeeded one after another at the end of the Ashikaga, was a phenomenon that was only temporary. How could a few patches of straw floating on the surface stop the forward movement of a strong undercurrent, however slowly the stream might run? Mingled with the clash and clang of arms, an exquisite music embodying the ever advancing civilisation of our country had been heard; though at first very faintly audible, it grew louder and louder till it became sonorous enough to make the whole nation vibrate when the clamorous battle-cry of the warriors had subsided. In short, Japan had been steadily advancing, and it was indeed those warriors themselves who carried the torch of civilisation farther and farther onward. Many historians ascribed it solely to the individual exertion of Iyeyasu, that learning had been revived since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Seeing, however, that those samurai who fought with and under him had rarely been noted for the excellence of their literary acquirements, it can hardly be supposed that he had been deeply interested in promoting learning and culture among his entourage. Neither did he himself leave any trace of his having received a higher degree of liberal education than the average generals of his times. It is too notorious a fact to doubt that he earnestly encouraged learning and ordered many books to be reprinted. Yet it is also clear that his encouragement was very efficient, mainly because his position as the sole military and political master of Japan enabled him to figure as a patron of the arts. The fact that before his authority as a military dictator became incontestably established, the reprint of various books had been going on almost without intermission, and that the two Emperors Go-Yôzei and Go-Midzunowo and also Kanetsugu Naoye, a warrior who had grown up in the remote province of Yechigo, were among the most ardent patrons of learning by the encouragement they gave to the reprinting of standard works, testifies that Iyeyasu did not stand alone in encouraging liberal education. After all, it should be fairly said that the first Shogun of the Tokugawa did only what ought to have been done by him, or what the nation had a right to expect from a person in a position such as his. In 1593, that is to say, five years before the death of Hideyoshi, the Emperor Go-Yôzei ordered the so-called old text of the Hsiao-king to be reprinted in wooden type. This was the first book in our country printed with movable type, so far as can be said with certainty. As to the types themselves which the Emperor resorted to in his scholastic undertaking, we have reason to suppose that they had been seized in Korea as a prize of war and brought to this country by the expeditionary troops which Hideyoshi had sent thither in the previous year. Korea had been looked upon through the Ashikaga period by the Japanese as a country more advanced in culture than Japan in those days. We read in our history about the repeated applications addressed by the Ashikaga Shogunate to the Korean government, not only for the donation of a complete set of the Buddhist Tripitaka reprinted in that country, but also the blocks themselves used in that reprinting. To the latter of these two requests, the peninsular government flatly declined to accede. To the former, however, they acquiesced as many times as they could manage, so that we see now here and there volumes of the sutras which had been sent as presents by the Korean government before the seventeenth century. The method of printing with movable types had been introduced into Korea of course from China, and types made of wood as well as of clay had long been in use there. It seems to have been those wooden types which our warriors fetched home, and the fact that such vehicles of learning had been taken as a war-prize by these soldiers indicates that they were not totally indifferent to the cultivation of letters.

In 1597, four years after the reprinting of the afore-said Hsiao-king, the same Emperor ordered again many other books to be reprinted. Among those then thus reproduced were not only several books of Confucian classical literature and other Chinese works, literary as well as medical, but some Japanese books, such as the first volume of the Nihongi and a work on Japanese political institutions written by Chikafusa Kitabatake, a court-noble in the time of the Emperor Go-Daigo, who was noted for his unwavering fidelity to the Emperor and for his education, being the author of the celebrated history called Jingô-shôtôki. Many of these books seem to have been re-issued within the same year, which was one year previous to the death of Hideyoshi, and the types used this time were made in our country after the Korean models. Most probably the types captured in Korea as prizes did not long suffice to satiate the increasing desire of the Emperor, aroused by his deep interest in books.

The next step in the improvement of Japanese printing followed the same course as it had in Europe, that is to say, the use of metallic types. The first attempt in this improved method was made by the aforesaid Kanetsugu Naoye, head of the vassals of the house of Uyesugi, who was at that time lord of Yonezawa. The book which Naoye ordered to be reprinted was the celebrated Chinese literary glossary called the Wen-hsüan, which literally means selected literary pieces, in verse as well as in prose. This reprint was put into execution at Fushimi in the year 1606, which was the fourth year of the Shogunate of Iyeyasu, and the metallic material then used in casting the types was copper. With him as the precursor, several patrons of learning followed in his wake. Among the most noted of them were Iyeyasu himself and the Emperor Go-Midsunowo. This Emperor, who was the son and successor of the Emperor Go-Yôzei, imitated his father in encouraging the reproduction of books with type, not of wood but of copper as Naoye had done. The book printed under the imperial auspices in 1621 was the fifteen volumes of a Chinese lexicon after the block print issued in China of the Sung dynasty. Prior, however, to the undertaking of the Emperor, Iyeyasu, as ex-Shogun, ordered reprints to be made with copper types at his residential town of Sumpu, now called Shidzuoka, in the province of Suruga. The books reprinted there in 1615 and 1616 were the index of the complete series of the Buddhist Tripitaka and the Extracts from Various Chinese Classics. Besides these, it should be mentioned in his honour as a patron of learning, that he ordered more than one hundred thousand pieces of wooden types to be manufactured for the reprinting of various useful books. From 1599, the year before the decisive battle of Sekigahara, until the end of his Shogunate, Iyeyasu's agent at Fushimi carried on the printing of books with movable wooden types without any cessation. Among the books reprinted there were the Adzuma-kagami, the record of the earlier Kamakura Shogunate, a Chinese political miscellany written at the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, and some old Chinese strategical works.

Not only such illustrious personages as the above-mentioned Emperors, Shogun, and eminent warriors, but men of mediocre means or of unpretentious rank, such as samurai, priests, literati and merchants, also vied with one another in publishing new and old books of Japan as well as of China, by the method of woodblocks or of movable types. Among wealthy merchants the most renowned at that time as the Mecaenas of arts and learning was Yoichi Suminokura. He was born of a rich family living in a suburb of Kyoto, and was himself an enterprising merchant. Moreover, his accomplishments in the Chinese classics and in Japanese versification were far ahead of the average literati of the time, and his skill in calligraphy has been said to be almost incomparable. Out of the immense fortune which he had amassed by trading with continental countries as far as Tonkin and Cochin-China, he spent great sums freely in publishing books, the greater part of which were works famous in Japanese literature. It is said that more than twenty sorts of books were issued by him alone, counting in all several hundred volumes.

What most attracts our attention in his undertakings, however, is the fact that all of these books were printed, not in the movable type then in vogue, but in the wood-block style of old. The new method of printing with type, though introduced several years back and assiduously encouraged by many influential persons, had not been able to demonstrate its advantages to the full. In each edition, whoever might have been the publisher, the number of copies issued had generally not exceeded two hundred, and that the number was so small shows at the same time the narrowness of the reading circle of that age. It proves also that Japan was not yet in any urgent need of seeing books suddenly multiplied by the busy use of movable types. Moreover, many inconveniences, not known in the typography of the West, manifested themselves in the adoption of the new method in a country like the Japan of that time, where Chinese ideographs had been used almost exclusively as the necessary vehicle for expressing thought. We had to provide a great variety of fonts of types, each type-face representing a special ideograph, so that a far larger and more varied assortment of fonts was required than in the case where an alphabet is in use, not to mention that the total number of types had to be enormously augmented out of the necessity of having numerous multiples of the same type. To print sundry accessories alongside Chinese texts, in order to make them easily legible for Japanese students, was another difficulty which was found almost insuperable in the adoption of movable types. The desire of some editors to insert illustrations could not also be fulfilled easily, if the text was to be printed in type, for setting the blocks together with type was considered a very irksome business at a time when printing in type was still in its infancy. They would rather have preferred the single use of wood-blocks to using them together with types. Lastly, as regards those literary works by Japanese authors which Suminokura had fondly put into print, that is to say, in cases where the editor's chief care was the reproduction in facsimile of the manuscript originally executed in fine calligraphic style, movable types entirely failed to serve the purpose. All these disadvantages conspired indeed to frustrate the development of the printing in type, so that the new method was set aside soon after its introduction until the end of the Shogunate. It is certain, however, that the introduction of the use of types in printing, though to a very limited extent, contributed none the less to the general progress of civilisation in Japan, in multiplying books and in stimulating the thirst for knowledge on the part of the general public.

There is no doubt whatever that, in the number of books published in Japan, the beginning of the seventeenth century far surpassed the end of the sixteenth. Bookstores, where books were sold, bought, edited, and published, were now to be found in Kyoto and Yedo, and their business became lucrative enough to be continued as an independent calling. Here the question must naturally arise, how were those multiplied books distributed? There were, besides the priests, especially those belonging to the Zen sect, not a few professional literati, who pursued learning as their chief business. Secretaries in the chancellories of the Shogun and of various daimyo had been generally recruited from that class. Their number, however, had remained comparatively insignificant for a long time during the earlier part of the Shogunate, and they had been classified rather into an exclusive society, which included physicians and Buddhist priests. They had been treated as servants engaged in reading and writing, and not respected as advisers nor revered as leaders of the spirit of the age. However noble might be the profession in which they were engaged, still they were mere professional men, considered good to serve and not apt to lead. The increase in number of such men of letters, it is true, was the cause and the effect of the rise of the cultural level of the country, for it clearly denoted that Japan had begun to appreciate learning more highly than before and hence to demand more of these learned men. But that increase must have naturally stopped short, unless the learning which they taught was imbibed by the people at large and made itself a necessary ingredient of the national life, that is to say, unless the general public had gained thereby more of enlightenment.