An Introduction to the History of Japan

by Katsuro Hara

For such a continual progress Japan was quite ready. Within half a century, our country had been transformed from an anarchical country of interminable wars to a peaceful land, a land which was non-militaristic to the utmost, though under one of the most elaborate military régimes. That it had been "shut up" against foreign intercourse was, in its main motive, not to ward off the infiltration of Western civilisation in general, but only to achieve a peaceful national progress undisturbed by any intervention of scheming foreign missionaries. The Shogun, who ought to have continued as a military dictator, had been turned into a potentate who cared the least for military matters, though here lurked the danger of losing his raison d'être against the Emperor at Kyoto. The "wisest fool" in Japan was Tsunayoshi, the fifth Shogun of the Tokugawa, who not only founded a college and a shrine for the spirit of Confucius at Yushima in Yedo, the site where now the Educational Museum stands, but was very fond of playing the savant, and himself delivered lectures commenting on Confucian texts before the assembled daimyo in duty bound to listen to him. With a Shogun like him at the head of the government, it should by no means be wondered at that the cultivation of Chinese literature, which formed the greater part of the learning of the time, came into vogue among all of those belonging to the military régime, the daimyo and the samurai of various sorts and grades. Moreover, the samurai of the age themselves, though they professed to be warriors as ever in their essential character, and their training in military exercises had never really significantly relaxed, had ceased to be fighting men by profession as of yore, on account of the long-continued tranquillity. Notwithstanding the fact that the reason they had been honoured and respected by the common people was mainly because they were serving the country through their master, the daimyo, at the possible hazard of their lives, they had been obliged gradually not to rely on their martial valour only, but to mould their character and improve their ability, so as to befit themselves to become capable officials, administrators, nay, even statesmen in their own territory and well-bred gentlemen in private life, so as to furnish models to the common people by their personal examples. As they had read Chinese works mainly for this purpose, the kinds of books read were naturally limited, the most preferred being those pertaining to morals and politics, that is to say, Confucian literature and the histories of various Chinese dynasties, all of which were pragmatic enough. Their literary culture, therefore, tended to become rigid, narrow, and utilitarian, though very serious in intention. At first sight it must seem a very paradoxical matter that the learning which had been essentially humanistic in the Ashikaga period should have taken so utilitarian a tendency in the age directly following it. If we, however, once think of the Italian Renaissance metamorphosed into the German Reformation, when it got northward over the Alps, we need not be much embarrassed to understand the seemingly abrupt transition in our country.

It should also be noted that utilitarian studies had not formed the whole of the literary culture of the Tokugawa age. Since the very beginning of the Shogunate down to its fall the humanistic studies handed down by the preceding age had never been entirely swept away from the land. The utilitarian studies above cited had been almost exclusively pursued by those samurai standing directly under the Shogun or under the powerful daimyo whose territories were big enough to be administered as quasi-independent states, and whose governments were on such a scale as to need high statesmanship in order to be well managed. In other words, those who had devoted themselves to the study of the serious sorts of literature had been generally men to whom some opportunities might have been given for allowing them to put into practice what they had learned from books. If these larger territories were to be compared with Prussia and other kingdoms and middle states in the German Confederation, the small states in the same political body would make good counterparts of the petty territories of minor daimyo in Japan. As to those samurai serving the minor daimyo, it had been difficult to make them interested in the perusal of Chinese political works, for their sphere of action was not wide enough to require the territorial affairs being conducted according to high and delicate policies emanating from a profound political principle. In this respect they had much in common with their colleagues residing in the domains directly belonging to the Shogunate. As the governor-in-chief and his principal assistants in each domain had not been taken from the residents of each district, but despatched thither from Yedo, the samurai attached to the locality were merely employed to serve the government of their own district as low-class officials, so that they had little or no hand even in local politics. Some of these samurai were landed proprietors, who, being rich and having little serious business to demand their attention, had ample means and time to dip into books, which could hardly have been of the kind causing self-constraint, for their first motive in reading was only for the sake of distraction. The landed gentry, under the samurai in rank, though wealthier, and generally in charge of village affairs and in control of lesser farmers and peasants, were also found numerously in the domains. They too were the sort of people to be classified in the same category as the samurai of the domains. The samurai and gentry gathered in and around second-rate towns in large territories belonging to powerful daimyo may be included also in the same group. It may be, however, premature to suppose that only books belonging to light literature were welcomed by those who resided in districts where the military régime had the least hold. Serious works, such as ethical treatises, for instance, which abound in Chinese literature, were also read there, but rather for the purpose of occupying themselves with metaphysical speculations about moral questions, than in order to regulate their own conduct, private or public, according to the principles taught in them. In short, their thirst for knowledge was purely for the sake of enjoying an intellectual pleasure thereby, and therefore had been quite humanistic. It was here that the true inheritors of the culture of the later Ashikaga were to be sought, and not in places where the influence of the regular samurai was paramount. Needless to say, the centre of this humanistic culture was Kyoto, whose significance as the political capital had already been lost, while Yedo represented at its best the culture of the samurai. The Chinese books preferred by these humanistic dilettanti were those pertaining to rhetoric and poetry. They were greatly addicted to practising these branches of literature. Art for art's sake also found a better patron among such people than in the courts of the Shogun and of influential daimyo, where art had rather an applied meaning, represented in ornamental things such as screen and wall paintings down to the miniature-art of the tsuba and the netsuke. Wandering poets, rhetoricians, calligraphers, and artists of various crafts were wont to be far better harboured in districts where the humanistic culture prevailed, than in Yedo or in the residential towns of powerful daimyo, where politics and discipline were all-important. The most significant difference between the two sorts of culture was manifested in a special branch of art, that of painting. In the military circles, the painting of the Kano school was preferred, which was rather rigid in style and had some tincture of the taste highly prized by the Zen-sect priests. On the other hand, what was in vogue among the non-military circles was the so-called "Bunjin-gwa," or paintings of the school of "literati-painters," which were introduced at the beginning of the Tokugawa period from China, and were characterised by the mellowness of tone prevailing in them and also by a lack of the professional flavour.

Besides these two distinct cultural circles, there arose a third group of people, who entered the cultured arena in the latter half of the seventeenth century. I mean the bourgeois class in several large cities. After the decline of the trade of the historic city of Sakai, brought about by the hard blow struck at the root of the political power of her haughty merchants by Nobunaga, and caused also by the growth of a rival in the great commercial city of Ôsaka founded by Hideyoshi quite near it, the refined humanistic culture cherished by the citizens of Sakai vanished with its prosperity. After that, it took a considerable while to witness the revival of the cultural influence of the bourgeois class in Japan. The tranquillity, however, which the Tokugawa Shogunate had brought on our country, did not fail to cause such a revival, though not again in Sakai, yet at least in the two greatest commercial centres of the empire. The one was Yedo on the east, and the other Ôsaka on the west. Of these two cities, in affluence Ôsaka, on account of its geographical advantages, was several steps ahead of Yedo. Not only was it near Kyoto, the centre of the humanistic culture as ever, but its remoteness from Yedo had induced its merchants to become more independent than those in the Shogun's own city of the influence of the strong military régime. The culture fostered in the city, therefore, was nearer to that of the non-military circles than that of Yedo. Nay, Ôsaka went still further, even by a great many steps, than Yedo. It was here that Monzayemon Chikamatsu, the first and the greatest dramatist Japan has ever produced, demonstrated his peerless talent at the end of the seventeenth century, and here was also one of the cradles of the modern Japanese theatre. Yedo, however, could not remain long alien to this fresh cultural current initiated in Kyoto and Ôsaka. On account of its growing prosperity brought on by the constant comings in and out of hundreds of daimyo and their numerous retinues, the newly started political capital was soon enabled to rival the senior city of Ôsaka in the liveliness of its urban social life, and in some respects surpassed that of Kyoto. The plutocrats of Ôsaka had also a very close relation with the military régime. This relation, however, consisted in lending large sums of money to various daimyo, many of whom had their warehouses there to deposit therein the produce of their territory, used as pledges for getting advances of money from those merchants, and on that account their pay-masters with their staffs were stationed there to enable them to transact the customary financial business. On the other hand, the merchants of Yedo generally profited by providing, as purveyors and contractors, necessary commodities to the Shogunate and to the daimyo, and therefore depended more closely on the military régime, though some of them also advanced money as did the merchants of Ôsaka. It is said that the richest bourgeois of Yedo, who had amassed immense sums of money at the beginning of the nineteenth century were those who had advanced their moneys at a very high rate of interest to a great many needy hatamoto, who were obliged to garnishee to those merchants their allowances in rice from the Shogunate at fixed intervals, in order to steer securely through stretches of low water or through the straits of Hard-Times in their household economy. On the whole, however, we see a great difference in that the merchants of Yedo were the patronised party in their relations with the warrior-class, while those of Ôsaka were mostly creditors and the military men their debtors. But whatever might have been their difference in general character from the merchants of Ôsaka, the commercial aristocrats of Yedo, induced by their opulence to live a leisurely and very luxurious life, could not fail to become gradually patrons of the bourgeois arts and literature, merely tinged by a little more of the martial element than those of Ôsaka.

Three cultural currents thus ran parallel to one another in the history of the modern civilisation of our country, that of the orthodox samurai with its centre in Yedo, that of court-nobles and county-gentry flowing from Kyoto as its source, and lastly that of the commercial class with its stronghold in Ôsaka. If these three currents had remained irrelative to one another to the last; if, in other words, they had continued for long to belong specially to one of the three distinct and exclusive groups of the nation, then the historic revolution of the Meidji era would not have been effected, and Japan might be in a state but half medieval and half modern. Fortunately, class distinction in our country was not, at that time, so rigid as to hamper absolutely the amalgamation of different classes, and a certain type of culture, which had for a time been but a speciality of one particular class, soon ceased to be so, and was extended to the other classes, and the process necessarily led to the fusion of all the cultures of different types. As one of the causes which hastened such an amalgamation must be mentioned the intermarriage of people of different classes.

At the time when Chinese legislation was first implanted in Japanese soil, there were still minute restrictions concerning interclass-marriages in the Statutes of the Taïhô. Though mésalliances were not forbidden by any explicit law, the offspring of such marriages between freemen and slaves were to follow in class the parent of inferior rank. It is evident, therefore, that such an alliance was stigmatised and severely checked. As to the intermarriages between different classes of freemen, there had been no such restraint, even with respect to the status of their children. That the custom, however, of choosing the empress from members of the Imperial family only, to the exclusion of all vassal families, became gradually confirmed, and that the same custom continued intact until the beginning of the eighth century, shows how such mésalliances had been discouraged in the ancient days of our history. The crowning of a daughter of the Fujiwara as the consort of the Emperor Shômu was the first violation of the long-kept traditional usage regarding the Imperial marriage; and since that time marriages had become very irregular, not only among the members of the Imperial family, but also among the courtiers. The social status of a father was considered sufficient by itself to determine that of his children. No legal scrutiny was thought necessary as to what kind of a woman their mother was, though it was self-evident that the higher the social position of the family from which she sprang, the more the children she gave birth to would be honoured. The establishment of the military régime could effect but very slight change in this domain of social usage, until the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It must be attributed to this neglect of the maternal lineage in the consideration of pedigrees, that in the most genealogical records of Japan the names of wives, mothers, and daughters are generally omitted, notwithstanding that we are able to trace the names of the male ancestors, sometimes for more than ten centuries backward with tolerable certainty and exactitude.

The establishment of the Shogunate by the Tokugawa could not affect to any great extent the social position of women in general, for in that domain radical alterations were not to be expected from the age in which militarism was all-powerful. There was one thing, however, which was worthy of special notice, concerning the new usage of marriage among the daimyo. As to the right of inheriting their territories, the preference, it is true, had been on the side of the offspring of a legal marriage, for it could not have been otherwise in a society in which the right of primogeniture had been just established for the sake of maintaining the order intact. Yet there existed no rigorous rule through the whole history of the Shogunate, which might be said to have aimed at discouraging mésalliances, and the natural sons of the daimyo were by no means deprived of their right of inheritance on account of the mean origin of their mother. The Shogunate, however, interfered in the marriages of the daimyo, and all of them were obliged to take unto themselves consorts from families of equal rank, that is to say, the legal wife of a daimyo had to be a daughter or sister of another daimyo, one of his equals. Some of the higher daimyo, especially those of the blood of Tokugawa, often married daughters of court-nobles, for the purpose of keeping the latter in close relation with the Shogunate. In the military peerage list of the time the wife of every ruling daimyo had her place together with the heir, alongside of her husband, though even in this case her name used to be omitted, while that of the heir was given. In spite of the fact, therefore, that the intermarriage of the people of different territories had often been prohibited by territorial laws, those daimyo themselves who were desirous of enforcing those laws were obliged to find their legal wives outside of their territory, in other words, to contract an interterritorial marriage. Such a marriage within the circle of the daimyo had of course very little to do with the territorial politics of the daimyo concerned, for most of the ladies chosen as brides were those who had been brought up in their father's residence at Yedo, and after their marriage they had to remain in the same city as hostages to the Shogunate, and not allowed to leave it for their territory. Moreover, as the marriage of the daimyo received the close supervision of the Shogunate, they could have borne very little, if any, political meaning of a sort which might be attached to the intermarriages of different royal families in Europe. Culturally speaking, however, such a marriage had the effect of levelling the ways of living of various daimyo, and making them similar to one another. The bride was usually accompanied into her husband's family by maids, the daughters of her father's vassals, and she was often escorted by a few samurai. These samurai as well as the maids often took service under the daimyo, the husband of the bride, and remained in the train of their lord, after the death of the lady whom they had to serve personally. The number of the samurai who changed masters in this manner, was not naturally large, but they contributed none the less toward the diminishing of the differences in the social life of the various territories.

Generally, however, it was found very difficult for any samurai to leave his master for the purpose of enlisting in the service of some other daimyo. As the samurai had been bound to their lord the daimyo, not only publicly as his officials and warriors, but privately as his domestics, they were not allowed to emigrate freely from their lord's territory. Nevertheless, the legal status of the samurai versus the daimyo had never been the relation of slave and master. No daimyo had absolute control over the person of his samurai, in other words, his sway was far from what might have been called full proprietorship. Against injustice on the part of a daimyo, his samurai had the actual right of appealing to the Shogunate at the risk of suffering a heavy penalty for his affronting his lord by so doing. It was also possible to alienate himself from the service of his master by giving sufficient reasons for it. If he had no reason to do so, then he could abscond, and the extradition of such a deserter was hardly ever rigorously pressed. And if such a vagrant samurai or rônin was found to be a capable warrior or a man of talent in some other line, he could find a position very easily under the daimyo of his adopted territory. In such and like ways the samurai of the Tokugawa period made interterritorial migration more freely than we imagine.

If, concluding from the limited sphere of freedom of the samurai in regard to change of domicile, one should suppose that farmers, merchants, and craftsmen were much more restricted in their moving about inter-territorially, he would be grossly deceived. The samurai was de facto linked almost inseparably to their lord the daimyo, for the link had been firmly cemented, though not by any formal oath of fealty uttered by the samurai, as was the custom in European countries, but by the hereditary relation between his family and that of his master. It became especially so when profound peace settled on Japan during the middle of the Tokugawa period, and if any daimyo had given his samurai the freest choice to leave his territory, very few of them would have availed themselves of their freedom, for by doing so they would have had to part with a great many things which they had long cherished in their hearts. On the whole, the samurai were attached to their daimyo and not to the soil on which they had settled, so that when their master was removed to some new territory by the order of the Shogunate, most of the samurai used to follow their lord and serve him in the new locality. The dialectic peculiarities, which have been vanishing in Japan very rapidly these years, show still a trace of these samurai migrations. If any foreigner should remark a considerable difference in dialect between some provincial town and its suburbs, it shows that the family of the daimyo who was the last to lord it over the territory, was one transplanted there together with the attendant train of samurai by order of the Shogunate in a time not so very remote.

Quite contrary to samurai usage, those people below them in rank held with the daimyo of the territory in which they lived a relationship which was purely public in character. Socially they were treated as men beneath the samurai, and they themselves were content to be treated as such. As a class, however, they had no personal relations with the daimyo, unless through the samurai, to whom the usufruct of the land which they cultivated had been allotted by the daimyo. In other words, their duty to their territorial lord was nothing but that which they owed as a people governed to a governor who chanced to rule hereditarily over the territory, but might at any time be displaced by somebody else at the pleasure of the Shogunate. Fidelity on their part to the daimyo, therefore, was no personal obligation, nor the result of a reciprocal contract, but only a product of a long history, if any example of such virtue were exhibited. They had no need to follow their daimyo as his samurai used to do, whithersoever he might be transferred. On the contrary, all of them remained as a rule in the old territory, in which they continued for long years to pursue their business, and welcomed the newly-appointed daimyo. In this respect they might be said to have been much more fixed to the territory than the samurai. At the same time, as their relations with the daimyo were not very close, their movements were not so vigilantly watched as those of the samurai, and during the Tokugawa period, there went on incessant goings and comings of the lower order in and out of various territories, though very insignificant in character and therefore apparently unnoticed. Summarily speaking, the boundary of the territories of the daimyo was of no practical value in restricting the population within its geographical pale, in spite of the fact that all daimyo, without exception, exercised their right of scrutinising the ingress and egress of travellers at certain fixed barriers on the boundary line. Viewed from the standpoint of the internal migration of people of all classes, Japan was far from being an agglomeration of isolated territories. No wonder that the contemporary culture, springing up from whichever of the three possible sources, could not remain secluded within the confines of particular localities, but gradually permeated the country in every direction, and became one.

Not only inter-territorially, but also in each of the territories themselves, no sort of culture could hold itself for long as the exclusive property of a certain class. In our history, it is true, we had retained a class-system for a very long time, even after the revolution of the Meidji era, and all men had not been equal before the law until very recent times. Nay, to this day we see still some harmless relics of that system in certain regulations preferential to the aristocracy. Regarded as a whole, however, the class-system in Japan has never approached the caste-system of some other countries. If there had been anything like that in our country, it was the distinction of the ordinary people, or we might say, people of the Japanese pur sang, from those whose blood was thought to be polluted. Marriage with the latter set of people had been scrupulously avoided on the part of the former. This antipathy entertained by the majority of the nation against the minority was nearly of the same nature as the anti-Semitic feeling in Europe. The coincidence between the two went so far that in Japan tanners, executioners, and so forth were considered as men of occupations exclusive to the people of polluted blood, just as similar trades in Europe had been relegated to the Jews of the Middle Ages. From the fact that in the newly explored part of the empire, such as the northern part of Honto, the settlements of the so-called people of polluted blood are very few, and therefore the feeling against them there is not so acute as it is in the central or most historic part of the empire, we may safely conclude that such a feeling had its origin in some racial difference and dates from the immemorial past. It is very strange that in Japan, where the population is unquestionably of mixed blood, such an antipathy against a certain set of people should have continued stubbornly even to the present day. On the other hand, we have sufficient grounds for believing that, in the course of our history, not a few people of the pure blood have been classed with the impure on account of some criminal action, or they mingled with the latter from some predilection, out of their own free will.