As to the people who were not stigmatised as impure of blood, it is very difficult to draw a boundary line distinct enough to divide them clearly according to their blood relationship. During the anarchical period of our history from the later Ashikaga to the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate, there took place a violent convulsion of the social strata, as the result of the disorder which reigned everywhere. Many talented plebeians had lucky chances to enlist as samurai in the service of some daimyo, while many of the scions of noted warrior families transformed themselves into plebeians, from disgust at their calling of men-slaughterers or from disappointment in their ambitions as warriors. In the time which followed, that is to say, when social order was reëstablished, such a transmutation became exceedingly difficult, as might be supposed. Yet even since then it is not altogether a matter of sheer impossibility. Plebeians of rare merit, especially those who were skilled in certain branches of art and learning, were able to find their way upward without much difficulty. The word "samurai" which had meant a "warrior attending" came to denote a social rank above the plebeians, so that it could include those who pursued a profession which was far from being militaristic, such as men of letters, physicians, painters, nô-dancers and the like in the retinue of the daimyo. Many territorial bourgeois, too, transformed themselves into samurai by contributing large sums of money to the treasury of their lord, or by purchasing the rank from some poor inheritors of samurai blood who were reduced to extreme penury, so as to be no more able to serve their daimyo as honourable warriors.
Examples of samurai promoted to the daimiate are not numerous since the re-establishment of peace and the social order under the dictatorship of the Tokugawa, for it had become for everybody very difficult to distinguish himself highly by merits other than military, so as to justify sufficiently such a sudden promotion. Still at the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate there were many vacant territories, caused by the confiscation of the territories of recalcitrant daimyo. Many families also lost their hereditary lands on account of the extinction of the male line, for the Shogunate did not at first recognise inheritance through an adopted son, a restriction which was later abrogated. Besides, the daimyo in general became wiser and more docile in order not to lose their estates on account of any misdemeanour toward the Shogun. As the result of such changes the later Shogun rarely had vacancies at his disposal by which he could create the new daimyo. If the Shogun had wished to promote somebody in spite of the lack of a vacant lordship, he had to part with a portion of his own domain, but this alienation of land from the Shogun could not be repeated too often without damage to the material resources of the Shogunate. Nevertheless, examples have not been wanting now and then, examples in which not only samurai but even plebeians also were promoted to the rank of daimyo, some of them owing to their due merits, or to the blood-relationship with the wives or the natural mother of some Shogun, others by courting the favour of their master. In short, the intruding upwards into the daimyo class was not a matter absolutely impossible for the people in the lower strata.
Inversely the descent to the lower social status was much easier than the ascent to the higher rank in any scale. Nay, for various reasons many persons had been obliged to climb down from their original high position in society to a lower status. As the law of primogeniture grew rigorous in its enforcements on the daimyo and the samurai, the greater part of the scions belonging to these classes could only fully enjoy the privilege of the society in which they were born during childhood, unless extinction of the main line took place. Descendants of daimyo generally gravitated to samurai rank, and those of samurai had to turn themselves into plebeians, in so far as they did not merit to be called to service as independent samurai. Thus the sliding down of classes was necessitated by the law of succession. Could any line of social demarcation be drawn according to the difference of classes in the face of such shiftings upwards and downwards? If it was a difficult matter, then we cannot expect to find any sort of culture monopolised by a certain class to the last. In whichever stratum of society it might have originated, it was sure to penetrate sooner or later into the other classes, and at last the whole people of a territory absorbed a similar and uniform culture. No sort of territorial barriers or social cleavage proved efficient enough to impede the inter-penetration of any cultural movement.
This amalgamation of cultures different in their origins had been accelerated by the introduction of European civilisation. Though the free intercourse of the Japanese with Europeans had been cut short in the third decade of the seventeenth century by the ordinances of the Shogunate, the country had never been absolutely closed against foreigners. No Japanese had been allowed to go abroad for any purpose whatever, but we continued to trade in the specially prescribed port of Nagasaki, not only with Chinese but also with Dutch merchants, though in very restricted forms. Thus while the Japanese had been struggling to mould the new national culture out of promiscuous elements which had existed from aforetime, they had been receiving the Western civilisation, not en masse but drop by drop, so that we had no need this time of the process of rumination in digesting the introduced exotic culture, as we had done as regards Chinese civilisation. The rigorous exclusion, carried to the utmost, of all Christian literature, whatever its relation to our religious tenets might have been, naturally induced men in authority to resort to the safest methods, that is to say, to restrict the kinds of books to be imported to the narrowest scope, and to limit their number to the smallest possible minimum. Accordingly, in the first half of the Tokugawa Shogunate, very few useful books were imported into our country, and the nation had, therefore, a very scanty opportunity of getting knowledge through books about things European. Yet the commodities which these Dutchmen brought to Deshima to be exchanged there or to be presented to the Shogun at Yedo, gave the Japanese who came in contact with them some idea about the modes of life in Europe. Moreover, after the encouragement assiduously given to the study of things European by the Shogun Yoshimune, whose rule covered the greater part of the first half of the eighteenth century, the process of infiltration of Western culture through the narrow door of Nagasaki had become suddenly accelerated. As the encouragement had been induced by the material necessities of the nation, the study of that time about things European was naturally limited to those sciences which were indispensable to the daily life of the people and at the same time far from being spiritual, like astronomy, medicine, botany, and so forth. Would it be possible, however, to ward off successfully the spiritual side of a culture, while taking in the material side of the same with avidity, as if the two parts had not been interwoven inseparably as a single entity? Those branches of Western knowledge, which we did not welcome in the least, but which were none the less useful, as history, and political as well as military sciences became gradually known to the Japanese, though very fragmentarily and slowly. That the diplomatists of the Shogunate had been able to conclude with the foreign powers, which forced our doors to be opened to them against our will, treaties which, though evidently detrimental to our national honour, were the largest concessions we could obtain from them at that time, shows that they had not been entirely ignorant of the condition of the parties with which they had to treat.
Probably there are foreign readers who may entertain some doubt about the lack of the religious element in the Western civilisation which thus flowed into our country from the first half of the eighteenth century. They may well consider, however, the change of religious temperament both in Japan and in European countries, besides the strictest prohibition rigorously exercised by the Japanese authorities. The Thirty Years War, the beginning of which falls in the fourteenth year of the Shogunate of Hidetada, the son and successor of Iyeyasu, is said generally to be the last religious war in Europe fought seriously. But it cannot be denied that in the latter part of the long war, more political than religious elements predominated, and the age which followed the most desolatory war was characterised by its religious toleration. Could the Dutchmen, who were the only people privileged to trade with us, have been expected to set as their first aim the propagation of the Christianity of their Reformed Church rather than material gain by their commerce, as the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Italians are said to have done as regards their Catholicism at the end of the Ashikaga period?
Japan had also changed religiously in the same direction. The end of the Ashikaga period had witnessed many wars which may be called religious, very rare examples since the time of the first introduction of Buddhism. Sectarians of Shinshû or Ikkôshû and of Nichirenshû often fought against one another. Some of them dared also to fight against powerful feudatories, and harassed them. Thus Japan was about to experience a struggle between the spiritual and the temporal powers, as Europe did in the Middle Ages. Nobunaga, therefore, gave countenance to Christian missionaries with a view to curbing the arrogance of Buddhist sectaries by the inroad of the new exotic religion. When the latter, however, proved not less dangerous to the political authority, it was interdicted by Hideyoshi. After all, the persecution of the Christians in Japan was not of religious nature, as in Europe, but essentially political. This explains why persecution could extirpate the seeds of Christianity sown so full of hope in Japan, in spite of its general failure in European countries.
The failure of the Christian propaganda, however, was at the same time the signal of the downfall of the influence of Buddhist sectaries in Japan. Iyeyasu, who had the most bitter experience of the resistance of Ikkô-votaries in his own province, had but to pursue the same religious policy as his predecessor, against Buddhism as well as Christianity. He ordered the personal morals of Buddhist priests to be rigorously supervised, and inflicted the severest punishment on those who violated the law of celibacy. It was natural, therefore, that secular preachers of the Ikkôshû or Shinshû, who made it their rule to lead a matrimonial life, should not have been held in so high a regard as the regular priests of other Buddhist sects, and on that account they had to recruit their believers chiefly among people in the lower strata of society. As to other sects besides the Shinshû, he showed no preference for any one of them, and he often called himself a believer in Buddhism of the Syaka Sect, which meant that he was no sectarian, for there actually existed no such sect in Japan. Such a broad tolerance, however, in religious matters is next door to indifferentism, and paved the way for the dwindling of the religious spirit in the ages to follow, at least in the prominent part of the nation.
Another factor which strengthened the spirit of toleration, or let me say, undermined the religious spirit of the people, was the Confucian philosophy expounded by Chutse, a celebrated savant of the Sung dynasty. This doctrine, which had been accepted by the court-philosophers of the Shogunate as the only orthodox one, was rationalistic to the extreme, so that it struck a heavy blow to many cherished superstitions and destroyed in a remarkable manner the influence which Buddhism had exercised over the mind of the people since many centuries, just like the rationalism of the eighteenth century in Europe, which ruined the authority of the Church and superstition. Yet among the educated society of the age, that is to say, the samurai class, the worship of Buddhist deities continued as before, superficially without any marked change, only because parents had worshipped them and taught their children to do likewise. That they had not been men strictly to be called Buddhist is evident from the fact that most of them had worshipped in Shinto shrines with almost the same devotion as they did in Buddhist temples. It cannot be denied that in their view of human life there was a preponderating Buddhist element, but as it had been since very long ago that our civilisation had become imbued with Buddhism, the Japanese of the Tokugawa period were not conscious of what part of the national culture they specially owed to the Indian religion. In short, religion in the Tokugawa age did not teach what to worship, but what to revere, and toward the latter part of the period we had less necessity to have more of a different religion. How could Christianity force her way into our country in the state such as it was, unless by the endeavour of fanatics? And the Dutch merchants of the eighteenth century were not religious fanatics at all. Through such agents, drops of the secular element in European civilisation were thrown on the cultural soil of Japan, which had been already secularised much earlier than most of the countries in the West. No spiritual consternation had been aroused, therefore, in the cultural world of our country by the intrusion of exotic factors, which only tended to augment the longing for the higher material improvement of the people, by never satiating the desire for it. It is by this stimulus indeed that civilisation, which is prone to become stationary in an isolated country like Japan, escaped the danger of stagnation, and the process of moulding and remoulding the ever new national culture out of the element which she had possessed and that which she had added to her stock since time immemorial, went on silently under cover of the long armed peace, and at last brought forth the Revolution of the Meidji.