[*Dr. Florenz accounts for the distinction between Kobetsu and Shinbetsu as due to the existence of two military ruling classes,—resulting from two successive waves of invasion or immigration. The Kobetsu were the followers of Jimmu Tenno; the Shinbetsu were earlier conquerors who had settled in Yamato prior to the advent of Jimmu. These first conquerors, he thinks, were not dispossessed.]
There was a division also into castes—kabane or sei. (I use the term "castes," following Dr. Florenz, a leading authority on ancient Japanese civilization, who gives the meaning of sei as equivalent to that of the Sanscrit varna, signifying "caste" or "colour.") Every family in the three great divisions of Japanese society belonged to some caste; and each caste represented at first some occupation or calling. Caste would not seem to have developed any very rigid structure in Japan; and there were early tendencies to a confusion of the kabane. In the seventh century the confusion became so great that the Emperor Temmu thought it necessary to reorganize the sei; and by him all the clan-families were regrouped into eight new castes.
[237] Such was the primal constitution of Japanese society; and that society was, therefore, in no true sense of the term, a fully formed nation. Nor can the title of Emperor be correctly applied to its early rulers. The German scholar, Dr. Florenz, was the first to establish these facts, contrary to the assumption of Japanese historians. He has shown that the "heavenly sovereign" of the early ages was the hereditary chief of one Uji only,—which Uji, being the most powerful of all, exercised influence over many of the others. The authority of the "heavenly sovereign" did not extend over the country. But though not even a king,—outside of his own large group of patriarchal families,—he enjoyed three immense prerogatives. The first was the right of representing the different Uji before the common ancestral deity,—which implies the privileges and powers of a high priest. The second was the right of representing the different Uji in foreign relations: that is to say, he could make peace or declare war in the name of all the clans, and therefore exercised the supreme military authority. His third prerogative included the right to settle disputes between clans; the right to nominate a clan-patriarch, in case that the line of direct succession to the chieftainship of any Uji came to an end; the right to establish new Uji; and the right to abolish an Uji guilty of so acting as to endanger the welfare of the rest. He was, therefore, Supreme Pontiff, Supreme Military Commander, [238] Supreme Arbitrator, and Supreme Magistrate. But he was not yet supreme king: his powers were exercised only by consent of the clans. Later he was to become the Great Khan in very fact, and even much more,—the Priest-Ruler, the God-King, the Deity-Incarnate. But with the growth of his dominion, it became more and more difficult for him to exercise all the functions originally combined in his authority; and, as a consequence of deputing those functions, his temporal sway was doomed to decline, even while his religious power continued to augment.
The earliest Japanese society was not, therefore, even a feudalism in the meaning which we commonly attach to that word: it was a union of clans at first combined for defence and offence,—each clan having a religion of its own. Gradually one clan-group, by power of wealth and numbers, obtained such domination that it was able to impose its cult upon all the rest, and to make its hereditary chief Supreme High Pontiff. The worship of the Sun-goddess so became a race-cult; but this worship did not diminish the relative importance of the other clan-cults,—it only furnished them with a common tradition. Eventually a nation formed; but the clan remained the real unit of society; and not until the present era of Meiji was its disintegration effected—at least in so far as legislation could accomplish. [239] We may call that period during which the clans became really united under one head, and the national cult was established, the First Period of Japanese Social Evolution. However, the social organism did not develop to the limit of its type until the era of the Tokugawa shoguns,—so that, in order to study it as a completed structure, we must turn to modern times. Yet it had taken on the vague outline of its destined form as early as the reign of the Emperor Temmu, whose accession is generally dated 673 A.D. During that reign Buddhism appears to have become a powerful influence at court; for the Emperor practically imposed a vegetarian diet upon the people—proof positive of supreme power in fact as well as in theory. Even before this time society had been arranged into ranks and grades,—each of the upper grades being distinguished by the form and quality of the official head-dresses worn; but the Emperor Temmu established many new grades, and reorganized the whole administration, after the Chinese manner, in one hundred and eight departments. Japanese society then assumed, as to its upper ranks, nearly all the hierarchical forms which it presented down to the era of the Tokugawa shoguns, who consolidated the system without seriously changing its fundamental structure. We may say that from the close of the First Period of its social evolution, the nation remained practically separated into two classes: the [240] governing class, including all orders of the nobility and military; and the producing class, comprising all the rest. The chief event of the Second Period of the social evolution was the rise of the military power, which left the imperial religious authority intact, but usurped all the administrative functions (this subject will be considered in a later chapter). The society eventually crystallized by this military power was a very complex structure—outwardly resembling a huge feudalism, as we understand the term, but intrinsically different from any European feudalism that ever existed. The difference lay especially in the religious organization of the Japanese communities, each of which, retaining its particular cult and patriarchal administration, remained essentially separate from every other. The national cult was a bond of tradition, not of cohesion: there was no religious unity. Buddhism, though widely accepted, brought no real change into this order of things; for, whatever Buddhist creed a commune might profess, the real social bond remained the bond of the Ujigami. So that, even as fully developed under the Tokugawa rule, Japanese society was still but a great aggregate of clans and subclans, kept together by military coercion.
At the head of this vast aggregate was the Heavenly Sovereign, the Living God of the race,—Priest-Emperor and Pontiff Supreme, —representing the oldest dynasty in the world. [241] Next to him stood the Kuge, or ancient nobility,—descendants of emperors and of gods. There were, in the time of the Tokugawa, 155 families of this high nobility. One of these, the Nakatomi, held, and still holds, the highest hereditary priesthood: the Nakatomi were, under the Emperor, the chiefs of the ancestral cult. All the great clans of early Japanese history—such as the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto—were Kuge; and most of the great regents and shoguns of later history were either Kuge or descendants of Kuge.
Next to the Kuge ranked the Buke, or military class,—also called Monofufu, Wasarau, or Samurahi (according to the ancient writing of these names),—with an extensive hierarchy of its own. But the difference, in most cases, between the lords and the warriors of the Buke was a difference of rank based upon income and title: all alike were samurai, and nearly all were of Kobetsu or Shinbetsu descent. In early times the head of the military class was appointed by the Emperor, only as a temporary commander-in-chief: afterwards, these commanders-in-chief, by usurpation of power, made their office hereditary, and became veritable imperatores, in the Roman sense. Their title of shogun is well known to Western readers. The shogun ruled over between two and three hundred lords of provinces or districts, whose powers and privileges varied according to income and grade. Under the Tokugawa [242] shogunate there were 292 of these lords, or daimyo. Before that time each lord exercised supreme rule over his own domain; and it is not surprising that the Jesuit missionaries, as well as the early Dutch and English traders should have called the daimyo "kings." The despotism of the daimyo was first checked by the founders of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, who so restricted their powers that they became, with some exceptions, liable to lose their estates if proved guilty of oppression and cruelty. He ranked them all in four great classes: (1) Sanke, or Go-Sanke, the "Three Exalted Families" (those from whom a successor to the shogunate might be chosen, in case of need); (2) Kokushu, "Lords of Provinces"; (3) Tozama, "Outside-Lords"; (4) Fudai, "Successful Families": a name given to those families promoted to lordship or otherwise rewarded for fealty to Iyeyasu. Of the Sanke, there were three clans, or families: of the Kokushu, eighteen; of the Tozama, eighty-six; and of the Fudai, one hundred and seventy-six. The income of the least of these daimyo was 10,000 koku of rice (we may say about 10,000 pounds, though the value of the koku differed greatly at different periods); and the income of the greatest, the Lord of Kaga, was estimated at 1,027,000 koku.
The great daimyo had their greater and lesser vassals; and each of these, again, had his force of trained samurai, or fighting gentry. There was [243] also a particular class of soldier-farmers, called goshi, some of whom possessed privileges and powers exceeding those of the lesser daimyo. These goshi, who were independent landowners, for the most part, formed a kind of yeomanry; but there were many points of difference between the social position of the goshi and that of the English yeomen.
Besides reorganizing the military class, Iyeyasu created several new subclasses. The more important of these were the hatamoto and the gokenin. The hatamoto, whose appellation signifies "banner-supporters," numbered about 2000, and the gokenin about 5000. These two bodies of samurai formed the special military force of the shogun; the hatamoto being greater vassals, with large incomes; and the gokenin lesser vassals, with small incomes, who ranked above other common samurai only because of being directly attached to the shogun's service…. The total number of samurai of all grades was about 2,000,000. They were exempted from taxation, and privileged to wear two swords.
Such, in brief outline, was the general ordination of those noble and military classes by whom the nation was ruled with great severity. The bulk of the common people were divided into three classes (we might even say castes, but for Indian ideas long associated with the term): Farmers, Artizans, and Merchants.
[244] Of these three classes, the farmers (hyakusho) were the highest; ranking immediately after the samurai. Indeed, it is hard to draw a line between the samurai class and the farming-class,—because many samurai were farmers also, and because some farmers held a rank considerably above that of ordinary samurai. Perhaps we should limit the term hyakusho (farmers, or peasantry) to those tillers of the soil who lived only by agriculture, and were neither of Kobetsu nor Shinbetsu descent…. At all events, the occupation of the peasant was considered honourable: a farmer's daughter might become a servant in the imperial household itself—though she could occupy only an humble position in the service. Certain farmers were privileged to wear swords. It appears that in the early ages of Japanese society there was no distinction between farmers and warriors: all able-bodied farmers were then trained fighting-men, ready for war at any moment,—a condition paralleled in old Scandinavian society. After a special military class had been evolved, the distinction between farmer and samurai still remained vague in certain parts of the country. In Satsuma and in Tosa, for example, the samurai continued to farm down to the present era: the best of the Kyushu samurai were nearly all farmers; and their superior stature and strength were commonly attributed to their rustic occupations. In other parts of the country, as in Izumo, farming was forbidden to samurai: [245] they were not even allowed to hold rice-land, though they might own forest-land. But in various provinces they were permitted to farm, even while strictly forbidden to follow any other occupation,—any trade or craft…. At no time did any degradation attach to the pursuit of agriculture. Some of the early emperors took a personal interest in farming; and in the grounds of the Imperial Palace at Akasaka may even now be seen a little rice-field. By religious tradition, immemorially old, the first sheaf of rice grown within the imperial grounds should be reaped and offered by the imperial hand to the divine ancestors as a harvest offering, on the occasion of the Ninth Festival,—Shin-Sho-Sai.*