We have already seen that the Emperor, or Mikado, was deprived of all authority, and retained only the outward attributes of his Imperial dignity. He dwelt in his palace of Gosho surrounded by 155 kuges, or noble families, all of whom were descended from the Imperial house, but whose duties were merely ceremonial. In order to prevent any possibility on their part of the kuges interfering with him, Ieyas reduced the Court to absolute poverty. He fixed the civil list of the Mikado—according to custom, in kind—at 9,000 kokus,[[15]] or 44,550 bushels of rice; as to the kuges, many of them lived in the most straightened circumstances. To still more completely isolate the Mikado the feudal princes were never on any pretext allowed to enter Kioto.
These princes, or daimios, who were the leaders of the military order, of whom the Shogun was the chief, were divided into five classes, according to their precedence and importance: firstly, the three great Gosanké families, who reigned over the provinces of Owari, Kii and Mito, and were descended from the three elder sons of Ieyas: they enjoyed the privilege of electing from amongst their number the Shogun in case of the failure of direct heirs; secondly, the sixteen kokushu daimios, whose ancestors possessed their fiefdoms before the elevation of Ieyas, which he had considerably reduced as a punishment for their having taken up arms against him, and whose revenues ranged between 750,000 and 5,000,000 bushels; thirdly, the nineteen kammong daimios, who were the immediate relatives or vassals of the Tokugawas, and descendants of Ieyas’ favourite generals, among whom he distributed the fiefdoms he had confiscated from his enemies: they were eventually the chief supporters of the Shogunate, being, however, not so rich as the above, possessing only between 50,000 and 1,600,000 bushels of revenue; fourthly, the 88 tozamma daimios; and fifthly, the 110 foudai daimios, who were not infrequently cadets of one of the two preceding classes. They possessed an income of at least 50,000 bushels, but rarely more, and their estates were proportionally small. Nevertheless, there were eight tozammas and sixteen foudais who enjoyed between them a revenue of 500,000 bushels, and, who, when united, were sufficiently powerful to be very troublesome.
Next came the samourai, forming about a twentieth of the entire population of the Empire. They were a distinct military class under the daimios, and were distinguished by wearing, even in infancy, the two swords Ieyas called the ‘living soul of the samourai.’ Excepting in one or two principalities at the extreme south, notably at Satsuma, they were never agriculturists, but, despising all manual labour, lived on salaries paid by their chief. Exceedingly brave and punctilious in all points of honour, they were addicted to vendetta, and added to their other peculiarities the ferocious custom of hara-kiri, which obliged them on the least insult to disembowel themselves with a small sword, an unpleasant rite into which they were initiated when still very young. They were ever ready to shed their blood for their prince and fanatically attached to their clan. It was from them that the troops, as well as all the minor officials in the various principalities, were recruited. The samourai were not only military, but literary, and corresponded to our professional classes, and their opinions only had the slightest influence on the affairs of the country. When a samourai, for some reason or other, found himself without a master, either because he had been expelled from his service or his lord had been deprived by the Shogun of his titles and estates, he sometimes turned ronin, or knight-errant, more often than not a brigand, and occasionally a redresser of wrongs, but as a rule a fellow capable of the worst sort of crime as well as of the most heroic acts of chivalry. In times of trouble these ronin were wont to form themselves into bands and offer their services to a popular prince, and when accepted, their opinion and influence sometimes became of considerable weight.
Nineteen-twentieths of the population consisted of the heimin, or commoners. Of this class the peasantry was by far the most numerous and esteemed. Next came the artisans, then the merchants, for be it remembered that feudal Japan, like feudal Europe, held trade and tradesmen in supreme contempt. Finally the two classes of pariahs, the eta, or ‘dirty people,’ who followed the profession of leather-dressers, tanners, curriers, knackers, grave-diggers, etc., then the hinin (not men), and the beggars.
Only on certain rare occasions, when a daimio wished to increase the number of his men-at-arms, and recruited some of his samourai from the heimin, or, again, when a ronin, tired of vagabondage, embraced some trade or other and contrived to lose himself among the people, were the barriers between class and class ever broken down, and thus society in Japan remained strictly confined within its narrow boundaries for over two centuries. Notwithstanding these restrictions, the country enjoyed during this period a profound peace and great prosperity. Both Ieyas and Iemitsu understood to perfection how to apply the maxim, ‘Divide in order to reign,’ whereby they broke up the influence of the daimios, which, when united, might have proved formidable. This they contrived to do by isolating them from the Imperial Court, and creating between them divergences of interest, and by fermenting among them a spirit of hatred and jealousy. Ieyas had not dared dispossess all his adversaries after his victory, but he confiscated a part at least of their domains, out of which he created a number of fiefs, which he distributed among his allies and soldiers. The descendants of these, the kammong and foudai princes, being ever at war with the kokushu and the tozamma, obtained protection from the Shoguns by establishing a common bond of interest, being fully aware that the downfall of the Tokugawas would be sure to involve their own.
A danger undoubtedly presented itself to the south-east of the Empire, for here the domains of the kokushu princes of Choshiu, Satsuma and Hizen and others nearly as powerful formed a continuous line of territory, and consequently a storm rising in that quarter might have been fatal to the Shogunate; but so long as these great vassals received no support from a foreign power, the military preponderance of the Shogun was safe. This state of affairs eventually gave rise to a rigorous exclusion of foreigners. Divided among themselves, isolated from all external influences, deprived of all communication with the Court, the daimios in due time lost a great deal of influence in their own principalities. By virtue of the Sankin law, promulgated in 1635 by Iemitsu, and solemnly ratified by the Mikado, they were compelled to sojourn at least one year out of two at Yedo, and to leave their women and children during the following year in that capital as hostages. In this manner their initiative was enfeebled, and as they were obliged in great part to leave the administration of their own affairs in the hands of subordinates, they soon became mere idlers, under the constant supervision of a swarm of spies, who reported to the Shogun any attempt on their part to resist his authority, or to conspire against him. Notwithstanding its many drawbacks, this administrative system, although it unquestionably weakened the political character of the Japanese, was in the long-run, by securing a prolonged peace, exceedingly beneficial to the country, especially as regards the development of art and literature, and it is from the period of the Tokugawas that dates all that is finest in Japanese architecture, painting, sculpture, lacquering, including the temples of Nikko and the noblest specimens of Satsuma faience. In the meantime civilization had made rapid progress, and the intellectual influence of China upon Japan was paramount. The Chinese classics, formerly neglected by the Japanese, were now, thanks to the initiative of Ieyas, studied with ardour both at the Court of his successors and at that of the Mikado, and were even publicly taught in the ever-increasing number of schools. And thus it came to pass that when the Europeans returned in 1854 they found Japan more completely under the influence of Chinese art and literature than had their ancestors in the sixteenth century.
The causes which brought about the revolution of 1868, which resulted in the suppression of the Shogunate and of feudalism, and in the rapid introduction of European civilization, were quite as important and as deeply rooted in the hearts of the people of Japan as were those which led to the French Revolution in 1789, which, it will be remembered, had been brewing for a very long time before its eventual outbreak. Politically, the decadence of the Shogunate commenced in 1652, after the death of Iemitsu, and especially at the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Tokugawas began gradually to decline, precisely as had done the various dynasties that had preceded them. Surrounded by a brilliant court and enlightened patrons both of arts and letters, the Shoguns disdained occupying themselves with public affairs, which they left in the hands of the Gorogio, a council composed of five foudai daimios and their subordinates. This substitution of a rather effete bureaucracy for the old but energetic feudal system soon inspired the great vassals with a hope of being able to overthrow their former masters. They perceived that it was easy to pick a hole in the Shogunate from the doctrinal point of view, even in the name of those very Confucian theories upon which they had the pretension to base their supremacy. As a matter of fact, although the system of paternal government extolled by the illustrious Chinese philosopher is by no means opposed to feudalism, when closely examined into, it shows that there was no place in it for the Shogunate, since it does not admit of any intermediary between the father and his children.
At the same time, in the eighteenth century a whole college of literary men and a distinct school of literature rose, whose principal object was the study of the ancient texts, to collate, publish, and interpret them, whereby certain political and religious conclusions were arrived at, tending to prove that the only legitimate power in Japan was the autocracy of the Mikado, the descendant of the gods, and the only true religion Shintoism, and that patriotism, moreover, demanded the restoration of the ancient political and social organization which had existed in the Empire long before the introduction of Buddhism, feudalism, and of Chinese ideas in general. If these theories did not interest the people, they certainly, and very effectively, created a breach between the literary classes and the samourai, on the one hand, and the Shogunate and its supporters, who by this time had become not only unpopular with the productive classes of the nation, but were even looked upon in the light of a tax, against which the people very naturally rebelled, failing to see why they should be called upon to support an idle and otherwise useless caste.
In 1700 the Government, financially embarrassed, was compelled to diminish the number of charges imposed upon it by the feudal system, and to increase taxation, whereupon the merchants deemed it prudent to conceal the exact amount of their fortunes, and the peasants, who paid their lords a third or a half of their harvests, were not infrequently ransomed by the ronin. Under these circumstances the feudal system could no longer endure, since it was now brought into contact with a society richer and better organized than itself, and thus it became impossible for the Japanese Government to prevent the penetration into the Empire of European ideas, which filtered through the one port, Nagasaki, left partially open for the benefit of the Dutch. From the eighteenth century onwards certain young samourai were always to be found at this port endeavouring to place themselves in contact with the Dutch. The Shogun Tzunayoshi (1650–1709) pretended not to notice what was happening, although his Government was ostentatiously endeavouring to repress any kind of intercommunication between the natives and foreigners.
It appears that medicine was the first science which excited the interest of the youthful Japanese students. They at first managed to obtain from the Dutch some books, containing anatomical plates, which both interested and surprised them on account of the great difference which existed between the figures represented in these works and the fantastic theories invented by the Chinese doctors. At considerable risk, for the laws on the subject were extremely severe, they secretly experimented upon a corpse, in order to compare the results with the anatomical sketches they had obtained from Europe. This led to their procuring a Dutch treatise on anatomy, which, with great difficulty, they translated into Japanese, spending sometimes as much as a whole day upon a single phrase. Before the end of the eighteenth century several Dutch-Japanese dictionaries were compiled, and a good many European works were translated and published privately, and read with all that ardour which fear of persecution ever engenders.