Ironically, the Zen arts profited from Hideyoshi's military blunders as well as from his patronage. At one point in his career he decided to invade China, but his armies, predictably, never got past Korea. The enterprise was unworthy of his military genius, and puzzled historians have speculated that it may actually have been merely a diversion for his unemployed samurai, intended to remove them temporarily to foreign soil. The most significant booty brought back from this disastrous venture (now sometimes known as the "pottery campaign") was a group of Korean potters, whose rugged folk ceramics added new dimensions to the equipment of the tea ceremony.
Having maneuvered the shogunate away from Nobunaga's heirs, Hideyoshi became increasingly nervous about succession as his health began to fail, fearing that his heirs might be similarly deprived of their birthright. The problem was particularly acute, since his only son, Hideyori, was five years old and scarcely able to defend the family interests. In 1598, as the end approached, Hideyoshi formed a council of daimyo headed by Tokugawa Ieyasu to rule until his son came of age, and on his deathbed he forced them to swear they would hand over the shogunate when the time came. Needless to say, nothing of the sort happened.
Tokugawa Ieyasu was no stranger to the brutal politics of the age, having once ordered his own wife's execution when Nobunaga suspected her of treason, and he spent the first five years after Hideyoshi's death consolidating his power and destroying rival daimyo. When Hideyoshi's son came of age, Ieyasu was ready to move. Hideyori was living in the family citadel at Osaka defended by an army of disenfranchised samurai and disaffected Christians, but Ieyasu held the power. In the ensuing bloodbath Hideyoshi's line was erased from the earth, and the Christians' faulty political judgment caused their faith eventually to be forbidden to all Japanese under threat of death. Christianity continued to be practiced on a surreptitious basis, however, as the Christians found shelter in, of all places, the Zen monasteries.
With the passing of Hideyoshi's line, the Tokugawa family became the only power in Japan, a land at last unified and with an imposed peace. Viewing foreign influences as a source of domestic unrest, the Tokugawa moved to bring down a curtain of isolationism around their shores: Christian Europeans were expelled and Japanese were forbidden to travel abroad. Ieyasu established a new capital at Edo (now Tokyo) and required the local daimyo to spend a large amount of time and money in attendance. Thus he craftily legitimatised his own position while simultaneously weakening that of the daimyo—a technique used with equal effect almost a century later by Louis XIV, when he moved his court from Paris to Versailles to contain the French aristocracy.
Content with the status quo, members of the Tokugawa family felt it could best be preserved by extreme conservatism, so they sent forth a volley of decrees formalizing all social relationships. Time was brought to a stop, permitting the Tokugawa to rule unhindered until the middle of the nineteenth century, when the country was again opened to foreign trade under the guns of American warships.
During the Tokugawa regime another Chinese "religion" assumed the place in the hearts of the shoguns that Buddhism had enjoyed in centuries past. This was Confucianism, more a philosophy than a religion, which in its original form had taught a respect for learning, the ready acceptance of a structured hierarchy, and unquestioning obedience to authority (that of both elders and superiors). The Tokugawa perverted Confucianism to establish a caste system among their subjects, separating them into the samurai class, the peasant class, and the merchant and artisan classes—the order given here denoting their supposed status. However, as the Japanese social system began to evolve, the idea backfired, causing great difficulties for the government. The reasons for this are interesting, for they bear directly upon the eventual role of Zen culture in Japanese life.
For centuries, Japan's major source of income had been agriculture. The samurai were local landholders who employed peasants to grow their rice and who were beholden to a local daimyo for protection. Money played no large part in the economy, since most daily needs could be obtained by barter. But the sudden wealth brought into being by the European traders had nothing to do with the amount of rice a samurai's peasants could produce; it accrued instead to the merchants in port cities. Furthermore, the accommodations required to keep the daimyo and their families in the capital city of Edo called for artisans and merchants in great number. Thus the Tokugawa government had mistakenly decreed the agricultural samurai and peasants the backbone of the economy at the very moment in history when Japan was finally developing an urban, currency-based culture. Predictably, the urban merchants, who were at the bottom of the Confucianist social system, soon had their supposed social betters, the samurai, completely in hock.
The Tokugawa struggled hard to keep the townspeople, now the controllers of the economy, in their place. Merchants were forbidden to build elaborate houses or wear elaborate clothes, and they were expected to defer to the penurious samurai in all things. Japan had never before had a bourgeoisie—the traditional divisions were aristocracy, warriors, and peasants— and consequently popular taste had never really been reflected in the arts. Much to the dismay of the Tokugawa (and to the detriment of classical Zen culture), this was changing. While the aristocrats and warrior families in Kyoto preserved the older arts of Zen, in the bourgeois city of Edo there were new popular art forms like the Kabuki theater and the woodblock print, both eons removed from the No and the monochrome landscape. Classical Zen culture was largely confined to aristocratic Kyoto, while in boisterous Edo the townspeople turned to explicit, exciting arts full of color and drama.
In spite of this democratic turn of events, the Zen aesthetics of Kyoto continued to be felt, largely through the tea ceremony, which had been officially encouraged in the Momoyama age of Hideyoshi. Later in the Tokugawa era the poetic form of Haiku developed, and it too was highly influenced by the Zen idea of suggestiveness. Domestic architecture also maintained the ideals of Zen, as did Ikebana, or flower arranging, and the Japanese cuisine, which employed Zen ceramics. Thus Zen aesthetics seeped into middle-class culture in many forms, tempering taste and providing rigid rules for much of what are today thought of as the traditional arts and crafts of the Japanese.
Traditional Buddhism did not fare well during the Momoyama and Tokugawa ages: the militaristic Buddhist strongholds were either put to rout or destroyed entirely during the Momoyama, and Confucianism had considerably more influence under the Tokugawa than did Buddhism. The great upsurge of Buddhism with its fiery teachers and believing shoguns was over, as the faith settled into empty ritual and a decidedly secondary station in a basically secular state. The only Buddhist sect demonstrating any vigor at all was Zen.