The Tokugawa Era.—When Hideyoshi died he left a son, Hideyori, then only six years of age, and the problem of this child’s future had naturally caused supreme solicitude to the peasant statesman. He finally entrusted the care of the boy and the management of state affairs to five regents, five ministers, and three intermediary councillors. But he placed chief reliance upon Iyeyasu, whom he appointed president of the board of regents. Among the latter was one, Ishida Mitsunari, who to insatiable ambition added an extraordinary faculty for intrigue and great personal magnetism. These qualities he utilized with such success that the dissensions among the daimyōs, which had been temporarily composed by Hideyoshi, broke out again, and the year 1600 saw Japan divided into two camps, one composed of Tokugawa Iyeyasu and his allies, the other of Ishida Mitsunari and his partisans.

The situation of Iyeyasu was eminently perilous. From his position in the east of the country, he found himself menaced by two powerful enemies on the north and on the south, respectively, the former barely contained by Iyeyasu. a greatly weaker force of his friends, and the latter moving up in seemingly overwhelming strength from Kiōto. He decided to hurl himself upon the southern army without awaiting the result of the conflict in the north. The encounter took place at Sekigahara in the province of Mino on the 21st of October 1600. The army of Iyeyasu had to move to the attack in such a manner that its left flank and its left rear were threatened by divisions of the enemy posted on commanding eminences. But with the leaders of these divisions Iyeyasu had come to an understanding by which they could be trusted to abide so long as victory did not declare against him. Such incidents were naturally common in an era when every man fought for his own hand. The southerners suffered a crushing defeat. The survivors fled pell-mell to Osaka, where in a colossal fortress, built by Hideyoshi, his son, Hideyori, and the latter’s mother, Yodo, were sheltered behind ramparts held by 80,000 men. Hideyori’s cause had been openly put forward by Ishida Mitsunari and his partisans, but Iyeyasu made no immediate attempt to visit the sin upon the head of his deceased benefactor’s child. On the contrary, he sent word to the lady Yodo and her little boy that he absolved them of all complicity. The battle of Sekigahara is commonly spoken of as having terminated the civil war which had devastated Japan, with brief intervals, from the latter half of the 12th century to the beginning of the 17th. That is incorrect in view of the fact that Sekigahara was followed by other fighting, especially by the terrible conflict at Osaka in 1615 when Yodo and her son perished. But Sekigahara’s importance cannot be over-rated. For had Iyeyasu been finally crushed there, the wave of internecine strife must have rolled again over the empire until providence provided another Hideyoshi and another Iyeyasu to stem it. Sekigahara, therefore, may be truly described as a turning-point in Japan’s career and as one of the decisive battles of the world. As for the fact that the Tokugawa leader did not at once proceed to extremities in the case of the boy Hideyori, though the events of the Sekigahara campaign had made it quite plain that such a course would ultimately be inevitable, we have to remember that only two years had elapsed since Hideyoshi was laid in his grave. His memory was still green and the glory of his achievements still enveloped his family. Iyeyasu foresaw that to carry the tragedy to its bitter end at once must have forced into Hideyori’s camp many puissant daimyōs whose sense of allegiance would grow less cogent with the lapse of time. When he did lay siege to the Osaka castle in 1615, the power of the Tokugawa was well-nigh shattered against its ramparts; had not the onset been aided by treachery, the stronghold would probably have proved impregnable.

But signal as were the triumphs of the Tokugawa chieftain in the field, what distinguishes him from all his predecessors is the ability he displayed in consolidating his conquests. The immense estates that fell into his hands he parcelled out in such a manner that all important strategical positions were held by daimyōs whose fidelity could be confidently trusted, and every feudatory of doubtful loyalty found his fief within touch of a Tokugawa partisan. This arrangement, supplemented by a system which required all the great daimyōs to have mansions in the shōgun’s capital. Yedo, to keep their families there always and to reside there themselves in alternate years, proved so potent a check to disaffection that from 1615, when the castle of Osaka fell, until 1864, when the Chōshū rōnin attacked Kiōto, Japan remained entirely free from civil war.

It is possible to form a clear idea of the ethical and administrative principles by which Iyeyasu and the early Tokugawa chiefs were guided in elaborating the system which gave to Japan an unprecedented era of peace and prosperity. Evidence is furnished not only by the system itself but also by the contents of a document generally called the Testament of Iyeyasu, though probably it was not fully compiled until the time of his grandson, Iyemitsu (1623-1650). The great Tokugawa chief, though he munificently patronized Buddhism and though he carried constantly in his bosom a miniature Buddhist image to which he ascribed all his success in the field and his safety in battle, took his ethical code from Confucius. He held that the basis of all legislation and administration should be the five relations of sovereign and subject, parent and child, husband and wife, brother and sister, friend and friend. The family was, in his eyes, the essential foundation of society, to be maintained at all sacrifices. Beyond these broad outlines of moral duty it was not deemed necessary to instruct the people. Therefore out of the hundred chapters forming the Testament only 22 contain what can be called legal enactments, while 55 relate to administration and politics; 16 set forth moral maxims and reflections, and the remainder record illustrative episodes in the career of the author. No distinct line is drawn between law and morals, between the duty of a citizen and the virtues of a member of a family. Substantive law is entirely wanting, just as it was wanting in the so-called constitution of Prince Shōtoku. Custom, as sanctioned by public observance, must be complied with in the civil affairs of life. What required minute exposition was criminal law, the relations of social classes, etiquette, rank, precedence, administration and government.

Society under feudalism had been moulded into three sharply defined groups, namely, first, the Throne and the court nobles (kuge); secondly, the military class (buke or samurai); and thirdly, the common people (heimin). These lines Social distinctions in the Tokugawa Era. of cleavage were emphasized as much as possible by the Tokugawa rulers. The divine origin of the mikado was held to separate him from contact with mundane affairs, and he was therefore strictly secluded in the palace at Kiōto, his main function being to mediate between his heavenly ancestors and his subjects, entrusting to the shōgun and the samurai the duty of transacting all worldly business on behalf of the state. In obedience to this principle the mikado became a kind of sacrosanct abstraction. No one except his consorts and his chief ministers ever saw his face. In the rare cases when he gave audience to a privileged subject, he sat behind a curtain, and when he went abroad, he rode in a closely shut car drawn by oxen. A revenue of ten thousand koku of rice—the equivalent of about as many guineas—was apportioned for his support, and the right was reserved to him of conferring empty titles upon the living and rank upon the dead. His majesty had one wife, the empress (kōgō), necessarily taken from one of the five chosen families (go-sekke) of the Fujiwara, but he might also have twelve consorts, and if direct issue failed, the succession passed to one of the two princely families of Arisugawa and Fushimi, adoption, however, being possible in the last resort. The kuge constituted the court nobility, consisting of 155 families all of whom traced their lineage to ancient mikados; they ranked far above the feudal chiefs, not excepting even the shōgun; filled by right of heredity nearly all the offices at the court, the emoluments attached being, however, a mere pittance; were entirely without the great estates which had belonged to them in ante-feudal times, and lived lives of proud poverty, occupying themselves with the study of literature and the practice of music and art. After the kuge and at a long distance below them in theoretical rank came the military families, who, as a class, were called buke or samurai. They had hereditary revenues, and they filled the administrative posts, these, too, being often hereditary. The third, and by far the most numerous, section of the nation were the commoners (heimin). They had no social status; were not allowed to carry swords, and possessed no income except what they could earn with their hands. About 55 in every 1000 units of the nation were samurai, the latter’s wives and children being included in this estimate.

Under the Hōjō and the Ashikaga shōguns the holders of the great estates changed frequently according to the vicissitudes of those troublesome times, but under the Tokugawa no change took place, and there thus Daimyōs. grew up a landed nobility of the most permanent character. Every one of these estates was a feudal kingdom, large or small, with its own usages and its own laws, based on the general principles above indicated and liable to be judged according to those principles by the shōgun’s government (baku-fu) in Yedo. A daimyō or feudal chief drew from the peasants on his estate the means of subsistence for himself and his retainers. For this purpose the produce of his estate was assessed by the shōgun’s officials in koku (one koku = 180.39 litres, worth about £1), and about one-half of the assessed amount went to the feudatory, the other half to the tillers of the soil. The richest daimyō was Mayeda of Kaga, whose fief was assessed at a little over a million koku, his revenue thus being about half a million sterling. Just as an empress had to be taken from one of five families designated to that distinction for all time, so a successor to the shōgunate, failing direct heir, had to be selected from three families (sanke), namely, those of the daimyōs of Owari, Kii and Mito, whose first representatives were three sons of Iyeyasu. Out of the total body of 255 daimyōs existing in the year 1862, 141 were specially distinguished as fudai, or hereditary vassals of the Tokugawa house, and to 18 of these was strictly limited the perpetual privilege of filling all the high offices in the Yedo administration, while to 4 of them was reserved the special honour of supplying a regent (go-tairō) during the minority of the shōgun. Moreover, a fudai daimyō was of necessity appointed to the command of the fortress of Nijō in Kiōto as well as of the great castles of Osaka and Fushimi, which Iyeyasu designated the keys of the country. No intermarriage might take place between members of the court nobility and the feudal houses without the consent of Yedo; no daimyō might apply direct to the emperor for an official title, or might put foot within the imperial district of Kiōto without the shōgun’s permit, and at all entrances to the region known as the Kwantō there were established guardhouses, where every one, of whatever rank, must submit to be examined, in order to prevent the wives and children of the daimyōs from secretly leaving Yedo for their own provinces. In their journeys to and from Yedo every second year the feudal chiefs had to travel by one of two great highways, the Tōkaidō or the Nakasendō, and as they moved with great retinues, these roads were provided with a number of inns and tea-houses equipped in a sumptuous manner, and having an abundance of female servants. A puissant daimyō’s procession often numbered as many as 1000 retainers, and nothing illustrates more forcibly the wide interval that separated the soldier and the plebeian than the fact that at the appearance of the heralds who preceded these progresses all commoners who happened to be abroad had to kneel on the ground with bowed and uncovered heads; all wayside houses had to close the shutters of windows giving on the road, and none might venture to look down from a height on the passing magnate. Any violation of these rules of etiquette exposed the violator to instant death at the hands of the daimyō’s retinue. Moreover, the samurai and the heimin lived strictly apart. A feudal chief had a castle which generally occupied a commanding position. It was surrounded by from one to three broad moats, the innermost crowned with a high wall of huge cut stones, its trace arranged so as to give flank defence, which was further provided by pagoda-like towers placed at the salient angles. Inside this wall stood the houses of the high officials on the outskirts of a park surrounding the residence of the daimyō himself, and from the scarps of the moats or in the intervals between them rose houses for the military retainers, barrack-like structures, provided, whenever possible, with small but artistically arranged and carefully tended gardens. All this domain of the military was called yashiki in distinction to the machi (streets) where the despised commoners had their habitat.

The general body of the samurai received stipends and lived frugally. Their pay was not reckoned in money: it took the form of so many rations of rice delivered from their chief’s granaries. A few had landed estates, Samurai. usually bestowed in recognition of conspicuous merit. They were probably the finest type of hereditary soldiers the world ever produced. Money and all devices for earning it they profoundly despised. The right of wearing a sword was to them the highest conceivable privilege. They counted themselves the guardians of their fiefs’ honour and of their country’s welfare. At any moment they were prepared cheerfully to sacrifice their lives on the altar of loyalty. Their word, once given, must never be violated. The slightest insult to their honour might not be condoned. Stoicism was a quality which they esteemed next to courage: all outward display of emotion must be suppressed. The sword might never be drawn for a petty cause, but, if once drawn, must never be returned to its scabbard until it had done its duty. Martial exercises occupied much of their attention, but book learning also they esteemed highly. They were profoundly courteous towards each other, profoundly contemptuous towards the commoner, whatever his wealth. Filial piety ranked next to loyalty in their code of ethics. Thus the Confucian maxim, endorsed explicitly in the Testament of Iyeyasu, that a man must not live under the same sky with his father’s murderer or his brother’s slayer, received most literal obedience, and many instances occurred of vendettas pursued in the face of apparently insuperable difficulties and consummated after years of effort. By the standard of modern morality the Japanese samurai would be counted cruel. Holding that death was the natural sequel of defeat and the only certain way of avoiding disgrace, he did not seek quarter himself or think of extending it to an enemy. Yet in his treatment of the latter he loved to display courtesy until the supreme moment when all considerations of mercy were laid aside. It cannot be doubted that the practice of employing torture judicially tended to educate a mood of callousness towards suffering, or that the many idle hours of a military man’s life in time of peace encouraged a measure of dissipation. But there does not seem to be any valid ground for concluding that either of these defects was conspicuous in the character of the Japanese samurai. Faithlessness towards women was the greatest fault that can be laid to his door. The samurai lady claimed no privilege of timidity on account of her sex. She knew how to die in the cause of honour just as readily as her husband, her father or her brother died, and conjugal fidelity did not rank as a virtue in her eyes, being regarded as a simple duty. But her husband held marital faith in small esteem and ranked his wife far below his sword. It has to be remembered that when we speak of a samurai’s suicide, there is no question of poison, the bullet, drowning or any comparatively painless manner of exit from the world. The invariable method was to cut open the abdomen (hara-kiri or seppuku) and afterwards, if strength remained, the sword was turned against the throat. To such endurance had the samurai trained himself that he went through this cruel ordeal without flinching in the smallest degree.

The heimin or commoners were divided into three classes—husbandmen, artisans and traders. The farmer, as the nation lived by his labour, was counted the most respectable among the bread-winners, and a cultivator Heimin. of his own estate might even carry one sword but never two, that privilege being strictly reserved to a samurai. The artisan, too, received much consideration, as is easily understood when we remember that included in his ranks were artists, sword-smiths, armourers, sculptors of sacred images or sword-furniture, ceramists and lacquerers. Many artisans were in the permanent service of feudal chiefs from whom they received fixed salaries. Tradesmen, however, were regarded with disdain and stood lowest of all in the social organization. Too much despised to be even included in that organization were the eta (defiled folks) and the hinin (outcasts). The exact origin of these latter pariahs is uncertain, but the ancestors of the eta would seem to have been prisoners of war or the enslaved families of criminals. To such people were assigned the defiling duties of tending tombs, disposing of the bodies of the dead, slaughtering animals or tanning hides. The hinin were mendicants. On them devolved the task of removing and burying the corpses of executed criminals. Living in segregated hamlets, forbidden to marry with heimin, still less with samurai, not allowed to eat, drink or associate with persons above their own class, the eta remained under the ban of ostracism from generation to generation, though many of them contrived to amass much wealth. They were governed by their own headmen, and they had three chiefs, one residing in each of the cities of Yedo, Osaka and Kiōto. All these members of the submerged classes were relieved from proscription and admitted to the ranks of the commoners under the enlightened system of Meiji. The 12th of October 1871 saw their enfranchisement, and at that date the census showed 287,111 eta and 695,689 hinin.

Naturally, as the unbroken peace of the Tokugawa régime became habitual, the mood of the nation underwent a change. The samurai, no longer required to lead the frugal life of camp or barracks, began to live beyond their Decline and Fall of the Shōgunate. incomes. “They found difficulty in meeting the pecuniary engagements of everyday existence, so that money acquired new importance in their eyes, and they gradually forfeited the respect which their traditional disinterestedness had won for them in the past.” At the same time the abuses of feudalism were thrown into increased salience. A large body of hereditary soldiers become an anomaly when fighting has passed even out of memory. On the other hand, the agricultural and commercial classes acquired new importance. The enormous sums disbursed every year in Yedo, for the maintenance of the great establishments which the feudal chiefs vied with each other in keeping there, enriched the merchants and traders so greatly that their scale of living underwent radical change. Buddhism was a potent influence, but its ethical restraints were weakened by the conduct of its priests, who themselves often yielded to the temptation of the time. The aristocracy adhered to its refined pastimes—performances of the No; tea reunions; poem composing; polo; football; equestrian archery; fencing and gambling—but the commoner, being excluded from all this realm and, at the same time, emerging rapidly from his old position of penury and degradation, began to develop luxurious proclivities and to demand corresponding amusements. Thus the theatre came into existence; the dancing girl and the jester found lucrative employment; a popular school of art was founded and quickly carried to perfection; the lupanar assumed unprecedented dimensions; rich and costly costumes acquired wide vogue in despite of sumptuary laws enacted from time to time; wrestling became an important institution, and plutocracy asserted itself in the face of caste distinctions.

Simultaneously with the change of social conditions thus taking place, history repeated itself at the shōgun’s court. The substance of administrative power passed into the hands of a minister, its shadow alone remaining to the shōgun. During only two generations were the successors of Iyeyasu able to resist this traditional tendency. The representative of the third—Iyetsuna (1661-1680)—succumbed to the machinations of an ambitious minister, Sakai Takakiyo, and it may be said that from that time the nominal repository of administrative authority in Yedo was generally a species of magnificent recluse, secluded from contact with the outer world and seeing and hearing only through the eyes and ears of the ladies of his household. In this respect the descendants of the great Tokugawa statesman found themselves reduced to a position precisely analogous to that of the emperor in Kiōto. Sovereign and shōgun were alike mere abstractions so far as the practical work of government was concerned. With the great mass of the feudal chiefs things fared similarly. These men who, in the days of Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu, had directed the policies of their fiefs and led their armies in the field, were gradually transformed, during the long peace of the Tokugawa era, into voluptuous fainéants or, at best, thoughtless dilettanti, willing to abandon the direction of their affairs to seneschals and mayors, who, while on the whole their administration was able and loyal, found their account in contriving and perpetuating the effacement of their chiefs. Thus, in effect, the government of the country, taken out of the hands of the shōgun and the feudatories, fell into those of their vassals. There were exceptions, of course, but so rare as to be merely accidental.