Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 7
Chapter VII
The Reestablishment of National Unity
The vigorous Japan of the early sixteenth century still showed no signs of recreating an effective central government, but the foundation of a new form of political unity had been laid. This foundation consisted of the Daimyo domains, into which almost all of Japan was now divided. Since each domain was an effective political unit in itself, national unity could be achieved simply by establishing some form of association or accepted leadership among the Daimyo.
The realms of the Daimyo varied greatly in size, but they tended to be compact, well-defined political units, perhaps subordinate to some other feudal domain, but in any case entirely independent of the emperor or Shogun. The Daimyo himself was a paternalistic but absolute monarch within his own realm. Aiding him in his rule over the soldiers, peasants, and merchants of the principality was a class of officials and military officers, who formed the little court at the central castle of the Daimyo and lived on the hereditary salaries he assigned them and their families.
With their military heritage, most of the Daimyo were intent upon developing the military strength of their domains. Some of the more powerful Daimyo, who ruled over several provinces, built up efficient fighting machines, with the peasantry as the backbone of the economic life of the realm and as the reservoir for military manpower, with the feudal aristocracy furnishing administrators and officers for the army, and with the merchants providing a transport corps in time of war.
The natural tendency was for the larger and stronger realms to swallow up or win dominance over weaker neighbors. In the second half of the sixteenth century, this process resulted in the creation of a single paramount power in Japan. The first great figure in the reunification of the country was Oda Nobunaga, a Daimyo who ruled over three provinces around the modern city of Nagoya east of Kyoto. By seizing the capital in 1568, he became the virtual dictator of central Japan, and he proceeded to consolidate his power by breaking the military might of the powerful central monasteries and by capturing the great temple-castle of the True Pure Land Sect in Osaka after a ten-year siege. But Nobunaga never achieved his goal of winning hegemony over all Japan. His career was cut short when a treacherous vassal murdered him in 1582.
Nobunaga’s place as undisputed ruler of central Japan was soon assumed by his ablest general, Hideyoshi, a man of lowly birth who had risen to power by sheer ability. Within a few years of Nobunaga’s death, Hideyoshi had eliminated the remnants of the Oda family and had established his supremacy over the remaining vassals of Nobunaga. He reconstructed the great castle at Osaka as the seat of his military government, but he gave evidence of a reviving interest in the imperial court at Kyoto by taking for himself the old Fujiwara posts of Prime Minister and Civil Dictator.
In 1587 Hideyoshi crushed the power of the great Satsuma realm of southern Kyushu and thereby won control over all western Japan. Three years later, all of eastern and northern Japan submitted to him after he had eliminated the chief Daimyo realm in the Kanto area. The restoration of political unity in Japan had at last been completed, and peace came to the land suddenly after more than a hundred years of incessant civil war.
Hideyoshi found himself in control of a superabundance of professional warriors who knew nothing but warfare. Possibly in order to drain off some of their excess fighting spirit, and probably because he himself, like many successful generals before him, fell victim to the world conqueror complex, Hideyoshi decided to embark on a program of world conquest, which for him meant the conquest of China. To do this he needed passage through Korea, and when the Koreans refused, he invaded the peninsula from the south in 1592. The Japanese armies rapidly overran almost all of Korea, but were eventually checked when they over-extended their lines of communication and met the armies of China, which had come to the aid of its Korean satellite. The Japanese were forced back to southern Korea, where they held on for several years despite a gradually deteriorating situation and difficulties in maintaining their communications by sea. The death of Hideyoshi in 1598 gave them a welcome excuse for abandoning the whole venture, and their armies streamed home. Japan’s first organized attempt at overseas conquest had ended in complete failure.
The political vacuum created by the death of Hideyoshi was soon filled by one of his foremost vassals, Tokugawa Ieyasu, who had been Hideyoshi’s chief deputy in eastern Japan, where he had built himself a castle headquarters at the small village of Edo, the future Tokyo. In 1600, Ieyasu decisively defeated a coalition of rivals, and fifteen years later he destroyed the remnants of Hideyoshi’s family when he captured the great Osaka castle by trickery and overwhelming might.
Ieyasu, impressed by the inability of the heirs of Nobunaga and Hideyoshi to keep the reins of government in their own hands, was obsessed with the idea of building up a political system strong enough to survive his death. Political stability became his primary goal, and it was equally sought and maintained by his successors. There is no doubt that the Tokugawa created political stability. During the first half of the seventeenth century they created a political system which was to endure almost unchanged for two and a half centuries, and which was to establish a state of domestic peace as complete as that enjoyed by any people at any time. Unfortunately, they secured peace and stability by a series of rigid controls over society, by ruthless suppression of many of the most creative tendencies in the Japan of that day, and by a return to many of the outmoded forms of feudalism—in short, by resorting to what was essentially a reactionary policy even in the early decades of the seventeenth century.
The Tokugawa, like the Minamoto before them, rejected the idea of rule from the old central district around Kyoto and established their new military capital at their castle in Edo, which they expanded into one of the greatest fortresses man has ever created. It was protected by wide moats, high embankments, and massive castle walls, arranged in a series of concentric circles with an overall diameter of slightly more than two miles. Today, the inner circles of the great castle form the beautiful imperial palace grounds in the heart of Tokyo.
The central part of Japan, including the Kanto Plain on the east and the old capital district in the west, was held directly by the Tokugawa themselves, by various branches of the family, and by the feudal lords and warriors who had backed Ieyasu in the great battle for supremacy in 1600. This central area was strategically the heart of the country. It contained most of the larger plains and much of the best agricultural land of Japan, and also a large proportion of the commercial towns and cities. Three great cadet families of the Tokugawa were established at three key points, the town of Mito, east of Edo; Nagoya, near the geographic center of the Tokugawa domains; and Wakayama, a few miles south of Osaka in the west. Most of the remainder of the central area was divided into fiefs held by other members of the family and by old and loyal allies of the Tokugawa. Holders of large fiefs were called “hereditary Daimyo,” signifying their early support of Ieyasu, and the lesser vassals were 
Japan in the Tokugawa period
Both categories of Daimyo were allowed virtual autonomy within their realms, but the Tokugawa worked out a careful system of checks and controls to prevent any of them from becoming a military menace to the new central authority. Severe restrictions were placed on the construction or repair of castles, marking the end of a century of castle building which has left many picturesque old fortifications scattered around Japan. Each Daimyo was forced to leave in Edo, as hostages, members of his own family, such as his wife and sons, and he himself was compelled to maintain a permanent residence there and to spend alternate periods in residence at Edo and at his fief. A close watch was kept at important barriers on the highways of the land to look for “women leaving Edo and firearms entering Edo,” for the departure of hostages or the smuggling in of weapons would have indicated a planned revolt.
Perhaps the most interesting measure taken by Edo to insure its control over the Daimyo was the creation of a group of officials known as metsuke, who acted on the one hand as censors in ferreting out cases of misrule and maladministration on the part of Tokugawa officials, and on the other hand as secret police spying on all men or groups who could be a menace to Tokugawa rule. The Edo government has the dubious distinction of being one of the first governments in the world to develop an extensive and efficient secret police system and to make of it an important organ of state. With three centuries of experience in such practices, it is not surprising that the secret police should have loomed so large in the political make-up of Japan in recent years.
The Tokugawa left the age-old fiction of imperial rule undisturbed. They actually helped reenforce it by fairly generous economic treatment of the emperors and their courtiers, while keeping them under close surveillance and strict control. Ieyasu in 1603 took for himself the old title of Shogun, indicating that in theory he was merely the generalissimo of the emperor’s armies. To insure that his death would not upset the supremacy of his family, he abdicated two years later in favor of one of his less gifted but more dependable sons. As a result of this move, Ieyasu’s death in 1616 produced no political repercussions.
The early Edo leaders were determined to do everything they could to insure that the ineptness or stupidity of some future Shogun should not bring disaster to the regime. They created a strong, complicated central administration quite capable of ruling the land with or without the Shogun, many of whom proved to be little more than figureheads. This central administration consisted of a Prime Minister—a post often left vacant—a council of state made up of four or five “elders,” a group of “junior elders” who controlled the affairs of the petty vassals of Edo, a large body of civil administrators, and the metsuke.
The membership of the administration was recruited on a basis of natural selection from among the members of the rapidly expanding Tokugawa family, the “hereditary Daimyo,” the “standard bearers,” and all the petty gentry of the central area. When first Japan had needed a large bureaucracy in the seventh and eighth centuries, it was lacking, but by the seventeenth century, education and learning had become so widespread that there was no dearth of educated men or capable administrators for the Edo government.
In support of the prime objective of political stability, the early Tokugawa adopted a policy of social stability. Nobunaga, by crushing the military power of the True Pure Land Sect and by taking over control of the commercial city of Osaka, had struck a severe blow at the rising political power of the middle and lower classes. Hideyoshi, the common foot-soldier, lacking even a family name, who had risen to become the virtual ruler of all Japan, had typified in himself the complete breakdown of the clear class cleavages of early feudalism, but it was he who struck the second great blow against the political aspirations of the lower classes. Wishing to reduce the overly large military establishments of Japan, which were unnecessary in a unified land, he drew a sharp line between the peasants and the aristocratic warrior class of officers and demanded that all peasants surrender their swords and other weapons to the government and forsake their past role of peasant-soldiers.
The Tokugawa simply followed and developed this policy. Adopting the social theories of Confucianism, which had developed some 2,000 years earlier in China, they created a hierarchy of four social classes—the warrior-administrator, the peasant, the artisan, and the merchant. The top class of warrior-administrators was to a large degree an artificial creation in imitation of the true warrior class of early feudalism. The members of this new fixed aristocracy were known as samurai, meaning “feudal retainers,” and their badge was the long and the short sword each samurai wore at his side. The merchants, despite their real intellectual and cultural status in society and in complete disregard of their high economic position, were placed last in the social order because, according to Confucian theory, they were an unproductive class. This unnatural stratification of social classes was reactionary even in seventeenth-century Japan, but the Tokugawa and the favored samurai class as a whole enforced it rigidly and blindly for two and a half centuries.
The early Tokugawa not only borrowed the antiquated social theories of early Confucianism; they encouraged the study of the whole philosophy of Confucianism, perhaps in the hope that it would be a stabilizing factor in the intellectual life of the land. Confucianism, with its emphasis on proper relationships between the ruler and the ruled, seemed admirably suited to be a state philosophy fostering a deep sense of loyalty to the regime.
As early as 1608 Ieyasu appointed a prominent Confucian philosopher to be “attendant scholar” at his court. From this small beginning grew a strong school of Confucianism at Edo, teaching the orthodox interpretation as it had been formulated in China in the twelfth century by a group of philosophers, who had added to the ethical doctrines of the early Confucianists a ponderous superstructure of metaphysical speculation. Soon groups of thinkers grew up in opposition to the orthodox Edo school, representing various unorthodox schools of Confucianism which rejected the rigid interpretations of the twelfth century masters. One of the best results of this scholarly interest in Confucianism in Tokugawa Japan was the development within the samurai class of a body of trained students and thinkers who as statesmen contributed greatly to the efficient administration of the Tokugawa and as teachers helped keep Japan intellectually alive, despite the stultifying effects of the basically reactionary political and social system.
The long period of interest in Confucianism also served to imbue the people as a whole with many of the high ethical and moral standards of this Chinese philosophy. Buddhism remained the dominant religion of the masses and enjoyed a status of official patronage, but Confucianism slowly became the strongest intellectual and ethical force in Japan. Buddhism began to show signs of slow inner decay, which has in modern times robbed it of much of the vigor it possessed in the Ashikaga period, but Confucianism grew in influence and strength. It became perhaps the dominant philosophy in Japan and a major source for the unwritten ethical code of the samurai, which recent scholars have described in romantic terms as Bushido, the “way of the warrior.”
Perhaps the most drastic measures taken by the Edo government in order to insure political stability were in the field of foreign relations, which, with the coming of Europeans to Far Eastern waters, assumed more significance than ever before in Japanese history. The first Europeans to reach Japan were Portuguese mariners who landed on an island off the southern tip of Kyushu in 1542 or 1543. Trade relations soon sprang up between the Portuguese and the feudal lords of western Kyushu, who learned the use of firearms from the European traders.
Contacts with the Portuguese took on a new aspect when St. Francis Xavier, the famous Jesuit missionary, introduced Christianity to Japan during a two year stay there from 1549 to 1551. He and many other Jesuits who followed in his footsteps met with considerable success in their proselytizing. The Buddhist churches soon recognized Christianity as a dangerous rival and opposed it bitterly, but several of the petty lords of Kyushu favored the missionaries, realizing that Portuguese traders tended to bring their ships to ports where the Jesuits had been welcomed. A minor Daimyo, who himself had earlier embraced Christianity, managed with the aid of the Portuguese to build the fishing village of Nagasaki in western Kyushu into the chief port for foreign trade in all Japan. Many small lords had already become Christians, when in 1578 one of the great Daimyo of Kyushu was converted. Japanese of all classes in western Japan and particularly in Kyushu were beginning to embrace the new faith. It is estimated that there were some 150,000 Christians in Japan around the year 1580 and twice that number in the early seventeenth century.
Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa who followed him had no particular objection to Christianity on religious grounds, but they looked upon it with deep suspicion as a political menace to their rule. The Christians, as a sizable group of Japanese owing some sort of vague allegiance to a remote European “ruler,” the Pope, were in their eyes a group which could not be trusted and a possible threat to the reestablished unity of Japan. Furthermore, Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa were fully aware of the colonial expansion of the European powers in Southeast Asia, where the Christian missionaries had seemed to serve as forerunners of military penetration and conquest. The Japanese leaders were desirous of retaining profitable trade relations with the Europeans, but they gradually came to the conclusion that for reasons of national safety and political stability, Christianity must go.
In 1587, the very year Hideyoshi completed the subjugation of western Japan, he issued a decree ordering all Christian missionaries banned from Japan. However, he made little effort to enforce this decree until ten years later, when irritated by the bickering between the Portuguese Jesuits and the Spanish Franciscans, who had started missionary activities in Japan in 1593, he executed nine European priests and seventeen native Christians.
Ieyasu at first reversed this stern policy, befriending Spanish missionaries in an unsuccessful attempt to persuade Spanish merchants to establish direct trade contacts in the Edo region. The arrival at this time of Protestant Dutch and English traders, who had no interest in proselytizing, convinced Ieyasu that it was not necessary to tolerate Christianity in order to retain trade relations with European countries. The Dutch established a trading post at Hirado, an island off the northwest coast of Kyushu in 1609, and the English, too, set up a trading post there in 1613. At about the same time Ieyasu reverted to Hideyoshi’s policy of persecuting Christianity, and his successor in 1617 returned to the extreme measure of executing European missionaries and native believers. In the next few years all the missionaries were either killed or forced to leave Japan, and thousands of Japanese Christians either apostatized or else suffered the death of martyrs. A common practice of the time was to order people suspected of being Christians to tread upon a cross or some other sacred symbol, and to kill those who refused to comply.
The persecution of Christianity came to a dramatic conclusion in the years 1637 and 1638, when the long Christianized peasantry of a region near Nagasaki rebelled in desperation over economic and religious oppression. Some 37,000, basing themselves on an old dilapidated castle, withstood for almost three months the assault of the assembled might of the central government, supported by the fire power of certain Dutch vessels. The Christian rebels were eventually slaughtered almost to a man, and with this final catastrophe Christianity ceased to exist as an organized religion in Japan.
Meanwhile, the successors of Ieyasu, with increasing suspicion of all foreigners and a growing zeal to preserve the status quo at all costs, had started to close the doors of Japan to virtually all foreign intercourse. The English had already given up their trading post at Hirado as an unprofitable venture, and all Spaniards were expelled from Japan in 1624. The Portuguese in turn were expelled in 1638 for suspected complicity in the Christian rebellion, and when they sent an embassy to Japan two years later to seek the reopening of trade relations, the Japanese answered emphatically in the negative by executing the envoys.
The Tokugawa treatment of its own overseas traders and adventurers was just as severe as its treatment of foreign traders and missionaries in Japan. Fearing that overseas Japanese and traders traveling to foreign ports might bring back to Japan the Christian religion or dangerous foreign ideas, Edo decreed in 1636 that henceforth no Japanese was to go abroad and no Japanese resident abroad was to return to Japan. Two years later this decree was followed by another prohibiting the construction of large ships suitable for overseas trade, and as a result the native merchant marine was limited to small vessels for coastal commerce among the Japanese islands. The overseas expansion of the Japanese merchants was thus brought to an abrupt end, and thousands of Japanese abroad were permanently cut off from their homeland and left to lose their racial identity in the native population of the towns of Southeast Asia.
Despite this extremely reactionary policy of national isolation, the Tokugawa were wise enough not to cut off all contact with other nations. They preserved Nagasaki as a window looking out on the rest of the world. Chinese merchants were allowed to visit and trade there under careful supervision, and the Dutch trading post at Hirado was moved to a small island in Nagasaki harbor, where the Dutch merchants were kept in virtual year-round imprisonment.
The measures the early Tokugawa took to insure the continuance of their regime were indeed drastic. They stifled the normal social and economic development of the land, laid a heavy hand upon the initiative of the people, and so isolated Japan from the rest of the world that she dropped far behind Europe in scientific and industrial achievements. Even Japan’s population stopped growing after about 1700 and remained relatively static at about 30,000,000 during the remaining century and a half of Tokugawa rule. And yet, it must be admitted that the Tokugawa were supremely successful in establishing the political stability they sought. Between the middle of the seventeenth century and the middle of the nineteenth, no revolution, disturbance, or incident in any way threatened the rule of the Tokugawa. The peace of the land was broken only by occasional and sporadic outbursts of man and nature—a great fire at Edo, a destructive earthquake, the last great eruption of the now extinct volcano of Fuji, an occasional rice riot by impoverished city-dwellers, scattered riots by still more impoverished peasants demanding a greater share of their own produce—but nothing on a national scale and nothing which could shake the existing political or social order.
Perhaps the best idea of the carefully guarded political tranquillity of this time can be gained from the story of the only political incident that at least emotionally shook the nation during these two hundred years. It has become the favorite literary and dramatic theme in modern Japan. This was the incident of the “Forty-Seven Ronin,” which took place between 1701 and 1703.
A minor feudal lord was so grievously insulted by a more important lord that in rage he drew his sword and wounded his tormenter. To have drawn his sword within the castle grounds of Edo was an offence punishable by death, and the Edo authorities ordered the unlucky man to commit suicide and confiscated his fief. His feudal retainers lost their status as full-fledged samurai and became ronin, which was a term for a masterless samurai who had lost his normal place in society.
Forty-seven of these ronin vowed to take vengeance upon the lord who had caused their master’s downfall, but realizing that the police would be watching for just such a move on their part, they decided first to lull the suspicions of the authorities. They bided their time for two years, while their leader took up a life of debauchery and degradation to prove that nothing was to be feared from him. Then, on a snowy winter night, they assembled at Edo, broke into the residence of their lord’s old enemy, and avenged themselves fully by taking his head and the heads of several of his samurai. By this act they of course flouted the authority of Edo, but their self-sacrificing loyalty to their master made them at once national heroes, living up to the best traditions of personal loyalty of the warrior class. After much debate the government finally permitted them to atone for their crime by the honorable death of seppuku, commonly called harakiri, which is suicide by the painful method of cutting open one’s stomach. This they did, and today the simple graves of the forty-seven ronin stand side by side in a quiet little temple compound in Tokyo.
The two centuries of strictly enforced peace under the watchful eye and firm hand of the Edo government have left an indelible mark upon the people. The bellicose, adventurous Japanese of the sixteenth century became by the nineteenth century a docile people looking meekly to their rulers for all leadership and following without question all orders from above. They grew accustomed to firmly established patterns of conduct. A thousand rules of etiquette, supplementing instructions from their rulers, governed all their actions.
As a result of this rigid regimentation of society, the Japanese have become a people who live together in their cramped islands with relatively few outward signs of friction. Nowhere in the world is proper decorum more rigorously observed by all classes in all situations than in Japan, and nowhere else is physical violence less in evidence. At the same time, few people are more dependent upon orders from above and on long established rules of conduct. The Japanese when thrown on their own judgment away from their normal environment seem to be more at a loss than peoples accustomed to greater freedom of action at home. They are as emotionally excitable as any people, and when they meet a situation to which their accustomed patterns of courteous conduct no longer apply, they are likely to react more violently than other people. This may be one explanation for the amazing contrast between the courtesy and docility of the modern Japanese at home and his cruelty and excesses as a conqueror abroad.
The long peace of the Tokugawa era was, of course, in many ways a blessing to the land. Yet by holding back the wheels of normal social and economic progress and fixing on the nation an antiquated political and social order, the Tokugawa preserved in Japan an outdated feudal structure and mentality far longer than they could have lasted in a freer society. What had been essentially a reactionary political and social system when founded in the early seventeenth century was preserved almost intact until the middle of the nineteenth century. Then a Japan still intellectually and socially bound down by an antiquated political system was suddenly confronted again by the Europeans, who during the intervening two centuries had made tremendous strides forward in almost all fields of human endeavor.