Japan: Past and Present/Chapter 8
Chapter VIII
Signs of Change Behind the Feudal Façade
Despite the best efforts of the Tokugawa to prevent any change that might undermine their safely isolated political system, it was, of course, impossible to stop all natural processes of evolution and growth within Japanese society. Outward political forms were relatively simple to maintain, but the internal working of the society and economy could not be held to a rigidly unchanging pattern. During the sixteenth century, Japanese society and economy had developed beyond the bounds of a strictly feudal system. Even the ruthless Edo regime could not force a return to simple feudal patterns.
Actually the unity and long peace under Tokugawa rule made the perpetuation of a feudal economy all the more impossible. With national unity established, many of the petty economic restrictions and limitations that had existed in the days of the Ashikaga were brushed away. Trade was possible on a greater scale than ever before, and despite the division of the land into many Daimyo domains, Japan became essentially a single economic unit. Relieved of the feudal fees and restrictions of earlier ages, the merchants no longer needed the protection of closed guild organizations. Guilds gradually disappeared, and independent merchants and firms of merchants or manufacturers took their place in a freer economic order.
The prolonged, complete peace of the Tokugawa period brought to Japan years of unprecedented prosperity, and industrial production and trade grew rapidly. Although the Tokugawa, the Daimyo, and the whole samurai class clung tenaciously to the concept that agriculture was the only true source of wealth, and continued to measure their incomes in terms of bushels of rice, in the cities and towns of Japan a vigorously expanding merchant class was creating a commercial economy far beyond anything to be expected in a politically feudal land. Paper credits of all sorts were developed and commonly used in normal transactions, and great rice exchanges with daily fluctuating price quotations grew up at the two economic capitals, Osaka and Edo.
The ruling class had placed the merchants at the bottom of the social scale, but the merchants, with their control of the nationwide rice market, came increasingly to dominate economic life. In an expanding money economy, the Daimyo and samurai felt a growing need for money, and as the Tokugawa period progressed many of them fell hopelessly in debt to rich city merchants. In time, Daimyo and samurai, despite their social disdain for the merchant class, sometimes married daughters of rich merchants in order to improve their own economic status.
By the early nineteenth century, several merchant families had amassed great fortunes. One family, the Mitsui, which in recent times built the greatest economic empire in Japan, was even then an important factor in the nation’s economic life. A genuine capitalist class had appeared, and a large group of experienced business men. The stage was set for the amazing economic modernization of Japan which was to take place once the doors of the country were thrown open again to trade and intercourse with the rest of the world.
The merchants, not the warrior-administrators, obviously dominated Japan economically, but their real supremacy in Tokugawa times is perhaps best seen in the cultural field, for the arts and literature of the period were more an expression of a city bourgeoisie than of a feudal warrior class. The cities clearly dominated Tokugawa culture, and in the cities the gay amusement quarters were the centers of social life. Here the geisha, a professional female entertainer, carefully trained in the arts of singing, dancing, and amusing conversation, reigned supreme. To her came the tired business man and the “slumming” warrior-aristocrat for the free social contact with women, denied them by the overly formalized patterns of society, which confined women of breeding strictly to their own homes.
To a surprising degree the art and literature of the time revolved around the geisha and the amusement quarters. Artists of the Tokugawa period loved to portray the streets of these quarters and the famous geisha beauties of the time; and the great seventeenth century novelist, Saikaku, made the demimonde the normal subject of his risqué, somewhat pornographic novels. The authorities, fearful lest the works of men like Saikaku corrupt public morals, often attempted to suppress them. But with the increased use of printing in the Tokugawa period, this was not an easy task even for the well-organized Edo police, and the novels of Saikaku continued to have a great vogue with city dwellers.
The drama of the age, like the novel, reflected the tastes of the city merchant class. Starting with a puppet drama in the seventeenth century, there developed in the course of the Tokugawa period a new dramatic form known as Kabuki, which is still the most popular form in Japan. Kabuki stressed realism of action and of setting. It utilized the revolving stage with great success, and the settings it developed were in many respects far superior to those of the Occidental theater. In sharp contrast to the slow moving and sedate Nō drama of the Ashikaga period, the Kabuki maintained a high degree of emotional tension and dealt freely in scenes of violence and melodrama.
Possibly the influence of the city dwellers may be seen also in the field of poetry, in which there appeared a new and excessively brief poetic form, the haiku—a reduction of the classical thirty-one syllable poem to a mere seventeen syllables. In the hands of a master like the seventeenth-century poet, Basho, the haiku was a superbly clever creation, conjuring up a whole scene with all its emotional overtones in a simple phrase or two. But its brevity made it even more limited as a literary form than the old classical poem, and the thousands of faddists who took up haiku writing during the Tokugawa period often reduced it to little more than an amusing word game.
Art in the times of Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa showed in many respects a radical departure from the major trends of Zen art in Ashikaga days. The calm and serenity of the simple landscape paintings were lost in a burst of magnificence and splendor—fitting expression of the military and political might of the age. Primary emphasis was put on erecting and decorating magnificent palaces. Gorgeous decorative screens and panels, with brightly colored scenes and designs laid on backgrounds of gold leaf, were the most typical artistic creations of the time. By the late sixteenth century the deep religious spirit, which earlier had produced supremely beautiful statues of Buddhas and fine portrait-statues of Buddhist monks, was lost; and sculptors for the most part confined their efforts to ornamenting palaces and temples with a superabundance of elaborate, detailed carvings.
The increased industrial output of this period of peace and unification also resulted in a great gain in semi-industrial arts. The making of fine pottery and beautiful porcelain ware, at first under the guidance of Korean potters, became a great industry with high artistic standards. Gorgeous silk brocades were produced by the expanding textile industry, and lacquer ware of great decorative distinction was made in quantity. In pottery making, weaving, and lacquer work the Japanese maintained their aesthetic standards despite increasing production during the Tokugawa period. In these fields and in many other minor industrial arts they have continued up to the present day to hold a balance between large-scale production, technical excellence, and aesthetic value which is almost unmatched in the modern world.
The art of the early Tokugawa period was in many ways already a popular art as contrasted with that of Ashikaga times, but as the Edo age progressed it grew even more markedly popular. The work of the sculptor became largely the production of small, often amusing trinkets for popular use, and the subject matter of the graphic arts became increasingly the city people and their life. Great artists, instead of working to beautify the palaces of rulers, produced pictures to fit the tastes and pocketbooks of the bourgeoisie. This was particularly evident in the development of the technique of wood-block printing, which made it possible to reproduce hundreds of copies of a single colored picture and to sell them at reasonable prices. This art for the masses reached a glorious culmination in the early nineteenth century in the work of two great masters, Hokusai and Hiroshige. The wood block print, as exemplified in their works, has become the form of Japanese art best known in the occidental world.
The development of a complicated commercial economy and a strong merchant class were not the only ways in which the foundations for a modernized Japan were being laid during the Tokugawa period. Interest in Europe and things European was reviving. Christianity and possible foreign aggression had become such dead issues by 1720 that Edo removed a long-standing ban on the study of the West and the importation of European books—with the exception, of course, of anything dealing with Christianity. Soon a small but intellectually vigorous group of students of the European sciences arose, working through the medium of the Dutch language, which they learned from the Dutch at Nagasaki. Within a few decades, a Dutch-Japanese dictionary was compiled and a text on anatomy translated into Japanese. By the middle of the nineteenth century Japanese scholars were well versed in such Western sciences as gunnery, smelting, shipbuilding, cartography, and medicine. Few in number, they formed a valuable nucleus of scholars to take the lead in scientific work on a much larger scale when opportunity finally offered itself.
The development of a strong national consciousness during the Tokugawa period was another element in setting the stage for Japan’s modernization. By the nineteenth century the Japanese were definitely a nationalistic people, and their possession of a fully developed spirit of nationalism perhaps best explains the success and speed with which they transformed their country into a modern nation-state.
As in western Europe, nationalism in Japan was the result of long, slow growth. Why it should have appeared so early and developed so fully in Japan, long before it became significant in other Asiatic lands, is an interesting question. The main reason may have been that the Japanese throughout their history felt themselves to be completely overshadowed by China but still distinct from it. There was no denying that China was the cradle of civilization in the Far East, a far older and greater country than Japan, and that Japan was no more than a small and, for long, a backward offshoot of Chinese civilization. The Koreans and some other East Asiatic peoples stood in much the same relationship to the Chinese as did the Japanese, but the prestige of Chinese civilization, coupled with occasional rule of their lands by the Chinese, persuaded them at certain times in their history to identify themselves with the Chinese, and to look upon themselves as members of the Chinese cultural empire.
The Japanese were saved from surrendering their cultural independence and national initiative by their greater isolation and their freedom from Chinese political control. Living in their own land and speaking their own language, they remained fully aware that they were Japanese, not Chinese. Yet they realized their insignificance when compared with the Chinese. Perhaps in compensation for a sense of inferiority, they early developed a strong consciousness of their national identity and a deep sense of pride in all things Japanese.
Such an attitude was already clearly observable in the Kamakura period, when Nichiren and other religious leaders injected a strong nationalistic note into their teachings. It was clearer in the political writings of the early Ashikaga period. A scholar of this time who supported the cause of Daigo II wrote a history to prove the validity of Daigo II’s claim to rule. He gave this history a strong nationalistic tinge by stressing the unique virtues of the Japanese political system, which he attributed to the fact that Japan was a land of divine origin, ruled by an imperial line of divine ancestry.
Shinto priests, who again began to play a part in the intellectual life of Japan during the feudal ages, did much to build up national consciousness. For many centuries Shinto had been completely overshadowed by Buddhism. Its many deities had been given humble recognition as local manifestations of universal Buddhist deities. But during the feudal period Shinto began to free itself gradually from Buddhist domination and to take on new intellectual vigor. Shinto philosophers, by adopting many Buddhist and Chinese concepts, developed their simple cults into a religion suitable to a more advanced people. In the process, Shinto priests came to claim superiority for their religion over Buddhism. They even reversed the old theory of relationship, terming the Buddhist deities foreign, and therefore inferior manifestations of supreme native Japanese gods. Quite naturally these nationalistic Shinto priests felt that native things were superior to foreign importations, and they looked back to the period of Japanese history which antedated Buddhist and Chinese influences as a golden age.
During the Tokugawa period, political unity and complete isolation marked by strong anti-foreign policies made for a rapid growth in nationalism. Strangely enough, even the Tokugawa patronage of the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism did much to strengthen nationalism, for interest in Confucianism led to a revival of historical studies; and the study of Japanese history took scholars back to the myths and legends of ancient Japan, as related in the early histories, the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki. One important school of historians was founded by the second head of the great Tokugawa branch family at Mito. This group, in the seventeenth century, started a monumental history of Japan which was not finally completed until the early years of the twentieth century.
A group even more responsible for the growth of nationalism consisted of certain Shinto scholars who studied the old myths and traditions and reintroduced them to the educated public. In the latter part of the eighteenth century one of these Shinto scholars produced a commentary to the Kojiki, which did much to make this early history the primary text of Japanese nationalism. He and other Shinto scholars studied the primitive pre-Chinese period of Japanese history, searching for native virtues which would explain to their own satisfaction the superiority to China which their unreasoning nationalism now led them to feel. What they often found was simply naïve myths and historically absurd traditions, but in their blind zeal they accepted these as true and foisted them on a nation which should have been too sophisticated to have taken them seriously.
One sidelight of the intellectual revival of Shinto was the sudden appearance in the first half of the nineteenth century of popular Shinto sects. Some were founded by women, and several stressed faith healing. All these sects added many Buddhist concepts and practices to basic Shinto principles, but generally they were strongly colored by nationalism. The popular Shinto sects were not only a sign of growing national consciousness; they also indicated that Buddhism was no longer able to meet all the spiritual needs of the lower classes. Converts flocked to the new sects in great numbers, and today, after about a century of existence, the thirteen chief Shinto sects count over 17,000,000 adherents.
The interest of historians and Shinto scholars in the early days of Japanese history naturally revealed the high place the imperial family had held in Japan, and nationalists tended to emphasize the divine ancestry of an unbroken imperial line as one of the unique virtues which accounted for Japan’s supposed superiority to other lands. The people in general again became aware that there was an emperor in Kyoto, and that in theory he was the supreme ruler of the land. In the late sixteenth century there had been signs of increasing interest in the imperial family, and this interest was fostered by the Tokugawa historians and Shinto scholars. In the eighteenth century, a certain scholar at Kyoto so boldly expounded the right of the emperor to rule that Edo was forced to take disciplinary action against him and his courtier pupils. The emperor and his court of course remained politically impotent, but the imperial line emerged again from obscurity; and the emperor again became a figure of such nationwide importance that many people began to wonder why a Shogun was actually ruling.
During the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, Tokugawa rule continued serene and unchallenged, but beneath an unchanging surface, forces were at work remaking the foundations of the nation. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Tokugawa were able to preserve an antiquated political system and an absurdly outdated political and social philosophy. However, rapid economic growth had produced behind the feudal façade an advanced commercial economy, capable of ready transformation into a modern economic order. Despite the division of the land into a large number of feudal fiefs, the people had developed a strong sense of national consciousness. Japan had become spiritually a modern nation, ready to take over and adopt the more efficient political forms of the modern nation-state.