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