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 Confucian-