very interesting remark about societies like those of China, ancient
Egypt, and ancient Assyria. "I am expressing," he said, "something
more than an analogy, I am describing a real homology so far as
concerns the process of development,--when I say that these
communities simulated modern European nations, much in the same way
that a tree-fern of the carboniferous period simulated the exogenous
trees of the present time." So far as this is true of China, it is
likewise true of Japan. The constitution of the old Japanese society
was no more than an amplification of the constitution of the
family,--the patriarchal family of primitive times. All modern
Western societies have been developed out of a like patriarchal
condition: the early civilizations of Greece and Rome were similarly
constructed, upon a lesser scale. But the patriarchal family in
Europe was disintegrated thousands of years ago; the gens and the
curia dissolved and disappeared; the originally distinct classes
became fused together; and a total reorganization of society was
gradually [230] effected, everywhere resulting in the substitution of
voluntary for compulsory cooperation. Industrial types of society
developed; and a state-religion overshadowed the ancient and
exclusive local cults. But society in Japan never, till within the
present era, became one coherent body, never developed beyond the
clan-stage. It remained a loose agglomerate of clan-groups, or
tribes, each religiously and administratively independent of the
rest; and this huge agglomerate was kept together, not by voluntary
cooperation, but by strong compulsion. Down to the period of Meiji,
and even for some time afterward, it was liable to split and fall
asunder at any moment that the central coercive power showed signs of
weakness. We may call it a feudalism; but it resembled European
feudalism only as a tree-fern resembles a tree.
Let us first briefly consider the nature of the ancient Japanese
society. Its original unit was not the household, but the patriarchal
family,--that is to say, the gens or clan, a body of hundreds or
thousands of persons claiming descent from a common ancestor, and so
religiously united by a common ancestor-worship,--the cult of the
Ujigami. As I have said before, there were two classes of these
patriarchal families: the O-uji, or Great Clans; and the Ko-uji, or
Little Clans. The lesser were branches of the greater, and
subordinate to [231] them,--so that the group formed by an O-uji with
its Ko-uji might be loosely compared with the Roman curia or Greek
phratry. Large bodies of serfs or slaves appear to have been attached
to the various great Uji; and the number of these, even at a very
early period, seems to have exceeded that of the members of the clans
proper. The different names given to these subject-classes indicate
different grades and kinds of servitude. One name was tomobe,
signifying bound to a place, or district; another was yakabe,
signifying bound to a family; a third was kakibe, signifying bound to
a close, or estate; yet another and more general term was tami, which
anciently signified "dependants," but is now used in the meaning of
the English word "folk." ... There is little doubt that the bulk of
the people were in a condition of servitude, and that there were many
forms of servitude. Mr. Spencer has pointed out that a general
distinction between slavery and serfdom, in the sense commonly
attached to each of those terms, is by no means easy to establish;
the real state of a subject-class, especially in early forms of
society, depending much more upon the character of the master, and
the actual conditions of social development, than upon matters of
privilege and legislation. In speaking of early Japanese
institutions, the distinction is particularly hard to draw: we are
still but little informed as to the condition of the subject [232]
classes in ancient times. It is safe to assert, however, that there
were then really but two great classes,--a ruling oligarchy, divided
into many grades; and a subject population, also divided into many
grades. Slaves were tattooed, either on the face or some part of the
body, with a mark indicating their ownership. Until within recent
years this system of tattooing appears to have been maintained in the
province of Satsuma,--where the marks were put especially upon the
hands; and in many other provinces the lower classes were generally
marked by a tattoo on the face. Slaves were bought and sold like
cattle in early times, or presented as tribute by their owners,--a
practice constantly referred to in the ancient records. Their unions
were not recognized: a fact which reminds us of the distinction among
the Romans between connubium and contubernium; and the children of a
slave-mother by a free father remained slaves.* In the seventh
century, however, private slaves were declared state-property, and
great numbers were [233] then emancipated,--including nearly
all--probably all--who were artizans or followed useful callings.
Gradually a large class of freedmen came into existence; but until
modern times the great mass of the common people appear to have
remained in a condition analogous to serfdom. The greater number
certainly had no family names,--which is considered evidence of a
former slave-condition. Slaves proper were registered in the names of
their owners: they do not seem to have had a cult of their own,--in
early times, at least. But, prior to Meiji, only the aristocracy,
samurai, doctors, and teachers--with perhaps a few other
exceptions--could use a family name. Another queer bit of evidence
or, the subject, furnished by the late Dr. Simmons, relates to the
mode of wearing the hair among the subject-classes. Up to the time of
the Ashikaga shogunate (1334 A.D.), all classes excepting the
nobility, samurai, Shinto priests, and doctors, shaved the greater
part of the head, and wore queues; and this fashion of wearing the
hair was called yakko-atama or dorei-atama--terms signifying
"slave-head," and indicating that the fashion originated in a period
of servitude.
[*In the year 645, the Emperor Kotoku issued the following edict on
the subject:--
"The law of men and women shall be that the children born of a free
man and a free woman shall belong to the father; if a free man takes
to wife a slave-woman, her children shall belong to the mother; if a
free woman marries a slave-man, the children shall belong to the
father; if they are slaves of two houses, the children shall belong
to the mother. The children of temple-serfs shall follow the rule for
freemen. But in regard to others who become slaves, they shall be
treated according to the rule for slaves.--Aston's translation of the
Nihongi, Vol. II, p. 202.]
About the origin of Japanese slavery, much remains to be learned.
There are evidences of successive immigrations; and it is possible
that some, at least, of the earlier Japanese settlers were reduced by
later invaders to the status of servitude. Again, [234] there was a
considerable immigration of Koreans and Chinese, some of whom might
have voluntarily sought servitude as a refuge from worse evils. But
the subject remains obscure. We know, however, that degradation to
slavery was a common punishment in early times; also, that debtors
unable to pay became the slaves of their creditors; also, that
thieves were sentenced to become the slaves of those whom they had
robbed.* Evidently there were great differences in the conditions of
servitude. The more unfortunate class of slaves were scarcely better
off than domestic animals; but there were serfs who could not be
bought or sold, nor employed at other than special work; these were
of kin to their lords, and may have entered voluntarily into
servitude for the sake of sustenance and protection. Their relation
to their masters reminds us of that of the Roman client to the Roman
patron.
[*An edict issued by the Empress Jito, in 690, enacted that a father
could sell his son into real slavery; but that debtors could be sold
only into a kind of serfdom. The edict ran thus: "If a younger
brother of the common people is sold by his elder brother, he should
be classed with freemen; if a child is sold by his parents, he should
be classed with slaves; persons confiscated into slavery, by way of
payment of interest on debts, are to be classed with freemen; and
their children, though born of a union with a slave, are to be all
classed with freemen."--Aston's Nihongi, Vol. II, p, 402.]
As yet it is difficult to establish any clear distinction between the
freedmen and the freemen of ancient Japanese society; but we know
that the free population, ranking below the ruling class, [235]
consisted of two great divisions: the kunitsuko and the tomonotsuko.
The first were farmers, descendants perhaps of the earliest Mongol
invaders, and were permitted to hold their own lands independently of
the central government: they were lords of their own soil, but not
nobles. The tomonotsuko were artizans,--probably of Korean or
Chinese descent, for the most part,--and numbered no less than 180
clans. They followed hereditary occupations; and their clans were
attached to the imperial clans, for which they were required to
furnish skilled labour.
Originally each of the O-uji and Ko-uji had its own territory,
chiefs, dependants, serfs, and slaves. The chieftainships were
hereditary,--descending from father to son in direct succession from
the original patriarch. The chief of a great clan was lord over the
chiefs of the subclans attached to it: his authority was both
religious and military. It must not be forgotten that religion and
government were considered identical.
All Japanese clan-families were classed under three heads,--Kobetsu,
Shinbetsu, and Bambetsu. The Kobetsu ("Imperial Branch") represented
the so-called imperial families, claiming descent from the
Sun-goddess; the Shinbetsu ("Divine Branch") were clans claiming
descent from other deities, terrestrial or celestial; the Bambetsu
("Foreign Branch") represented the mass of the people. [236] Thus it
would seem that, by the ruling classes, the common people were
originally considered strangers,--Japanese only by adoption. Some
scholars think that the term Bambetsu was at first given to serfs or
freedmen of Chinese or Korean descent. But this has not been proved.
It is only certain that all society was divided into three classes,
according to ancestry; that two of these classes constituted a ruling
oligarchy;* and that the third, or "foreign" class represented the
bulk of the nation,--the plebs.
[*Dr. Florenz accounts for the distinction between Kobetsu and
Shinbetsu as due to the existence of two military ruling
classes,--resulting from two successive waves of invasion or
immigration. The Kobetsu were the followers of Jimmu Tenno; the
Shinbetsu were earlier conquerors who had settled in Yamato prior to
the advent of Jimmu. These first conquerors, he thinks, were not
dispossessed.]
There was a division also into castes--kabane or sei. (I use the
term "castes," following Dr. Florenz, a leading authority on ancient
Japanese civilization, who gives the meaning of sei as equivalent to
that of the Sanscrit varna, signifying "caste" or "colour.") Every
family in the three great divisions of Japanese society belonged to
some caste; and each caste represented at first some occupation or
calling. Caste would not seem to have developed any very rigid
structure in Japan; and there were early tendencies to a confusion of
the kabane. In the seventh century the confusion became so great that
the Emperor Temmu thought it necessary to reorganize the sei; and by
him all the clan-families were regrouped into eight new castes.
[237] Such was the primal constitution of Japanese society; and that
society was, therefore, in no true sense of the term, a fully formed
nation. Nor can the title of Emperor be correctly applied to its
early rulers. The German scholar, Dr. Florenz, was the first to
establish these facts, contrary to the assumption of Japanese
historians. He has shown that the "heavenly sovereign" of the early
ages was the hereditary chief of one Uji only,--which Uji, being the
most powerful of all, exercised influence over many of the others.
The authority of the "heavenly sovereign" did not extend over the
country. But though not even a king,--outside of his own large group
of patriarchal families,--he enjoyed three immense prerogatives. The
first was the right of representing the different Uji before the
common ancestral deity,--which implies the privileges and powers of a
high priest. The second was the right of representing the different
Uji in foreign relations: that is to say, he could make peace or
declare war in the name of all the clans, and therefore exercised the
supreme military authority. His third prerogative included the right
to settle disputes between clans; the right to nominate a
clan-patriarch, in case that the line of direct succession to the
chieftainship of any Uji came to an end; the right to establish new
Uji; and the right to abolish an Uji guilty of so acting as to
endanger the welfare of the rest. He was, therefore, Supreme Pontiff,
Supreme Military Commander, [238] Supreme Arbitrator, and Supreme
Magistrate. But he was not yet supreme king: his powers were
exercised only by consent of the clans. Later he was to become the
Great Khan in very fact, and even much more,--the Priest-Ruler, the
God-King, the Deity-Incarnate. But with the growth of his dominion,
it became more and more difficult for him to exercise all the
functions originally combined in his authority; and, as a consequence
of deputing those functions, his temporal sway was doomed to decline,
even while his religious power continued to augment.
The earliest Japanese society was not, therefore, even a feudalism in
the meaning which we commonly attach to that word: it was a union of
clans at first combined for defence and offence,--each clan having a
religion of its own. Gradually one clan-group, by power of wealth and
numbers, obtained such domination that it was able to impose its cult
upon all the rest, and to make its hereditary chief Supreme High
Pontiff. The worship of the Sun-goddess so became a race-cult; but
this worship did not diminish the relative importance of the other
clan-cults,--it only furnished them with a common tradition.
Eventually a nation formed; but the clan remained the real unit of
society; and not until the present era of Meiji was its
disintegration effected--at least in so far as legislation could
accomplish. [239] We may call that period during which the clans
became really united under one head, and the national cult was
established, the First Period of Japanese Social Evolution. However,
the social organism did not develop to the limit of its type until
the era of the Tokugawa shoguns,--so that, in order to study it as a
completed structure, we must turn to modern times. Yet it had taken
on the vague outline of its destined form as early as the reign of
the Emperor Temmu, whose accession is generally dated 673 A.D. During
that reign Buddhism appears to have become a powerful influence at
court; for the Emperor practically imposed a vegetarian diet upon the
people--proof positive of supreme power in fact as well as in theory.
Even before this time society had been arranged into ranks and
grades,--each of the upper grades being distinguished by the form and
quality of the official head-dresses worn; but the Emperor Temmu
established many new grades, and reorganized the whole
administration, after the Chinese manner, in one hundred and eight
departments. Japanese society then assumed, as to its upper ranks,
nearly all the hierarchical forms which it presented down to the era
of the Tokugawa shoguns, who consolidated the system without
seriously changing its fundamental structure. We may say that from
the close of the First Period of its social evolution, the nation
remained practically separated into two classes: the [240] governing
class, including all orders of the nobility and military; and the
producing class, comprising all the rest. The chief event of the
Second Period of the social evolution was the rise of the military
power, which left the imperial religious authority intact, but
usurped all the administrative functions (this subject will be
considered in a later chapter). The society eventually crystallized
by this military power was a very complex structure--outwardly
resembling a huge feudalism, as we understand the term, but
intrinsically different from any European feudalism that ever
existed. The difference lay especially in the religious organization
of the Japanese communities, each of which, retaining its particular
cult and patriarchal administration, remained essentially separate
from every other. The national cult was a bond of tradition, not of
cohesion: there was no religious unity. Buddhism, though widely
accepted, brought no real change into this order of things; for,
whatever Buddhist creed a commune might profess, the real social bond
remained the bond of the Ujigami. So that, even as fully developed
under the Tokugawa rule, Japanese society was still but a great
aggregate of clans and subclans, kept together by military coercion.
At the head of this vast aggregate was the Heavenly Sovereign, the
Living God of the race,--Priest-Emperor and Pontiff Supreme,
--representing the oldest dynasty in the world. [241] Next to him
stood the Kuge, or ancient nobility,--descendants of emperors and of
gods. There were, in the time of the Tokugawa, 155 families of this
high nobility. One of these, the Nakatomi, held, and still holds, the
highest hereditary priesthood: the Nakatomi were, under the Emperor,
the chiefs of the ancestral cult. All the great clans of early
Japanese history--such as the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto--were
Kuge; and most of the great regents and shoguns of later history were
either Kuge or descendants of Kuge.
Next to the Kuge ranked the Buke, or military class,--also called
Monofufu, Wasarau, or Samurahi (according to the ancient writing of
these names),--with an extensive hierarchy of its own. But the
difference, in most cases, between the lords and the warriors of the
Buke was a difference of rank based upon income and title: all alike
were samurai, and nearly all were of Kobetsu or Shinbetsu descent. In
early times the head of the military class was appointed by the
Emperor, only as a temporary commander-in-chief: afterwards, these
commanders-in-chief, by usurpation of power, made their office
hereditary, and became veritable imperatores, in the Roman sense.
Their title of shogun is well known to Western readers. The shogun
ruled over between two and three hundred lords of provinces or
districts, whose powers and privileges varied according to income and
grade. Under the Tokugawa [242] shogunate there were 292 of these
lords, or daimyo. Before that time each lord exercised supreme rule
over his own domain; and it is not surprising that the Jesuit
missionaries, as well as the early Dutch and English traders should
have called the daimyo "kings." The despotism of the daimyo was first
checked by the founders of the Tokugawa dynasty, Iyeyasu, who so
restricted their powers that they became, with some exceptions,
liable to lose their estates if proved guilty of oppression and
cruelty. He ranked them all in four great classes: (1) Sanke, or
Go-Sanke, the "Three Exalted Families" (those from whom a successor
to the shogunate might be chosen, in case of need); (2) Kokushu,
"Lords of Provinces"; (3) Tozama, "Outside-Lords"; (4) Fudai,
"Successful Families": a name given to those families promoted to
lordship or otherwise rewarded for fealty to Iyeyasu. Of the Sanke,
there were three clans, or families: of the Kokushu, eighteen; of the
Tozama, eighty-six; and of the Fudai, one hundred and seventy-six.
The income of the least of these daimyo was 10,000 koku of rice (we
may say about 10,000 pounds, though the value of the koku differed
greatly at different periods); and the income of the greatest, the
Lord of Kaga, was estimated at 1,027,000 koku.
The great daimyo had their greater and lesser vassals; and each of
these, again, had his force of trained samurai, or fighting gentry.
There was [243] also a particular class of soldier-farmers, called
goshi, some of whom possessed privileges and powers exceeding those
of the lesser daimyo. These goshi, who were independent landowners,
for the most part, formed a kind of yeomanry; but there were many
points of difference between the social position of the goshi and
that of the English yeomen.
Besides reorganizing the military class, Iyeyasu created several new
subclasses. The more important of these were the hatamoto and the
gokenin. The hatamoto, whose appellation signifies
"banner-supporters," numbered about 2000, and the gokenin about 5000.
These two bodies of samurai formed the special military force of the
shogun; the hatamoto being greater vassals, with large incomes; and
the gokenin lesser vassals, with small incomes, who ranked above
other common samurai only because of being directly attached to the
shogun's service.... The total number of samurai of all grades was
about 2,000,000. They were exempted from taxation, and privileged to
wear two swords.
Such, in brief outline, was the general ordination of those noble and
military classes by whom the nation was ruled with great severity.
The bulk of the common people were divided into three classes (we
might even say castes, but for Indian ideas long associated with the
term): Farmers, Artizans, and Merchants.
[244] Of these three classes, the farmers (hyakusho) were the
highest; ranking immediately after the samurai. Indeed, it is hard to
draw a line between the samurai class and the farming-class,--because
many samurai were farmers also, and because some farmers held a rank
considerably above that of ordinary samurai. Perhaps we should limit
the term hyakusho (farmers, or peasantry) to those tillers of the
soil who lived only by agriculture, and were neither of Kobetsu nor
Shinbetsu descent.... At all events, the occupation of the peasant
was considered honourable: a farmer's daughter might become a servant
in the imperial household itself--though she could occupy only an
humble position in the service. Certain farmers were privileged to
wear swords. It appears that in the early ages of Japanese society
there was no distinction between farmers and warriors: all
able-bodied farmers were then trained fighting-men, ready for war at
any moment,--a condition paralleled in old Scandinavian society.
After a special military class had been evolved, the distinction
between farmer and samurai still remained vague in certain parts of
the country. In Satsuma and in Tosa, for example, the samurai
continued to farm down to the present era: the best of the Kyushu
samurai were nearly all farmers; and their superior stature and
strength were commonly attributed to their rustic occupations. In
other parts of the country, as in Izumo, farming was forbidden to
samurai: [245] they were not even allowed to hold rice-land, though
they might own forest-land. But in various provinces they were
permitted to farm, even while strictly forbidden to follow any other
occupation,--any trade or craft.... At no time did any degradation
attach to the pursuit of agriculture. Some of the early emperors took
a personal interest in farming; and in the grounds of the Imperial
Palace at Akasaka may even now be seen a little rice-field. By
religious tradition, immemorially old, the first sheaf of rice grown
within the imperial grounds should be reaped and offered by the
imperial hand to the divine ancestors as a harvest offering, on the
occasion of the Ninth Festival,--Shin-Sho-Sai.*