TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE, CULTURE AND SOCIETY
In the previous chapter I have dwelt on the military and political
organisation of the time of the Tokugawa Shogunate somewhat more fully
than was appropriate for a book of such small compass as this. What was
then the civilisation, which had been supported and sheltered by this
organisation and regime? That must be told subsequently.
As the well-planned military regime of the Shogunate can be said to have
been based on the assumption that war was a far-distant possibility, an
imaginary danger, and as at the same time the Shogunate had watched
jealously not to stir up _daimyo_ and _samurai_ to so warlike a pitch of
self-confidence that they would believe themselves able to cope with the
Shogun, there had lain the chief difficulty of sustaining the martial
spirit of the nation in full strength, that is to say, of continuing the
military regime as it had been at first. There were of course several
gradations in the intensity of the fighting spirit of the people in
different localities of the country. In both extremities of the Empire,
in the south of Kyushu and in the north of Honto, where civilisation
was rather at a low ebb, the martial spirit had continued not much
abated since the time of the Ashikaga. On both sides of the boundary of
two such adjoining territories, a difference of dialect was clearly
perceivable, and an acute hostile feeling against each other prevailed.
People were not allowed to marry their neighbors beyond the frontier,
and this rule was strictly applied to all members of the warrior-class.
In brief, they were always staring each other in the face, as if ready
to fight at any time. As to the greater part of the Empire, however,
including the territories situated between the two extremities, that is
to say, in those regions of the country where the people were more
enlightened, no such animosity between the peoples of neighboring
_daimyo_ was to be noticed. There marriages had been contracted freely
between the subjects of different lords, a relationship which could only
arise from the assumption that most probably there would occur no war
between the two _daimyo_, and there would be no fear of such marriages
becoming an awkward connection. Adjoining territories maintaining such
intimate relations, being connected by the personalities of the
inhabitants, should be considered not as quasi-independent states ranged
side by side and in dangerous rivalry, verging almost on belligerency,
but as neighboring governmental departments in the same well-centralised
state. It may be gathered from these data that the more enlightened and
by far the greater part of the Japanese nation were so peace-loving,
that they organised all their ways of living on the assumption of a
permanent peace. And that absolute peace had verily continued for more
than two centuries in a country said to have been dominated by an
absolute military regime, more than testifies how averse is the Japanese
nation from wanton warfare. Foreigners should ponder this irrefutable
fact in the history of Japan, a fact which can not elsewhere be found in
abundance even in the history of European and American states, before
they calumniate our nation as the most bellicose and dangerous in the
world.
Without doubt Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate was a country governed
by a military regime, feudalistic in form, but in truth peace brooded
over the land, the utmost peace which could be expected from any
military regime. As tranquillity had continued so long, our civilisation
had been able meanwhile to make a wonderful progress. If war can be
eulogised with some justice to be a stimulating and compulsive factor of
civilisation, with no less certainty peace may be complimented as a
factor, the most efficient, in fostering the same. In the preceding
chapters I have spoken of the propagation of culture throughout the
country, notwithstanding its anarchical condition, and of that very
culture, which was in the main humanistic. This humanistic culture had
now its successor in a civilisation higher in form and in quality. That
the progress was apparently retarded for a while on account of wars,
which rapidly succeeded one after another at the end of the Ashikaga,
was a phenomenon that was only temporary. How could a few patches of
straw floating on the surface stop the forward movement of a strong
undercurrent, however slowly the stream might run? Mingled with the
clash and clang of arms, an exquisite music embodying the ever advancing
civilisation of our country had been heard; though at first very faintly
audible, it grew louder and louder till it became sonorous enough to
make the whole nation vibrate when the clamorous battle-cry of the
warriors had subsided. In short, Japan had been steadily advancing, and
it was indeed those warriors themselves who carried the torch of
civilisation farther and farther onward. Many historians ascribed it
solely to the individual exertion of Iyeyasu, that learning had been
revived since the beginning of the seventeenth century. Seeing, however,
that those _samurai_ who fought with and under him had rarely been noted
for the excellence of their literary acquirements, it can hardly be
supposed that he had been deeply interested in promoting learning and
culture among his entourage. Neither did he himself leave any trace of
his having received a higher degree of liberal education than the
average generals of his times. It is too notorious a fact to doubt that
he earnestly encouraged learning and ordered many books to be
reprinted. Yet it is also clear that his encouragement was very
efficient, mainly because his position as the sole military and
political master of Japan enabled him to figure as a patron of the arts.
The fact that before his authority as a military dictator became
incontestably established, the reprint of various books had been going
on almost without intermission, and that the two Emperors Go-Yozei and
Go-Midzunowo and also Kanetsugu Naoye, a warrior who had grown up in the
remote province of Yechigo, were among the most ardent patrons of
learning by the encouragement they gave to the reprinting of standard
works, testifies that Iyeyasu did not stand alone in encouraging liberal
education. After all, it should be fairly said that the first Shogun of
the Tokugawa did only what ought to have been done by him, or what the
nation had a right to expect from a person in a position such as his. In
1593, that is to say, five years before the death of Hideyoshi, the
Emperor Go-Yozei ordered the so-called old text of the _Hsiao-king_ to
be reprinted in wooden type. This was the first book in our country
printed with movable type, so far as can be said with certainty. As to
the types themselves which the Emperor resorted to in his scholastic
undertaking, we have reason to suppose that they had been seized in
Korea as a prize of war and brought to this country by the expeditionary
troops which Hideyoshi had sent thither in the previous year. Korea had
been looked upon through the Ashikaga period by the Japanese as a
country more advanced in culture than Japan in those days. We read in
our history about the repeated applications addressed by the Ashikaga
Shogunate to the Korean government, not only for the donation of a
complete set of the Buddhist Tripitaka reprinted in that country, but
also the blocks themselves used in that reprinting. To the latter of
these two requests, the peninsular government flatly declined to accede.
To the former, however, they acquiesced as many times as they could
manage, so that we see now here and there volumes of the sutras which
had been sent as presents by the Korean government before the
seventeenth century. The method of printing with movable types had been
introduced into Korea of course from China, and types made of wood as
well as of clay had long been in use there. It seems to have been those
wooden types which our warriors fetched home, and the fact that such
vehicles of learning had been taken as a war-prize by these soldiers
indicates that they were not totally indifferent to the cultivation of
letters.
In 1597, four years after the reprinting of the afore-said _Hsiao-king_,
the same Emperor ordered again many other books to be reprinted. Among
those then thus reproduced were not only several books of Confucian
classical literature and other Chinese works, literary as well as
medical, but some Japanese books, such as the first volume of the
_Nihongi_ and a work on Japanese political institutions written by
Chikafusa Kitabatake, a court-noble in the time of the Emperor Go-Daigo,
who was noted for his unwavering fidelity to the Emperor and for his
education, being the author of the celebrated history called
_Jingo-shotoki_. Many of these books seem to have been re-issued within
the same year, which was one year previous to the death of Hideyoshi,
and the types used this time were made in our country after the Korean
models. Most probably the types captured in Korea as prizes did not long
suffice to satiate the increasing desire of the Emperor, aroused by his
deep interest in books.
The next step in the improvement of Japanese printing followed the same
course as it had in Europe, that is to say, the use of metallic types.
The first attempt in this improved method was made by the aforesaid
Kanetsugu Naoye, head of the vassals of the house of Uyesugi, who was at
that time lord of Yonezawa. The book which Naoye ordered to be reprinted
was the celebrated Chinese literary glossary called the _Wen-hsuean_,
which literally means selected literary pieces, in verse as well as in
prose. This reprint was put into execution at Fushimi in the year 1606,
which was the fourth year of the Shogunate of Iyeyasu, and the metallic
material then used in casting the types was copper. With him as the
precursor, several patrons of learning followed in his wake. Among the
most noted of them were Iyeyasu himself and the Emperor Go-Midsunowo.
This Emperor, who was the son and successor of the Emperor Go-Yozei,
imitated his father in encouraging the reproduction of books with type,
not of wood but of copper as Naoye had done. The book printed under the
imperial auspices in 1621 was the fifteen volumes of a Chinese lexicon
after the block print issued in China of the Sung dynasty. Prior,
however, to the undertaking of the Emperor, Iyeyasu, as ex-Shogun,
ordered reprints to be made with copper types at his residential town of
Sumpu, now called Shidzuoka, in the province of Suruga. The books
reprinted there in 1615 and 1616 were the index of the complete series
of the Buddhist Tripitaka and the Extracts from Various Chinese
Classics. Besides these, it should be mentioned in his honour as a
patron of learning, that he ordered more than one hundred thousand
pieces of wooden types to be manufactured for the reprinting of various
useful books. From 1599, the year before the decisive battle of
Sekigahara, until the end of his Shogunate, Iyeyasu's agent at Fushimi
carried on the printing of books with movable wooden types without any
cessation. Among the books reprinted there were the _Adzuma-kagami_, the
record of the earlier Kamakura Shogunate, a Chinese political miscellany
written at the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, and some old Chinese
strategical works.
Not only such illustrious personages as the above-mentioned Emperors,
Shogun, and eminent warriors, but men of mediocre means or of
unpretentious rank, such as _samurai_, priests, literati and merchants,
also vied with one another in publishing new and old books of Japan as
well as of China, by the method of woodblocks or of movable types. Among
wealthy merchants the most renowned at that time as the Mecaenas of arts
and learning was Yoichi Suminokura. He was born of a rich family living
in a suburb of Kyoto, and was himself an enterprising merchant.
Moreover, his accomplishments in the Chinese classics and in Japanese
versification were far ahead of the average literati of the time, and
his skill in calligraphy has been said to be almost incomparable. Out of
the immense fortune which he had amassed by trading with continental
countries as far as Tonkin and Cochin-China, he spent great sums freely
in publishing books, the greater part of which were works famous in
Japanese literature. It is said that more than twenty sorts of books
were issued by him alone, counting in all several hundred volumes.
What most attracts our attention in his undertakings, however, is the
fact that all of these books were printed, not in the movable type then
in vogue, but in the wood-block style of old. The new method of printing
with type, though introduced several years back and assiduously
encouraged by many influential persons, had not been able to demonstrate
its advantages to the full. In each edition, whoever might have been the
publisher, the number of copies issued had generally not exceeded two
hundred, and that the number was so small shows at the same time the
narrowness of the reading circle of that age. It proves also that Japan
was not yet in any urgent need of seeing books suddenly multiplied by
the busy use of movable types. Moreover, many inconveniences, not known
in the typography of the West, manifested themselves in the adoption of
the new method in a country like the Japan of that time, where Chinese
ideographs had been used almost exclusively as the necessary vehicle for
expressing thought. We had to provide a great variety of fonts of types,
each type-face representing a special ideograph, so that a far larger
and more varied assortment of fonts was required than in the case where
an alphabet is in use, not to mention that the total number of types had
to be enormously augmented out of the necessity of having numerous
multiples of the same type. To print sundry accessories alongside
Chinese texts, in order to make them easily legible for Japanese
students, was another difficulty which was found almost insuperable in
the adoption of movable types. The desire of some editors to insert
illustrations could not also be fulfilled easily, if the text was to be
printed in type, for setting the blocks together with type was
considered a very irksome business at a time when printing in type was
still in its infancy. They would rather have preferred the single use of
wood-blocks to using them together with types. Lastly, as regards those
literary works by Japanese authors which Suminokura had fondly put into
print, that is to say, in cases where the editor's chief care was the
reproduction in facsimile of the manuscript originally executed in fine
calligraphic style, movable types entirely failed to serve the purpose.
All these disadvantages conspired indeed to frustrate the development of
the printing in type, so that the new method was set aside soon after
its introduction until the end of the Shogunate. It is certain, however,
that the introduction of the use of types in printing, though to a very
limited extent, contributed none the less to the general progress of
civilisation in Japan, in multiplying books and in stimulating the
thirst for knowledge on the part of the general public.
There is no doubt whatever that, in the number of books published in
Japan, the beginning of the seventeenth century far surpassed the end of
the sixteenth. Bookstores, where books were sold, bought, edited, and
published, were now to be found in Kyoto and Yedo, and their business
became lucrative enough to be continued as an independent calling. Here
the question must naturally arise, how were those multiplied books
distributed? There were, besides the priests, especially those belonging
to the Zen sect, not a few professional literati, who pursued learning
as their chief business. Secretaries in the chancellories of the Shogun
and of various _daimyo_ had been generally recruited from that class.
Their number, however, had remained comparatively insignificant for a
long time during the earlier part of the Shogunate, and they had been
classified rather into an exclusive society, which included physicians
and Buddhist priests. They had been treated as servants engaged in
reading and writing, and not respected as advisers nor revered as
leaders of the spirit of the age. However noble might be the profession
in which they were engaged, still they were mere professional men,
considered good to serve and not apt to lead. The increase in number of
such men of letters, it is true, was the cause and the effect of the
rise of the cultural level of the country, for it clearly denoted that
Japan had begun to appreciate learning more highly than before and hence
to demand more of these learned men. But that increase must have
naturally stopped short, unless the learning which they taught was
imbibed by the people at large and made itself a necessary ingredient of
the national life, that is to say, unless the general public had gained
thereby more of enlightenment.
For such a continual progress Japan was quite ready. Within half a
century, our country had been transformed from an anarchical country of
interminable wars to a peaceful land, a land which was non-militaristic
to the utmost, though under one of the most elaborate military regimes.
That it had been "shut up" against foreign intercourse was, in its main
motive, not to ward off the infiltration of Western civilisation in
general, but only to achieve a peaceful national progress undisturbed by
any intervention of scheming foreign missionaries. The Shogun, who ought
to have continued as a military dictator, had been turned into a
potentate who cared the least for military matters, though here lurked
the danger of losing his _raison d'etre_ against the Emperor at Kyoto.
The "wisest fool" in Japan was Tsunayoshi, the fifth Shogun of the
Tokugawa, who not only founded a college and a shrine for the spirit of
Confucius at Yushima in Yedo, the site where now the Educational Museum
stands, but was very fond of playing the savant, and himself delivered
lectures commenting on Confucian texts before the assembled _daimyo_ in
duty bound to listen to him. With a Shogun like him at the head of the
government, it should by no means be wondered at that the cultivation of
Chinese literature, which formed the greater part of the learning of the
time, came into vogue among all of those belonging to the military
regime, the _daimyo_ and the _samurai_ of various sorts and grades.
Moreover, the _samurai_ of the age themselves, though they professed to
be warriors as ever in their essential character, and their training in
military exercises had never really significantly relaxed, had ceased to
be fighting men by profession as of yore, on account of the
long-continued tranquillity. Notwithstanding the fact that the reason
they had been honoured and respected by the common people was mainly
because they were serving the country through their master, the
_daimyo_, at the possible hazard of their lives, they had been obliged
gradually not to rely on their martial valour only, but to mould their
character and improve their ability, so as to befit themselves to become
capable officials, administrators, nay, even statesmen in their own
territory and well-bred gentlemen in private life, so as to furnish
models to the common people by their personal examples. As they had read
Chinese works mainly for this purpose, the kinds of books read were
naturally limited, the most preferred being those pertaining to morals
and politics, that is to say, Confucian literature and the histories of
various Chinese dynasties, all of which were pragmatic enough. Their
literary culture, therefore, tended to become rigid, narrow, and
utilitarian, though very serious in intention. At first sight it must
seem a very paradoxical matter that the learning which had been
essentially humanistic in the Ashikaga period should have taken so
utilitarian a tendency in the age directly following it. If we, however,
once think of the Italian Renaissance metamorphosed into the German
Reformation, when it got northward over the Alps, we need not be much
embarrassed to understand the seemingly abrupt transition in our
country.
It should also be noted that utilitarian studies had not formed the
whole of the literary culture of the Tokugawa age. Since the very
beginning of the Shogunate down to its fall the humanistic studies
handed down by the preceding age had never been entirely swept away from
the land. The utilitarian studies above cited had been almost
exclusively pursued by those _samurai_ standing directly under the
Shogun or under the powerful _daimyo_ whose territories were big enough
to be administered as quasi-independent states, and whose governments
were on such a scale as to need high statesmanship in order to be well
managed. In other words, those who had devoted themselves to the study
of the serious sorts of literature had been generally men to whom some
opportunities might have been given for allowing them to put into
practice what they had learned from books. If these larger territories
were to be compared with Prussia and other kingdoms and middle states in
the German Confederation, the small states in the same political body
would make good counterparts of the petty territories of minor _daimyo_
in Japan. As to those _samurai_ serving the minor _daimyo_, it had been
difficult to make them interested in the perusal of Chinese political
works, for their sphere of action was not wide enough to require the
territorial affairs being conducted according to high and delicate
policies emanating from a profound political principle. In this respect
they had much in common with their colleagues residing in the domains
directly belonging to the Shogunate. As the governor-in-chief and his
principal assistants in each domain had not been taken from the
residents of each district, but despatched thither from Yedo, the
_samurai_ attached to the locality were merely employed to serve the
government of their own district as low-class officials, so that they
had little or no hand even in local politics. Some of these _samurai_
were landed proprietors, who, being rich and having little serious
business to demand their attention, had ample means and time to dip into
books, which could hardly have been of the kind causing self-constraint,
for their first motive in reading was only for the sake of distraction.
The landed gentry, under the _samurai_ in rank, though wealthier, and
generally in charge of village affairs and in control of lesser farmers
and peasants, were also found numerously in the domains. They too were
the sort of people to be classified in the same category as the
_samurai_ of the domains. The _samurai_ and gentry gathered in and
around second-rate towns in large territories belonging to powerful
_daimyo_ may be included also in the same group. It may be, however,
premature to suppose that only books belonging to light literature were
welcomed by those who resided in districts where the military regime had
the least hold. Serious works, such as ethical treatises, for instance,
which abound in Chinese literature, were also read there, but rather for
the purpose of occupying themselves with metaphysical speculations about
moral questions, than in order to regulate their own conduct, private
or public, according to the principles taught in them. In short, their
thirst for knowledge was purely for the sake of enjoying an intellectual
pleasure thereby, and therefore had been quite humanistic. It was here
that the true inheritors of the culture of the later Ashikaga were to be
sought, and not in places where the influence of the regular _samurai_
was paramount. Needless to say, the centre of this humanistic culture
was Kyoto, whose significance as the political capital had already been
lost, while Yedo represented at its best the culture of the _samurai_.
The Chinese books preferred by these humanistic dilettanti were those
pertaining to rhetoric and poetry. They were greatly addicted to
practising these branches of literature. Art for art's sake also found a
better patron among such people than in the courts of the Shogun and of
influential _daimyo_, where art had rather an applied meaning,
represented in ornamental things such as screen and wall paintings down
to the miniature-art of the _tsuba_ and the _netsuke_. Wandering poets,
rhetoricians, calligraphers, and artists of various crafts were wont to
be far better harboured in districts where the humanistic culture
prevailed, than in Yedo or in the residential towns of powerful
_daimyo_, where politics and discipline were all-important. The most
significant difference between the two sorts of culture was manifested
in a special branch of art, that of painting. In the military circles,
the painting of the Kano school was preferred, which was rather rigid
in style and had some tincture of the taste highly prized by the
Zen-sect priests. On the other hand, what was in vogue among the
non-military circles was the so-called "Bunjin-gwa," or paintings of the
school of "literati-painters," which were introduced at the beginning of
the Tokugawa period from China, and were characterised by the mellowness
of tone prevailing in them and also by a lack of the professional
flavour.
Besides these two distinct cultural circles, there arose a third group
of people, who entered the cultured arena in the latter half of the
seventeenth century. I mean the bourgeois class in several large cities.
After the decline of the trade of the historic city of Sakai, brought
about by the hard blow struck at the root of the political power of her
haughty merchants by Nobunaga, and caused also by the growth of a rival
in the great commercial city of Osaka founded by Hideyoshi quite near
it, the refined humanistic culture cherished by the citizens of Sakai
vanished with its prosperity. After that, it took a considerable while
to witness the revival of the cultural influence of the bourgeois class
in Japan. The tranquillity, however, which the Tokugawa Shogunate had
brought on our country, did not fail to cause such a revival, though not
again in Sakai, yet at least in the two greatest commercial centres of
the empire. The one was Yedo on the east, and the other Osaka on the
west. Of these two cities, in affluence Osaka, on account of its
geographical advantages, was several steps ahead of Yedo. Not only was
it near Kyoto, the centre of the humanistic culture as ever, but its
remoteness from Yedo had induced its merchants to become more
independent than those in the Shogun's own city of the influence of the
strong military regime. The culture fostered in the city, therefore, was
nearer to that of the non-military circles than that of Yedo. Nay, Osaka
went still further, even by a great many steps, than Yedo. It was here
that Monzayemon Chikamatsu, the first and the greatest dramatist Japan
has ever produced, demonstrated his peerless talent at the end of the
seventeenth century, and here was also one of the cradles of the modern
Japanese theatre. Yedo, however, could not remain long alien to this
fresh cultural current initiated in Kyoto and Osaka. On account of its
growing prosperity brought on by the constant comings in and out of
hundreds of _daimyo_ and their numerous retinues, the newly started
political capital was soon enabled to rival the senior city of Osaka in
the liveliness of its urban social life, and in some respects surpassed
that of Kyoto. The plutocrats of Osaka had also a very close relation
with the military regime. This relation, however, consisted in lending
large sums of money to various _daimyo_, many of whom had their
warehouses there to deposit therein the produce of their territory, used
as pledges for getting advances of money from those merchants, and on
that account their pay-masters with their staffs were stationed there to
enable them to transact the customary financial business. On the other
hand, the merchants of Yedo generally profited by providing, as
purveyors and contractors, necessary commodities to the Shogunate and to
the _daimyo_, and therefore depended more closely on the military
regime, though some of them also advanced money as did the merchants of
Osaka. It is said that the richest bourgeois of Yedo, who had amassed
immense sums of money at the beginning of the nineteenth century were
those who had advanced their moneys at a very high rate of interest to a
great many needy _hatamoto_, who were obliged to garnishee to those
merchants their allowances in rice from the Shogunate at fixed
intervals, in order to steer securely through stretches of low water or
through the straits of Hard-Times in their household economy. On the
whole, however, we see a great difference in that the merchants of Yedo
were the patronised party in their relations with the warrior-class,
while those of Osaka were mostly creditors and the military men their
debtors. But whatever might have been their difference in general
character from the merchants of Osaka, the commercial aristocrats of
Yedo, induced by their opulence to live a leisurely and very luxurious
life, could not fail to become gradually patrons of the bourgeois arts
and literature, merely tinged by a little more of the martial element
than those of Osaka.
Three cultural currents thus ran parallel to one another in the history
of the modern civilisation of our country, that of the orthodox
_samurai_ with its centre in Yedo, that of court-nobles and
county-gentry flowing from Kyoto as its source, and lastly that of the
commercial class with its stronghold in Osaka. If these three currents
had remained irrelative to one another to the last; if, in other words,
they had continued for long to belong specially to one of the three
distinct and exclusive groups of the nation, then the historic
revolution of the Meidji era would not have been effected, and Japan
might be in a state but half medieval and half modern. Fortunately,
class distinction in our country was not, at that time, so rigid as to
hamper absolutely the amalgamation of different classes, and a certain
type of culture, which had for a time been but a speciality of one
particular class, soon ceased to be so, and was extended to the other
classes, and the process necessarily led to the fusion of all the
cultures of different types. As one of the causes which hastened such an
amalgamation must be mentioned the intermarriage of people of different
classes.
At the time when Chinese legislation was first implanted in Japanese
soil, there were still minute restrictions concerning
interclass-marriages in the Statutes of the Taiho. Though mesalliances
were not forbidden by any explicit law, the offspring of such marriages
between freemen and slaves were to follow in class the parent of
inferior rank. It is evident, therefore, that such an alliance was
stigmatised and severely checked. As to the intermarriages between
different classes of freemen, there had been no such restraint, even
with respect to the status of their children. That the custom, however,
of choosing the empress from members of the Imperial family only, to the
exclusion of all vassal families, became gradually confirmed, and that
the same custom continued intact until the beginning of the eighth
century, shows how such mesalliances had been discouraged in the ancient
days of our history. The crowning of a daughter of the Fujiwara as the
consort of the Emperor Shomu was the first violation of the long-kept
traditional usage regarding the Imperial marriage; and since that time
marriages had become very irregular, not only among the members of the
Imperial family, but also among the courtiers. The social status of a
father was considered sufficient by itself to determine that of his
children. No legal scrutiny was thought necessary as to what kind of a
woman their mother was, though it was self-evident that the higher the
social position of the family from which she sprang, the more the
children she gave birth to would be honoured. The establishment of the
military regime could effect but very slight change in this domain of
social usage, until the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. It must be
attributed to this neglect of the maternal lineage in the consideration
of pedigrees, that in the most genealogical records of Japan the names
of wives, mothers, and daughters are generally omitted, notwithstanding
that we are able to trace the names of the male ancestors, sometimes for
more than ten centuries backward with tolerable certainty and
exactitude.
The establishment of the Shogunate by the Tokugawa could not affect to
any great extent the social position of women in general, for in that
domain radical alterations were not to be expected from the age in which
militarism was all-powerful. There was one thing, however, which was
worthy of special notice, concerning the new usage of marriage among the
_daimyo_. As to the right of inheriting their territories, the
preference, it is true, had been on the side of the offspring of a legal
marriage, for it could not have been otherwise in a society in which the
right of primogeniture had been just established for the sake of
maintaining the order intact. Yet there existed no rigorous rule through
the whole history of the Shogunate, which might be said to have aimed at
discouraging mesalliances, and the natural sons of the _daimyo_ were by
no means deprived of their right of inheritance on account of the mean
origin of their mother. The Shogunate, however, interfered in the
marriages of the _daimyo_, and all of them were obliged to take unto
themselves consorts from families of equal rank, that is to say, the
legal wife of a _daimyo_ had to be a daughter or sister of another
_daimyo_, one of his equals. Some of the higher _daimyo_, especially
those of the blood of Tokugawa, often married daughters of court-nobles,
for the purpose of keeping the latter in close relation with the
Shogunate. In the military peerage list of the time the wife of every
ruling _daimyo_ had her place together with the heir, alongside of her
husband, though even in this case her name used to be omitted, while
that of the heir was given. In spite of the fact, therefore, that the
intermarriage of the people of different territories had often been
prohibited by territorial laws, those _daimyo_ themselves who were
desirous of enforcing those laws were obliged to find their legal wives
outside of their territory, in other words, to contract an
interterritorial marriage. Such a marriage within the circle of the
_daimyo_ had of course very little to do with the territorial politics
of the _daimyo_ concerned, for most of the ladies chosen as brides were
those who had been brought up in their father's residence at Yedo, and
after their marriage they had to remain in the same city as hostages to
the Shogunate, and not allowed to leave it for their territory.
Moreover, as the marriage of the _daimyo_ received the close supervision
of the Shogunate, they could have borne very little, if any, political
meaning of a sort which might be attached to the intermarriages of
different royal families in Europe. Culturally speaking, however, such a
marriage had the effect of levelling the ways of living of various
_daimyo_, and making them similar to one another. The bride was usually
accompanied into her husband's family by maids, the daughters of her
father's vassals, and she was often escorted by a few _samurai_. These
_samurai_ as well as the maids often took service under the _daimyo_,
the husband of the bride, and remained in the train of their lord, after
the death of the lady whom they had to serve personally. The number of
the _samurai_ who changed masters in this manner, was not naturally
large, but they contributed none the less toward the diminishing of the
differences in the social life of the various territories.
Generally, however, it was found very difficult for any _samurai_ to
leave his master for the purpose of enlisting in the service of some
other _daimyo_. As the _samurai_ had been bound to their lord the
_daimyo_, not only publicly as his officials and warriors, but privately
as his domestics, they were not allowed to emigrate freely from their
lord's territory. Nevertheless, the legal status of the _samurai_ versus
the _daimyo_ had never been the relation of slave and master. No
_daimyo_ had absolute control over the person of his _samurai_, in other
words, his sway was far from what might have been called full
proprietorship. Against injustice on the part of a _daimyo_, his
_samurai_ had the actual right of appealing to the Shogunate at the risk
of suffering a heavy penalty for his affronting his lord by so doing. It
was also possible to alienate himself from the service of his master by
giving sufficient reasons for it. If he had no reason to do so, then he
could abscond, and the extradition of such a deserter was hardly ever
rigorously pressed. And if such a vagrant _samurai_ or _ronin_ was found
to be a capable warrior or a man of talent in some other line, he could
find a position very easily under the _daimyo_ of his adopted territory.
In such and like ways the _samurai_ of the Tokugawa period made
interterritorial migration more freely than we imagine.
If, concluding from the limited sphere of freedom of the _samurai_ in
regard to change of domicile, one should suppose that farmers,
merchants, and craftsmen were much more restricted in their moving about
inter-territorially, he would be grossly deceived. The _samurai_ was _de
facto_ linked almost inseparably to their lord the _daimyo_, for the
link had been firmly cemented, though not by any formal oath of fealty
uttered by the _samurai_, as was the custom in European countries, but
by the hereditary relation between his family and that of his master. It
became especially so when profound peace settled on Japan during the
middle of the Tokugawa period, and if any _daimyo_ had given his
_samurai_ the freest choice to leave his territory, very few of them
would have availed themselves of their freedom, for by doing so they
would have had to part with a great many things which they had long
cherished in their hearts. On the whole, the _samurai_ were attached to
their _daimyo_ and not to the soil on which they had settled, so that
when their master was removed to some new territory by the order of the
Shogunate, most of the _samurai_ used to follow their lord and serve him
in the new locality. The dialectic peculiarities, which have been
vanishing in Japan very rapidly these years, show still a trace of these
_samurai_ migrations. If any foreigner should remark a considerable
difference in dialect between some provincial town and its suburbs, it
shows that the family of the _daimyo_ who was the last to lord it over
the territory, was one transplanted there together with the attendant
train of _samurai_ by order of the Shogunate in a time not so very
remote.
Quite contrary to _samurai_ usage, those people below them in rank held
with the _daimyo_ of the territory in which they lived a relationship
which was purely public in character. Socially they were treated as men
beneath the _samurai_, and they themselves were content to be treated as
such. As a class, however, they had no personal relations with the
_daimyo_, unless through the _samurai_, to whom the usufruct of the land
which they cultivated had been allotted by the _daimyo_. In other words,
their duty to their territorial lord was nothing but that which they
owed as a people governed to a governor who chanced to rule hereditarily
over the territory, but might at any time be displaced by somebody else
at the pleasure of the Shogunate. Fidelity on their part to the
_daimyo_, therefore, was no personal obligation, nor the result of a
reciprocal contract, but only a product of a long history, if any
example of such virtue were exhibited. They had no need to follow their
_daimyo_ as his _samurai_ used to do, whithersoever he might be
transferred. On the contrary, all of them remained as a rule in the old
territory, in which they continued for long years to pursue their
business, and welcomed the newly-appointed _daimyo_. In this respect
they might be said to have been much more fixed to the territory than
the _samurai_. At the same time, as their relations with the _daimyo_
were not very close, their movements were not so vigilantly watched as
those of the _samurai_, and during the Tokugawa period, there went on
incessant goings and comings of the lower order in and out of various
territories, though very insignificant in character and therefore
apparently unnoticed. Summarily speaking, the boundary of the
territories of the _daimyo_ was of no practical value in restricting the
population within its geographical pale, in spite of the fact that all
_daimyo_, without exception, exercised their right of scrutinising the
ingress and egress of travellers at certain fixed barriers on the
boundary line. Viewed from the standpoint of the internal migration of
people of all classes, Japan was far from being an agglomeration of
isolated territories. No wonder that the contemporary culture, springing
up from whichever of the three possible sources, could not remain
secluded within the confines of particular localities, but gradually
permeated the country in every direction, and became one.
Not only inter-territorially, but also in each of the territories
themselves, no sort of culture could hold itself for long as the
exclusive property of a certain class. In our history, it is true, we
had retained a class-system for a very long time, even after the
revolution of the Meidji era, and all men had not been equal before the
law until very recent times. Nay, to this day we see still some harmless
relics of that system in certain regulations preferential to the
aristocracy. Regarded as a whole, however, the class-system in Japan has
never approached the caste-system of some other countries. If there had
been anything like that in our country, it was the distinction of the
ordinary people, or we might say, people of the Japanese _pur sang_,
from those whose blood was thought to be polluted. Marriage with the
latter set of people had been scrupulously avoided on the part of the
former. This antipathy entertained by the majority of the nation against
the minority was nearly of the same nature as the anti-Semitic feeling
in Europe. The coincidence between the two went so far that in Japan
tanners, executioners, and so forth were considered as men of
occupations exclusive to the people of polluted blood, just as similar
trades in Europe had been relegated to the Jews of the Middle Ages. From
the fact that in the newly explored part of the empire, such as the
northern part of Honto, the settlements of the so-called people of
polluted blood are very few, and therefore the feeling against them
there is not so acute as it is in the central or most historic part of
the empire, we may safely conclude that such a feeling had its origin in
some racial difference and dates from the immemorial past. It is very
strange that in Japan, where the population is unquestionably of mixed
blood, such an antipathy against a certain set of people should have
continued stubbornly even to the present day. On the other hand, we have
sufficient grounds for believing that, in the course of our history, not
a few people of the pure blood have been classed with the impure on
account of some criminal action, or they mingled with the latter from
some predilection, out of their own free will.
As to the people who were not stigmatised as impure of blood, it is very
difficult to draw a boundary line distinct enough to divide them clearly
according to their blood relationship. During the anarchical period of
our history from the later Ashikaga to the beginning of the Tokugawa
Shogunate, there took place a violent convulsion of the social strata,
as the result of the disorder which reigned everywhere. Many talented
plebeians had lucky chances to enlist as _samurai_ in the service of
some _daimyo_, while many of the scions of noted warrior families
transformed themselves into plebeians, from disgust at their calling of
men-slaughterers or from disappointment in their ambitions as warriors.
In the time which followed, that is to say, when social order was
reestablished, such a transmutation became exceedingly difficult, as
might be supposed. Yet even since then it is not altogether a matter of
sheer impossibility. Plebeians of rare merit, especially those who were
skilled in certain branches of art and learning, were able to find their
way upward without much difficulty. The word "_samurai_" which had meant
a "warrior attending" came to denote a social rank above the plebeians,
so that it could include those who pursued a profession which was far
from being militaristic, such as men of letters, physicians, painters,
_no_-dancers and the like in the retinue of the _daimyo_. Many
territorial bourgeois, too, transformed themselves into _samurai_ by
contributing large sums of money to the treasury of their lord, or by
purchasing the rank from some poor inheritors of _samurai_ blood who
were reduced to extreme penury, so as to be no more able to serve their
_daimyo_ as honourable warriors.
Examples of _samurai_ promoted to the _daimiate_ are not numerous since
the re-establishment of peace and the social order under the
dictatorship of the Tokugawa, for it had become for everybody very
difficult to distinguish himself highly by merits other than military,
so as to justify sufficiently such a sudden promotion. Still at the
beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate there were many vacant territories,
caused by the confiscation of the territories of recalcitrant _daimyo_.
Many families also lost their hereditary lands on account of the
extinction of the male line, for the Shogunate did not at first
recognise inheritance through an adopted son, a restriction which was
later abrogated. Besides, the _daimyo_ in general became wiser and more
docile in order not to lose their estates on account of any misdemeanour
toward the Shogun. As the result of such changes the later Shogun rarely
had vacancies at his disposal by which he could create the new _daimyo_.
If the Shogun had wished to promote somebody in spite of the lack of a
vacant lordship, he had to part with a portion of his own domain, but
this alienation of land from the Shogun could not be repeated too often
without damage to the material resources of the Shogunate. Nevertheless,
examples have not been wanting now and then, examples in which not only
_samurai_ but even plebeians also were promoted to the rank of _daimyo_,
some of them owing to their due merits, or to the blood-relationship
with the wives or the natural mother of some Shogun, others by courting
the favour of their master. In short, the intruding upwards into the
_daimyo_ class was not a matter absolutely impossible for the people in
the lower strata.
Inversely the descent to the lower social status was much easier than
the ascent to the higher rank in any scale. Nay, for various reasons
many persons had been obliged to climb down from their original high
position in society to a lower status. As the law of primogeniture grew
rigorous in its enforcements on the _daimyo_ and the _samurai_, the
greater part of the scions belonging to these classes could only fully
enjoy the privilege of the society in which they were born during
childhood, unless extinction of the main line took place. Descendants of
_daimyo_ generally gravitated to _samurai_ rank, and those of _samurai_
had to turn themselves into plebeians, in so far as they did not merit
to be called to service as independent _samurai_. Thus the sliding down
of classes was necessitated by the law of succession. Could any line of
social demarcation be drawn according to the difference of classes in
the face of such shiftings upwards and downwards? If it was a difficult
matter, then we cannot expect to find any sort of culture monopolised by
a certain class to the last. In whichever stratum of society it might
have originated, it was sure to penetrate sooner or later into the other
classes, and at last the whole people of a territory absorbed a similar
and uniform culture. No sort of territorial barriers or social cleavage
proved efficient enough to impede the inter-penetration of any cultural
movement.
This amalgamation of cultures different in their origins had been
accelerated by the introduction of European civilisation. Though the
free intercourse of the Japanese with Europeans had been cut short in
the third decade of the seventeenth century by the ordinances of the
Shogunate, the country had never been absolutely closed against
foreigners. No Japanese had been allowed to go abroad for any purpose
whatever, but we continued to trade in the specially prescribed port of
Nagasaki, not only with Chinese but also with Dutch merchants, though in
very restricted forms. Thus while the Japanese had been struggling to
mould the new national culture out of promiscuous elements which had
existed from aforetime, they had been receiving the Western
civilisation, not _en masse_ but drop by drop, so that we had no need
this time of the process of rumination in digesting the introduced
exotic culture, as we had done as regards Chinese civilisation. The
rigorous exclusion, carried to the utmost, of all Christian literature,
whatever its relation to our religious tenets might have been, naturally
induced men in authority to resort to the safest methods, that is to
say, to restrict the kinds of books to be imported to the narrowest
scope, and to limit their number to the smallest possible minimum.
Accordingly, in the first half of the Tokugawa Shogunate, very few
useful books were imported into our country, and the nation had,
therefore, a very scanty opportunity of getting knowledge through books
about things European. Yet the commodities which these Dutchmen brought
to Deshima to be exchanged there or to be presented to the Shogun at
Yedo, gave the Japanese who came in contact with them some idea about
the modes of life in Europe. Moreover, after the encouragement
assiduously given to the study of things European by the Shogun
Yoshimune, whose rule covered the greater part of the first half of the
eighteenth century, the process of infiltration of Western culture
through the narrow door of Nagasaki had become suddenly accelerated. As
the encouragement had been induced by the material necessities of the
nation, the study of that time about things European was naturally
limited to those sciences which were indispensable to the daily life of
the people and at the same time far from being spiritual, like
astronomy, medicine, botany, and so forth. Would it be possible,
however, to ward off successfully the spiritual side of a culture, while
taking in the material side of the same with avidity, as if the two
parts had not been interwoven inseparably as a single entity? Those
branches of Western knowledge, which we did not welcome in the least,
but which were none the less useful, as history, and political as well
as military sciences became gradually known to the Japanese, though very
fragmentarily and slowly. That the diplomatists of the Shogunate had
been able to conclude with the foreign powers, which forced our doors to
be opened to them against our will, treaties which, though evidently
detrimental to our national honour, were the largest concessions we
could obtain from them at that time, shows that they had not been
entirely ignorant of the condition of the parties with which they had
to treat.
Probably there are foreign readers who may entertain some doubt about
the lack of the religious element in the Western civilisation which thus
flowed into our country from the first half of the eighteenth century.
They may well consider, however, the change of religious temperament
both in Japan and in European countries, besides the strictest
prohibition rigorously exercised by the Japanese authorities. The Thirty
Years War, the beginning of which falls in the fourteenth year of the
Shogunate of Hidetada, the son and successor of Iyeyasu, is said
generally to be the last religious war in Europe fought seriously. But
it cannot be denied that in the latter part of the long war, more
political than religious elements predominated, and the age which
followed the most desolatory war was characterised by its religious
toleration. Could the Dutchmen, who were the only people privileged to
trade with us, have been expected to set as their first aim the
propagation of the Christianity of their Reformed Church rather than
material gain by their commerce, as the Portuguese, Spaniards, and
Italians are said to have done as regards their Catholicism at the end
of the Ashikaga period?
Japan had also changed religiously in the same direction. The end of the
Ashikaga period had witnessed many wars which may be called religious,
very rare examples since the time of the first introduction of
Buddhism. Sectarians of Shinshu or Ikkoshu and of Nichirenshu often
fought against one another. Some of them dared also to fight against
powerful feudatories, and harassed them. Thus Japan was about to
experience a struggle between the spiritual and the temporal powers, as
Europe did in the Middle Ages. Nobunaga, therefore, gave countenance to
Christian missionaries with a view to curbing the arrogance of Buddhist
sectaries by the inroad of the new exotic religion. When the latter,
however, proved not less dangerous to the political authority, it was
interdicted by Hideyoshi. After all, the persecution of the Christians
in Japan was not of religious nature, as in Europe, but essentially
political. This explains why persecution could extirpate the seeds of
Christianity sown so full of hope in Japan, in spite of its general
failure in European countries.
The failure of the Christian propaganda, however, was at the same time
the signal of the downfall of the influence of Buddhist sectaries in
Japan. Iyeyasu, who had the most bitter experience of the resistance of
Ikko-votaries in his own province, had but to pursue the same religious
policy as his predecessor, against Buddhism as well as Christianity. He
ordered the personal morals of Buddhist priests to be rigorously
supervised, and inflicted the severest punishment on those who violated
the law of celibacy. It was natural, therefore, that secular preachers
of the Ikkoshu or Shinshu, who made it their rule to lead a matrimonial
life, should not have been held in so high a regard as the regular
priests of other Buddhist sects, and on that account they had to recruit
their believers chiefly among people in the lower strata of society. As
to other sects besides the Shinshu, he showed no preference for any one
of them, and he often called himself a believer in Buddhism of the Syaka
Sect, which meant that he was no sectarian, for there actually existed
no such sect in Japan. Such a broad tolerance, however, in religious
matters is next door to indifferentism, and paved the way for the
dwindling of the religious spirit in the ages to follow, at least in the
prominent part of the nation.
Another factor which strengthened the spirit of toleration, or let me
say, undermined the religious spirit of the people, was the Confucian
philosophy expounded by Chutse, a celebrated savant of the Sung dynasty.
This doctrine, which had been accepted by the court-philosophers of the
Shogunate as the only orthodox one, was rationalistic to the extreme, so
that it struck a heavy blow to many cherished superstitions and
destroyed in a remarkable manner the influence which Buddhism had
exercised over the mind of the people since many centuries, just like
the rationalism of the eighteenth century in Europe, which ruined the
authority of the Church and superstition. Yet among the educated society
of the age, that is to say, the _samurai_ class, the worship of
Buddhist deities continued as before, superficially without any marked
change, only because parents had worshipped them and taught their
children to do likewise. That they had not been men strictly to be
called Buddhist is evident from the fact that most of them had
worshipped in Shinto shrines with almost the same devotion as they did
in Buddhist temples. It cannot be denied that in their view of human
life there was a preponderating Buddhist element, but as it had been
since very long ago that our civilisation had become imbued with
Buddhism, the Japanese of the Tokugawa period were not conscious of what
part of the national culture they specially owed to the Indian religion.
In short, religion in the Tokugawa age did not teach what to worship,
but what to revere, and toward the latter part of the period we had less
necessity to have more of a different religion. How could Christianity
force her way into our country in the state such as it was, unless by
the endeavour of fanatics? And the Dutch merchants of the eighteenth
century were not religious fanatics at all. Through such agents, drops
of the secular element in European civilisation were thrown on the
cultural soil of Japan, which had been already secularised much earlier
than most of the countries in the West. No spiritual consternation had
been aroused, therefore, in the cultural world of our country by the
intrusion of exotic factors, which only tended to augment the longing
for the higher material improvement of the people, by never satiating
the desire for it. It is by this stimulus indeed that civilisation,
which is prone to become stationary in an isolated country like Japan,
escaped the danger of stagnation, and the process of moulding and
remoulding the ever new national culture out of the element which she
had possessed and that which she had added to her stock since time
immemorial, went on silently under cover of the long armed peace, and at
last brought forth the Revolution of the Meidji.