The Tokugawa State

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ber. Ieyasu now turned to crafty negotiation, and suggested a truce in which, as a show of good faith, part of the Osaka castles defensive moats would be lled in. As those terms were being carried out, treachery on the part of the Tokugawa force, which obligingly provided the labor, tipped the balance. The Tokugawa labor squads, in an excess of zeal, lled in more of the moats than was called for by the agreement. After they were through and the attack was renewed in the summer of 1615, things went better. When defeat was certain young Hideyori and his mother committed suicide, the castle was put to ames, and the problem of loyalty to the memory of Hideyoshi was laid to rest.

2. Ranking the Daimyo

The task of rearranging the daimyo had been substantially achieved by 1615, but the fall of Osaka left the Tokugawa free to reassign the domains that had remained in Hideyoris care. It now became possible to nalize the divisions of the country. In considering the shape of territorial disposition it is clear that the Tokugawa arrangement grew organically out of what had gone before. The Kamakura and Ashikaga shoguns had worked with and through the administrative and territorial patterns laid down by the imperial court, and they had structured their own house band and retainers into existing administrative units, after which they squelched attempts by aristocratic and temple networks of Kyoto to retain control of the assets within their realms. Of the uniers, Nobunaga had been ruthless in removing clerical and administrative interference with his activities, while Hideyoshi had done his best to co-opt the prestige of the court through his assumption of court titles. Ieyasus rst moves, as shown in his instructions for the court nobility, were to keep them out of warrior politics, and in a short time he managed to hamstring the Kyoto establishment in such a way that it was probably less effective, in terms of real power, than it had been since the seventh century. The vassal bands that the Sengoku uniers developed were far more intimately a part of the clan structure than their predecessors had been. John Hall has observed that throughout history Japan has alternated between familial and bureaucratic structures;2 and that with time each took on an overlay of the other. In Tokugawa Japan this reached a high point, as ctive family terms came to cloak most relationships of status dependency. The house, or ie, was everywhere the enduring unit, and all obligations were subordinated to its preservation. This was not limited to the warrior class. In the seventeenth-century Japanese countryside large households staffed by