Aradhya Jain

S173DHS13

MA History 4th Semester

History of Modern Japan

Question) Discuss how Tokugawa period is considered as the early modern

period in the history of Japan by elucidating the changes that occurred in polity,
society, economy and culture.

The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868) set the pattern for modern Japanese
history by centralizing the power of the nation's government and uniting its
people. The Tokugawa order was characterized by harsh laws and restrictions on
social order and geographic mobility but at the same time they were also an era
of flourishing rural production and commerce and lively city life. It did help in
changing the Japanese society in the Edo period; the improvements made
positively impacted the lives of the Japanese people, making Japan a politically
and socially advanced community. Essentially, Japan transformed from a country
torn apart by warfare between competing feudal lords (daimyo) for nearly a
century into a peaceful economy of Tokugawa Shoguns; which would be the final
era of traditional Japanese government, culture and society before the Meiji
Restoration of 1868.

Before the Tokogawa shogunate came to power, we see a sharp contrast in the
period prior to it. The most important feature of Tokugawa history was the
absence of warfare. Tokugawa rule was not Japan’s first experience of unity and
order. In the seventh and eighth centuries, certain institutions were introduced by
the central government which modeled on those of China had also been followed
by several centuries of peace broken only by border conflict to the north. The
early government followed into the footsteps of Chinese-style centralization for
its heartland at the price of continued dominance for regional leaders at the
periphery, however, and by the tenth century a movement of privatization had
begun to replace the institutions of central rule. Grants of tax-free land to court
favorites and to temples restricted the fiscal base of central government and by
the twelfth century, a power struggle broke out between the local grandees
which inversely affected the life in the capital. The period prior to the Tokugawa
regime Japan suffered through the lawlessness and chaos of the Sengoku (warring
states) period which lasted from 1467 to 1573. Before the Edo period, social
classes were mobile and daimyos weren’t monitored so there was a prime
opportunity for people to have a grab at power and daimyos could build their
armies uncontrollably to the point when they could attack other daimyos and
even overtake the shogun. During the warring states period, daimyos were
fighting and didn’t have the resources to fund the development of their society
and economy. Around 1568, the process of unification started in Japan with
Japan’s “Three Reunifiers”- Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa
Ieyasu- working to bring around the volatile daimyos back under the central
control and pulled together an enduring political order. From the 1600s through
the mid-1800s, people in Japan enjoyed over 250 years free of war. The warrior
elite of daimyo and samurai retained their place as political rulers, but the basic
character of the warriors changed dramatically. There was also an immense
change in the economic and cultural life of Japan. The unification of Japan came
when Tokugawa Ieyasu rose to power at the time in history known as the great
peace. He implemented many strategies to control the political system and
improve society through strict social structures, control over daimyo, urbanization
and economic growth.

Polity of Tokugawa Japan

Tokugawa political institutions were the product of an extended period of civil

war. For centuries before and after the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, an
emperor reigned powerlessly as a nominal head in Kyoto while military men
ruled. Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1537–1598) attained effective hegemony in 1590,
ending 150 years of turmoil, but died before his heir reached adulthood. His rival,
Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542– 1616), took advantage of Hideyoshi's death to
consolidate power for himself. His rise culminated in his assumption of the title of
shogun, or paramount military leader, in 1603. The shogun made many changes
to improve the political system in Japan. Ieyasu provided peace for his people,
through the creation of strict political rules that governed the way daimyo could
live, act and rule; he called this new political system the bakuhan system. Ieyasu
and Iemitsu( Ieyasu’s grandson) built upon the achievements of Nobunaga and
Hideyoshi and neutralized all possible opposition, from daimyo and the emperor’s
court, to samurai, peasants, merchants, and priests. These settlements eliminated
tensions of previous decades, even centuries. Ieyasu enforced an order limiting
castles to one per domain. He required daimyo to swear oaths of loyalty to him
and forbade them from concluding alliances among themselves and dispatched
inspectors to make sure the daimyo were in compliance. Ieyasu further controlled
the daimyo by mandating that all their marriages receive Tokugawa approval.
Ieyasu opted to rule through a political system of alliances with weaker military
rulers. He left roughly 180 daimyo in place as hereditary rulers of relatively
autonomous domains as long as they showed respect and followed his orders.
Iemitsu established the right to confiscate daimyo lands and give them to other
lords he considered more reliable. He also exercised power by ordering some
daimyo to trade domains, which weakened them considerably. Iemitsu
heightened another practice of the pre-Tokugawa period to strengthen central
control over the daimyos called sankin kotai (“alternate attendance”). This
entailed that daimyo reside in the Tokugawa castle at Edo for periods of time,
alternating with residence at their own castle. Their wives and children had to
remain behind in Edo when they went home for a year before the next period of
attendance. This was a most effective system of political control. It created what
were essentially hostage neighborhoods of daimyo families. Forced attendance
weakened the daimyo politically by removing them from a hands-on role in local
rule, since they were absent half the time.

Second critical settlement gave the shogun effective control over the most potent
Japanese political symbol, the emperor. Ieyasu continued the Nobunaga and
Hideyoshi policies of economic support for the court, raising it considerably from
the genteel poverty of the previous century. These policies presented the shogun
as a virtual equal to the emperor.
 Perhaps the most important by-product of this imperative was the social-status
system, which categorized social groups according to their relationship with
military authority. The social group of samurais underwent massive changes as
they once controlled small portions of land, called fiefs, as well as the peasants
who farmed them and drew tax income from this land to support their military
endeavors. However, during the Tokugawa regime, most became town and city-
dwellers. The samurai’s fief lands came to be administered by these specialized
officers of the daimyo or the shogun who would then collect tax revenues from
the lands originally controlled by the samurai and forward the funds to the
daimyo’s castle or his Edo residence. The daimyo would then pay out to each
samurai an amount equivalent to the expected income from that man’s original
fief called “stipend”. The samurai were transformed from warriors into
bureaucrats.

Another settlement that maintained order and peace was imposed on the rest of
the population who were divided into several subgroups. In the 1630s, Tokugawa
Iemitsu ordered all commoners to register with a Buddhist temple to guarantee
each person’s religious loyalty. Villagers were not allowed to change places of
residence or even travel without permission. The system of registration was thus
a tool of political and social control. It was also a means to enforce the ban on
Christianity that had been inconsistently imposed on the population since the
1590s. The statuses of farmer and of merchant or artisan townspeople thus
became fixed and hereditary but despite it all, the regime did not micro-manage
the lives of ordinary people. A group of city elders was given responsibility for
enforcing laws, investigating crimes, and collecting taxes.

Society and Economy

The Tokugawa social order drew its framework from the Chinese Confucian ideas
and divided its society into four classes: warrior, farmer, artisan, and merchant.
But there were still people who did not fit into any of these categories such as
Buddhist priests, actors, artists, prostitutes and various groups of outcastes who
were marginalized and were physically placed on the edge of the city. Tokugawa
Japan is sometimes characterized as isolated from the outside world. Although
the shogunate certainly did closely manage contact with the outside, Japan was
by no means a closed country. It maintained diplomatic and commercial relations
with Korea and Ryukyu and allowed Chinese traders to call at Nagasaki. The
closing of the country was mostly to European countries who insisted on
promoting a religion that appeared to be a political threat.

Peace and stability spurred population growth as well, particularly during the first
half of the Tokugawa period, when the population grew from about 18 million in
1600 to about 30 million in 1720. Thereafter the population remained virtually
unchanged. The stagnation of the population had many causes, but deliberate
choices among the peasantry—including abortion, infanticide, and delayed
marriage—were a major factor. The economy continued to grow after 1720,
albeit at a slower pace than previously, with the result that Tokugawa Japan was a
rare pre-modern example of intensive economic growth. The economy grew
unevenly: central Honshu enjoyed far greater prosperity than the northeastern
and southwestern peripheries of the country, and famines occasionally took a
devastating toll on the rural population. In this increasingly complex and
productive economy, the cities were the magnets for commerce, and the towns,
roads, and seaways were the nodes and arteries of economic life. The villages, in
turn, provided most of the raw materials that were consumed and processed.
Literacy also improved with educated samurais and priests began to offer classes
at unofficial schools, mostly Buddhist temples. A host of industries developed
throughout the countryside, including the production of sake (rice wine) and food
staples like miso, soy sauce, vinegar, refined oil, or dried fruits. In the spinning
and weaving of silk, cotton, and rougher fabrics, complicated networks of home-
based production grew up. By the 1800s these and many other products had long
ceased to be monopolized by city artisans or urban markets. This change can be
called the “proto-industrialization” of the countryside which was defined by an
increased scale of operations and specialized production networks serving long-
range markets. These networks were deeply embedded into the rural society and
economy. Poorer peasants resorted to petitions and mass demonstrations to
show their protest against high taxes and debts. This economic development
sometimes set upstart rural producers against established city traders and
artisans. At the same time, within the countryside it set a prospering,
entrepreneurial upper crust against embattled smallholders or tenant farmers.
The latter struggled to survive in a world of increased danger as well as
opportunity. Overall the Tokugawa period was, by the standards of the
preindustrial world, a time of prosperity, stability, and growth. Even though the
orthodox ideals of Tokugawa society held that women should be kept ignorant
and in the kitchen, social practice often defied such harsh prescriptions. Women
played crucial productive roles both within the household economy, as they had
in the past, and outside it.

The Intellectual Realm

The reformers wished to restore the ideal world not just by using coercive power
and hegemony but also through reinforcing religious as well as secular symbols
and ideals. Nobunaga promoted himself as a divine ruler and Hideyoshi shared
this tendency for self-deification. The Tokugawa clan continued these programs of
personal deification that rivaled the sacred claims of the imperial court and
established their legitimacy through philosophical claims of religious and secular
traditions. A complicated mixture of Buddhist, Shinto, and neo-Confucian
elements underlay this ideological synthesis. Numerous thinkers landed on neo-
Confucian ideas to educate rulers and ruled on the character of the just political
order. These thinkers developed the principle of reason, or ‘ri’ around this neo-
Confucian ideology which was said to be the basis of all learning and conduct.
Neo-Confucianism was more religious than Chinese Confucianism, and focused on
identifying the purest essence of things in the world. Its teachings also
emphasized reciprocal relationships between parents and children, as well as
between rulers and subjects, and promoted a government ruled by the most
qualified. The Tokugawa shoguns relied on neo-Confucianism for centuries, to
help bring order and stability to a previously war-torn Japan. The Tokugawa era
cities were home to flourishing prose fiction, poetry, and pictorial arts that
celebrated the lives of commoners and rogues and gently challenged the high-
minded moralists of established order. Theaters and book shops stood beside
teahouses and brothels in Osaka and Edo. Woodblock print also began to flourish
in the middle of the Tokugawa era. Two theatrical traditions also emerged at the
heart of urban cultural life: the Kabuki and the bunraku puppet theater. Tokugawa
political advisors and scholars sought to contain these cultural forms and to
resolve the problems they explored. In the 1700s, some tensions deepened
regarding merit and heredity and complaints increased about the failure of rulers
to appoint “men of talent” to high office. Chronic debt and a belief that the
regime faced a moral as well as a fiscal crisis sparked the first of several official
drives to reform. The spread of commerce and education fostered increasing ties
between literate merchants and samurai in cities and an upper crust of literate
and prosperous farmers in the country. This rural upper class had begun to
develop an interest in political and economic matters reaching beyond the village
boundaries. National Learning, the reformism of the Mito school, and Dutch-
mediated Western learning appealed primarily to sub-elites of the rural upper
crust and to educated samurai of middle to lower ranks. In addition, the rural
villagers of Tokugawa Japan cut loose in several astonishing moments of mass
pilgrimage. Mass pilgrimage heightened the widespread expectations of change.
This proved to be a potent, increasingly nationalistic brew, in which reforming
ideas had revolutionary consequences.

The polity of Japan was not as different as it was in the times preceding the
Tokugawa period. One thing that stands out here is how the various
administrative heads’ maintained their relationships with each other and the
common people. The new peaceful era created a space for commerce and social
life of people. Industries could flourish and people could educate themselves in
arts other than the martial ones. Economy flourished and fell due to reasons
other than feudal wars. All these factors made way for a modernized economy to
form within Japan.

References

1. Gordon, Andrew, 2003. A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa to the

Present. OUP, USA.
2. Jansen, Marius B. The Making of Modern Japan. Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2002

3) Honjo, Eijiro. Changes of Social Classes during the Tokugawa period. Kyoto
University Economic Review (1928)

4) Szczepanski, Kallie. The Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan- Centralization of Power

from 1603 to 1868. ThoughtCo. 2018