Everyday Life in Traditional Japan. Charles Dunn
potential source of opposition was to be found in the Buddhist temples and shintō shrines; some of the former had played a considerable role in earlier civil wars. The Shogun kept them under control by a number of Superintendents of Temples and Shrines, and their incomes were allotted to them from central or local sources, which could be cut off if necessary. One Buddhist sect—the Shin sect—of which the Shogun was particularly suspicious was dealt with by a characteristic piece of Tokugawa “divide and rule” tactics; in the preceding era members of this sect had caused trouble for the military authorities by setting up autonomous communities of commoners, and to prevent this happening again Ieyasu ordered the sect to be split into two branches so that it would have to support separate groups of temples, kept apart and weakened by rival jealousies.
However, such threats as these were very minor compared with that from the hostile military lords. The Tokugawa ruler allotted territories in exchange for an oath of allegiance, and made sure that faithful followers and relatives, including those who had fought with him at Sekigahara in 1600, were given lands in strategic positions—forming a ring of buffer estates round Edo, a string of others protecting the great routes of Japan or keeping watch on possible lines along which potentially hostile lords might advance on Edo. These latter would be from the “outside” lords, who had surrendered to him at Sekigahara or afterwards. The majority of these were great landowners, and were, in fact, far more wealthy than the Tokugawa adherents. However, the Shogun himself held great estates, and also administered the main cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka.
Thus the political control of the country worked through the officials of the directly held lands and through the vassaldom of the lords, who lived under threat of dispossession or transfer as punishment for disloyalty or misconduct. There were controls on the amount of fortification permitted; lords were encouraged to spy on their neighbors and report on suspicious activities, while social contact was frowned on. Then in addition there were government inspectors, whose function was to keep a watchful eye on the lords and make sure that they conducted their affairs in a manner to be approved.
Yet another weapon in the Shogun’s armory for controlling the top strata of society was the compulsory attendance at his court in Edo. In the early days of Tokugawa rule its possible opponents had to leave hostages in Edo as surety for their good behavior, but later a unified system was evolved. This required alternate residence of one year in Edo and one on his home territory for every large landowner (except for those whose lands were either near by or most distant from the center of government), involving an annual journey one way or the other. Appropriate residences had to be maintained in Edo, where the wives and families of the lords had to stay. This measure, along with the providing of garrisons for the Tokugawa castles and enforced assistance with certain public works, assured both political and economic control of the wealthy overlords, since the constant travel to and fro, coupled with the maintaining of two establishments in the style that was obligatory for a great lord, involved considerable outlay of income, time, and effort.
The rest of the population in town and country was controlled in two ways. First, there were officials appointed by local authorities or by the central government, and these worked through officers who could be termed “policemen.” The other method was through a system of responsibilities, so that an ordinary Japanese could rarely contravene the accepted code of behavior without involving others in punishment for his offence: the head of a family answered for its members, groups of households for each individual household, the headman for his village, and any group might be punished for the misdeeds of one of its members.
There was no semblance of a constitution. As regards criminal justice, magistrates had a code to guide them, but this was never published as a whole, although notices about certain crimes were posted from time to time. In principle, there was no punishment without confession, and this often led to a suspect being rigorously interrogated. This criminal code, such as it was, could be changed without warning. This was in keeping with the fundamental Tokugawa attitude, derived from Confucianist precepts, that the people should not be instructed as to what the law might be, but should be content to do what they were told.
These then were the ways in which the Tokugawa Shoguns sought to perpetuate their family’s power over every inch of the country, and dominance over every aspect of Japanese life, indeed, over every living soul. Their efforts met with remarkable success for 200 years, although a gradual decline in Tokugawa power set in after the mid-eighteenth century. The very nature of Japanese society was in their favor, for the existing class system was a weapon in their hands that required only to be maintained and reinforced in its application. It was only a fairly small number of Japanese who were unaffected by this rigid division into classes: on the one hand were the courtiers and priests, doctors and some intellectuals, and on the other the outcasts, a motley crew performing a variety of lowly tasks. Everyone apart from these exceptions was either a warrior, a farmer, a craftsman, or a merchant.
In this tight class system there was an equally rigid hierarchy, with the warrior class (samurai) at the top; the samurai enjoyed privileges, such as the right to wear two swords, but also had obligations and were expected to lead sober lives and set a good example to the rest. Next came the farmers (the bulk of the population), placed in this position because on them depended the livelihood, in the form of rice, of the warrior class. The honor was dubious, for severe restrictions were put on their liberty, lest they should leave their farms; their lot was usually a miserable one, compounded of hard work and poverty for most of them. Craftsmen came next, and merchants or traders last. Merchants were despised because it was considered that they produced nothing and were activated solely by the desire to amass wealth; indeed, this they proceeded to do, and the culture of the latter part of the period was mainly their creation, and the growth of their power a leading factor in the decline of the old class system.
Because these classes were so clearly divided, and had quite different ways of living, it will be best to treat them separately, describing the conditions and daily life of each in turn.
2
The Samurai
The population of Japan is estimated at having been slightly under 30 million for most of the Tokugawa period, remaining remarkably static for this length of time. There were probably fewer than two million who were samurai, the highest of the four classes into which the people of Japan were divided. The word samurai implies “servant” and is strictly applicable only to retainers, but the custom arose of applying it to the whole warrior class, who were in any case all liegemen, direct or indirect, of the Shogun himself, the apex of the pyramid.
Membership of the class was hereditary, and included many whose ancestors in earlier times had been farmers, ready to take up arms to fight in local armies. Others had belonged to clans with great estates in the regions distant from the capital, themselves descendants or supplanters of still earlier landholders under the Emperor when he really ruled Japan. Some samurai families had originally been closely connected with the Emperor, who, embarrassed by the financial burden of too numerous descendants, had reduced several groups of his dependants to the rank of ordinary noble in the tenth century, giving them land and so freeing himself from further responsibility. One of these groups had been the Minamoto clan, which increased its land-holdings by predatory means, and which rose to become rulers of Japan in the thirteenth century: the Tokugawa family, which had long held a small domain in Mikawa province, east of Nagoya, before moving to Edo, itself claimed descent from these earlier Shoguns.
During the early sixteenth century there had been considerable mobility between the classes, especially between farmers and warriors, but Hideyoshi endeavored to stabilize society, and decreed in 1586 that samurai could not become townsmen, and that a farmer could not leave his land. The rigidity of the class system so characteristic of the ensuing centuries really dates from this time, and in the next year farmers had to give up their weapons, in an operation known as “Hideyoshi’s sword-hunt”; henceforward samurai alone had the right to carry a sword. A sword in this context is a long sword; a shorter sword was also worn, and the first recognition point for distinguishing a samurai, either in illustrations, or probably even at the time in the flesh, is the sight of two sword-handles protruding from the girdle on the left-hand side, where the right hand could come across and draw either (