An Introduction to the History of Japan Part 7

As to the betterment of the individual morals of the contemporary j.a.panese, however, the influence of Christianity cannot be said to have been wholesome in all ways. It probably did as much mischief as good during its brief prosperity. Any cult, which may be styled a universal religion, contains a strong tincture of individualism in its doctrines, and any creed of which individualism is a main factor often easily tends to encourage, against its original purpose, the pursuit of selfish objects. In this respect even Christianity can offer no exception. What, then, could it preach, at the end of the Ashikaga regime, to the j.a.panese who were already individualistic enough without the new teaching of the western religion, besides the intensifying of that individualism to make it still more strong and prevalent? Moreover, the very moral doctrine of the Christianity introduced by Francis Xavier and his successors was nothing but the moral of the Jesuits of the sixteenth century, who maintained the unscrupulous teaching that the end justified the means, the moral principle which has been universally adjudged in Europe to be a very dangerous and obnoxious doctrine. Could it have been otherwise only in our country as an exceptional case? But if these missionaries had all been men of truly n.o.ble and upright character, they should have been able perhaps to raise the standard of our national morals by personal contact with the j.a.panese, notwithstanding the moral tenets of their religion. Unfortunately, however, most of them were of debased character, with the exception of St. Francis Xavier and a few others. We need not doubt the ardent desire of these missionaries to save the "souls" of the j.a.panese, and thus to recover in the East what they had lost in the West. But by whatever motive their pious undertakings may have been prompted, their religious enthusiasm and their dauntless courage do not confute the charge of dishonesty. That the majority of them were grossest liars is evident from their reports addressed to their superiors in Europe, in which the numbers of converts and martyrs in this country were misrepresented and ridiculously exaggerated, in order bombastically to manifest their undue merits, exaggeration which could not be attributed to a lack of precise knowledge about those matters. What could we expect from men of such knavish characters as regards the moral regeneration of the contemporary j.a.panese?

As these missionaries, however, were at least cunning, if not intelligent in a good sense, it would not have been impossible for them to achieve something in the domain of the moral education of the nation, if they could only have understood the real state of j.a.pan of that time.

On the contrary, their comprehension of our country and of our forefathers was far wide of the mark. Most of them had expected to find in j.a.pan an El Dorado inhabited by primitive folks of a very low grade of intelligence, where they could play their parts gloriously as missionaries by preaching the Gospel in the wilderness. They had not dreamt that the culture possessed by the j.a.panese of that time, though for the most part borrowed from China, was superior to that of some still uncivilised parts of Europe, for the difference in the form of civilisation deceived them in their judgment of the value of Eastern culture. When they set their feet on j.a.panese soil, therefore, they soon discovered that they had been grossly mistaken, and then running to the opposite extreme they fell into the error of overestimation. Yet they did not stop at this. This first misconception on the part of the missionaries about j.a.pan left in them an ineradicable prejudice. They became very n.i.g.g.ards in seeing things j.a.panese in an impartial light, and const.i.tuted themselves consciously or unconsciously fault-finders of the people, and unfortunately the j.a.pan of that time furnished them with much material to corroborate their low opinion. The result was that while on the one hand the j.a.panese were praised far above their real value, they were stigmatised equally far below their real merits.

Regrettable as it was for j.a.pan to have received such reprehensible people as pioneers of Western civilisation, it was also pitiable that Christianity, which had been fervently embraced by a large number of j.a.panese, was once rooted out chiefly on account of the incredible folly of these missionaries, who fermented trouble and embroiled themselves in numberless intrigues, which were quite useless and unnecessary as regards the cause of Christianity. It would, in good sooth, have been absurd to hope to have the morality of the people improved by the personal influence of such reckless adventurers.

j.a.pan was ready to be transformed into a solid national state, and at the same time to emerge from a chaotic medieval condition to enter the modern status. The cultural milieu, however, though it might have been ripe for change, must have found it difficult to get transformed by itself, and wanted an infusion of some new element to create an opportunity for the change. A new element did come in, but it proved to be unable to effect any wholesome alteration, so that in order to create that opportunity the only possible and promising way was to resort first to the political unification of the country, and thus to start from the political and so to reach social and individual regeneration. And for that political unification the right man was not long wanting. We find him first in n.o.bunaga Oda, then in Hideyoshi Toyotomi, and lastly in Iyeyasu Tokugawa.

The first task was naturally to break down the authority of numerous traditions and conventions which had kept the nation in fetters for a long time. This task was an appropriate one for such a hero as n.o.bunaga, who was imperious and intrepid enough to brave every difficulty coming in his way. He was born in a family which had been of the following of the house of Shiba, one of the branches of the Ashikaga, and had continued as the hereditary administrator of Owari, a province which formed part of the domain of its suzerain lord. When the power of the house of Shiba decayed, the Oda family a.s.serted its virtual independence in the very province in which it had been the vicegerent of its lord, and it was after this a.s.sertion of independence that our hero was born.

Strictly speaking, therefore, his right as a territorial lord was founded on an act of usurpation, that is to say, n.o.bunaga's claim as the owner of the province had no footing in the old system of the Ashikaga, so that he was destined by his birth to become a creator of the new age, and not the upholder of the ancient regime. The province over which he held sway has been called one of the richest provinces in j.a.pan, and was not far from Kyoto, which was, as often stated before, still by far the most influential among the political and cultural centres of the empire.

He and his va.s.sals, therefore, had more opportunities than most of the territorial lords and their va.s.sals living in remote provinces, of getting sundry knowledge useful to make his territory greater and stronger. In the year 1560 he defeated and killed his powerful enemy on the east, Yoshimoto Imagawa, the lord of the two provinces, Totomi and Suruga. This was his first acquisition of new territory. Four years after, the province of Mino, lying to the north of Owari, came into his possession. In 1568 he marched his army into Kyoto to avenge the death of the Shogun Yos.h.i.teru, and installed his brother, who was the last of the Ashikaga line, as the new Shogun. Then one territory after another was added to his dominion, so that the Shogun was at last eclipsed in power and influence by Oda, without ever having renounced his hereditary rights. n.o.bunaga's dominion reached from the Sea of j.a.pan to the Pacific sh.o.r.e, when he met at the height of his career of conquest a premature death by the hand of a traitor.

It is not, however, on account of the magnitude of the territories which he annexed, that n.o.bunaga figures in the history of j.a.pan, for the land conquered by dint of his arms did not cover more than one-third of the island of Honto. His real historical importance lies not there, but in that he destroyed the old j.a.pan and made himself the harbinger of the new age, though the honour of being creator of modern j.a.pan must be a.s.signed rather to Hideyoshi, his successor. Since the beginning of our history, the j.a.panese have always been very reluctant, in the cultural respect, to give up what they have possessed from the first, while they have been very eager and keen to take in the new exotic elements which seemed agreeable or useful to them. In other words, the j.a.panese have been simultaneously conservative and progressive, and immoderately so in both ways. The result of such a conservation and a.s.similation operating at the same time was that the country has gradually become a depository of a huge ma.s.s of things j.a.panese and Chinese, no matter whether they were desirable or not. If any exotic matter or custom once found its way into this country, it was preserved with tender care and never-relaxing tenacity, as if it were some treasure found or made at home and would prove a credit to our country. In this way we could save from destruction and demolition a great many historical remains, material as well as spiritual, not only of j.a.panese but also of Chinese origins.

There may still be found in our country many things, the histories of which show that they had once their beginnings in China indeed, but the traces of their origins have long been entirely lost there. Needless to say that the religious rites and other traditions of our forefathers in remotest antiquity have been carefully handed down to us. This a.s.siduity for preserving on the part of the j.a.panese can best be realised by the existence to this day of very old wooden buildings, some of which, in their dates of erection, go back to more than twelve hundred years ago.

Besides this conservative propensity of the nation, the history of our country has also been very favourable to the effort of preserving. We have had no chronic change of dynasties as in China, nor have we experienced any violent revolution, shaking the whole structure of the country, as the French people had. Though our history has not lacked in civil wars and political convulsions, their destructive force has been comparatively feeble, and one Imperial house has continued to reign here from the mythic Age of the G.o.ds! With this permanent sovereign family as the _point d'appui_, it has been easier in j.a.pan than in any other country to preserve things historic. Things thus preserved, however, have not all been worthy of such care. As we have been obliged to march constantly with hurried steps in our course of civilisation, little time has been left to us to pause and discriminate what was good for preservation from what was not. We have betaken ourselves occasionally to the process of rumination, but it did not render us much a.s.sistance.

Not only rubbish has not been rejected, as it should have been, but the things which proved of good service at one time and subsequently wore out, have been h.o.a.rded over-numerously. Think of this immense quant.i.ty of the slag, the detritus, of the civilisations of various countries in various ages all dumped into the limited area of our small empire! No people, however vigorous and progressive they may have been, would have been able to go on briskly with such a heavy burden on their backs. The worst evils were to be recognised in the sphere of religious belief and in the transactions of daily official business. Red tape, home-made and that of China of all dynasties, taken in haphazard and fastened together, formed the guiding-lines of the so-called "administrative business" in the time of the court-n.o.bles' regime. The prestige of these conventionalities was so powerful that even after the installation of the Shogunate, that is to say, after the establishment of the government which really meant to govern, the administration, promising to be far more effective than that of the Fujiwara's, had to be varnished with this conventionalism. Kiyomori, the first of the warriors to become the political head of the country, failed, because he was ignorant of this red-tapism. The Shogunate initiated by Yoritomo tried at first to keep itself aloof from this influence, but could succeed only for a short duration. The second Shogunate, the Ashikaga, had been overrun almost from its inception by the red tape of the courtiers' regime, as well as by the routine newly started in Kamakura. The humanistic culture, which glimmered during the latter part of this Shogunate, was by its nature able to find its place only where conventionalism did not reign, but it soon began to give way and be conventionalised also. Until this red-tapism was destroyed, there could have been no possibility of the modernisation of j.a.pan.

Superst.i.tions of all sorts, when fixed in their forms and launched on the stream of time to float down to posterity with authority undiminished by age, make the worst kind of convention. We had a great ma.s.s of conventions of this type in our country. Various superst.i.tions, from the primitive forms of worship, such as fetichism, totemism, and so forth, to the highest forms of idolatry, survived notwithstanding the introduction of Buddhism. Buddhism, too, has produced various sects which were rather to be called coa.r.s.e superst.i.tions. Taoism was also introduced together with the general Chinese culture. Not to mention that Shintoism, which was by its original nature hardly to be called a religion, but only a system or body of rites inseparable from the history of our country, became blended with the Buddhist elements and was preached as a religion of a hybrid character. Thus a concourse of different superst.i.tions of all ages had their common field of action in the spirit of the people, so that it has became exceedingly difficult to tell exactly to what kind of faith this or that j.a.panese belonged; in other words, one was divided against one's self. To put it in the best light, religiously the j.a.panese were divided into a large number of different religious groups. Religion is generally spoken of in Europe as one of the characteristics of a nation. If it is insufficient to serve as an a.s.sociating link of a nation, at least the difference in religious belief can draw a line of marked distinction between different nations, and thus the embracing of the same religion becomes indirectly a strong uniting force in a nation. Such a co-existence of heterogeneous forms of religious beliefs painted the confessional map of j.a.pan in too many variegated colours, a condition which was directly opposed to the process of national unification, of which our country had been placed in urgent need for a very long time. In short, it was hard for us to expect from the religious side anything helpful in our national affairs.

Moreover, the religious spirit of the nation reached its climax in this later Ashikaga period. Except in the age of the introduction of Buddhism and the beginning of the Kamakura era, enthusiasm for salvation has never, in all the course of j.a.panese history, been stronger than in this period. We witness now several religious corporations, the most remarkable of which were those formed by two violent and influential sects of j.a.panese Buddhism, Jodo-shinshu or Ikko-shu and Nichiren-shu or Hokke-shu. The followers of the latter, though said to be the most aggressive sectarians in our country, were not so numerous as the former, and were put under control by n.o.bunaga with no great difficulty.

The former, however, was by far the mightier, const.i.tuting an exclusive society by itself, and its adherents spread especially over the provinces of central j.a.pan, that is to say, wherever the arms of n.o.bunaga were triumphant. It presented therefore a great hindrance to the uniform administration of his domains.

Other Buddhist bodies, which had been not less formidable, not because their creed had numerous fervent adherents, but because they had an invisible historical prestige originating in very old times, were the monks of the temples and monasteries on Mount Hiyei, belonging to the Tendai sect, and of those cl.u.s.tered on Mount Koya, of the Shingon sect.

These two sects had long ceased active propaganda, but the temples had been revered by the Imperial house, and none had ever dared to put a check upon the arrogance of the priests and monks residing in them. As they had received rich donations in land from the court and from devotees, they had been able to live a luxurious life, and very few of them gave themselves up to religious works. Most of them behaved as if they were soldiers by profession, and were always ready to fight, not only in defence of the interests of the corporations to which they belonged, but also as auxiliaries of neighbouring territorial lords, when their aid was called for. Such had been the practice since the end of Fujiwara regime. The more their soldierly character predominated, the more their religious colouring decreased, and in the period of which I am speaking now, they were rather territorial powers than religious bodies. If we seek for their counterpart in the history of Europe, the republic founded by order of the Teutonic Knights in Prussia would fairly correspond to them, rather than ordinary bishoprics or archbishoprics. For the unification, therefore, they were also obstacles which could not be suffered to remain as they had been.

In order to achieve the national unification and to effect the modernisation of the country, it was necessary to dispense with all the red tape, the time-honoured superst.i.tions and all other enc.u.mbrances lying in the way. It was not, however, an easy task to do away with all these things, for they had been held sacrosanct, so that to set them at defiance was but to brave the public opinion of the time. And none had been courageous enough to raise his hand against them, until n.o.bunaga decided to rid himself of all these feeble but tenacious shackles.

In the year 1571 n.o.bunaga attacked Mount Hiyei, for the turbulent shavelings of the mountain had sided with his enemies in the war of the preceding year, and burned down the Temple Yenryakuji to the ground. The emblem of the glory of Buddhism in j.a.pan, which had stood for more than seven centuries, was thus turned to ashes. The next blow was struck at the recalcitrant priests of the temple of Negoro, belonging to the same sect as Koya and situated near it. As for the Ikko-sectarians with the Hongwanji as centre, the arms of n.o.bunaga were not so successful against them as against the other two temples, so that in the end he was compelled to conclude an armistice with them, but he was able in great measure to curtail their overbearing power. Of all these feats of arms, the burning of the temples on Mount Hiyei most dumbfounded n.o.bunaga's contemporaries, for the hallowed inst.i.tution, held in the highest esteem rivalling even the prestige of the Imperial family, was thus prostrated in the dust, unable to rise up again to its former grandeur. It is much lamented by later historians that in the conflagration of the temple an immense number of invaluable doc.u.ments, chronicles and other kinds of historical records was swept away forever, and they calumniated our hero on this account rather severely. It is true that if those materials had existed to this day, the history of our country would have been much more lucid and easy to comprehend than it is now, and if n.o.bunaga could have saved those papers first, and then burnt the temple, he would have acted far more wisely than he did, and have earned less censure from posterity. But history is not made for the sake of historians, and we need not much lament about losses which there was little possibility of avoiding. A nation ought to feel more grateful to a great man for giving her a promising future, than for preserving merely some souvenirs of the past. The bell announcing the dawn of modern j.a.pan was rung by n.o.body but n.o.bunaga himself by this demolition of a decrepit inst.i.tution.

It was not only those proud priests that defied n.o.bunaga and thereby suffered a heavy calamity, but the flourishing city of Sakai met the same fate. As the city had been accustomed to despise the military force of the condottieri, who abounded in the provinces neighbouring Kyoto and were easily to be bribed by money to change sides, it misunderstood the new rising power of n.o.bunaga, and dared to defy him. The insolence of the citizens of this wealthy town irritated n.o.bunaga and was punished by him severely. The defence works of the city were razed to the ground, and the city was placed under the control of a mayor appointed by him.

The only city in j.a.pan which promised to grow an autonomous political body thus succ.u.mbed to the new unifying force.

n.o.bunaga was born, however, not to be a mere insensate destroyer of ancient j.a.pan. He seems also to have been gifted with the ability of reconstruction, an ability which was not meagre in him at all. That his special attention was directed to the improvement of the means of communication shows that he considered the work of organisation and consolidation to be as important as gaining a victory. The countenance which he gave to the Christian missionaries might have been the result of his repugnance at the degradation or intractability of the Buddhists in j.a.pan. Could it not be imagined, however, that he was p.r.o.ne, in religious affairs as well as in other things, to seek the yet untried means thoroughly to renovate j.a.pan? It is much to be regretted that he did not live long enough to see his aims attained. When he died, his destructive task had not reached its end, and his constructive work had barely begun. It was he, however, who indicated that j.a.pan was a country which could be truly unified, and that what had come to be preserved and revered blindly should not all necessarily be so; and the grand task of building up the new j.a.pan, initiated by him, was transferred to his successor, Hideyoshi.

It was in 1582 that n.o.bunaga died in Kyoto, and in the quarrel which ensued after his death among his Diadochi, Hideyoshi remained as the final successor. The year after, osaka was chosen as the place of his residence. He was of very low origin, so that he had even less footing in the conventional old regime than his master n.o.bunaga, and therefore was more fitted to become the creator of the new j.a.pan. He continued the course of conquest begun by n.o.bunaga, and annexed the whole of historic j.a.pan within eight years from his accession to the political power. The most noteworthy item in his internal administration was the land survey which he ordered to be undertaken parallel to the progress of his arms.

The great estates of j.a.pan were one after another subjected to a uniform measurement, and thus was fashioned the standard of new taxation. This land-survey began in 1590 and continued till the death of Hideyoshi. The proportion of the tax levied to the area of the taxable land must still have varied in different localities, but the mode of taxation was now simplified thereby to a great extent, for the old systems, each of which was peculiar to an individual estate, were henceforth mostly abrogated.

The manorial system of old j.a.pan was entirely swept away.

The unity of the nation under Hideyoshi, that is to say, j.a.pan at the disposal of a single person, an illuminated despot, might have been really the result of the long process of unification gradually accentuated, but it may also be considered as one of the causes which brought about a still stronger national consciousness. The expulsion of the foreign missionaries and the prohibition of the Christian propaganda did not const.i.tute a religious persecution in its strict sense. That Hideyoshi was no enthusiastic Buddhist should be accepted as a negative proof of it. Most probably he had no religious aversion against Christianity, but the intermeddling of those missionaries in the politics of our country infuriated him, for the demand for the solid unification of the nation, embodied in him, was against such an encroachment. The persecution, which crowned many adventurers with the honour of martyrdom, is to be imputed to the lack of prudence on the part of those missionaries.

As to the motive of the Korean invasion undertaken by Hideyoshi, various interpretations have been put forth by various historians. Some explain it as mere love of adventure and fame. Others attribute it to the necessity of keeping malcontent warriors engaged abroad, in order to keep the country pacific. As Hideyoshi himself died while the expedition was still in progress, giving neither explanation nor hint of his real motive, it is very difficult for us to fathom his innermost thought. It would not be altogether a mistaken idea, however, if we consider it as an outcome of his unifying aspiration carried a few steps farther outside the empire.

When we consider his brilliant career from its beginning, the amount of work which he accomplished greatly exceeded what we could expect from a single ordinary mortal. He performed his share of the construction of new j.a.pan admirably. As to the organisation of what Hideyoshi had roughly put together, it was reserved for the prudent intelligence of Iyeyasu to accomplish.

CHAPTER XI

THE TOKUGAWA SHOGUNATE,--ITS POLITICAL ReGIME

The spirit of the coming age was loudly heralded by n.o.bunaga. Most of the hindrances which had persistently obstructed the national progress for a long while were cleared away at his peremptory call. Then out of the quarry opened by him the stones for the new pieces of sculpture were hewn out by his successor Hideyoshi. The blocks, however, which were only rough-cut by the latter, were left unfinished, awaiting the final touch of wise and prudent Iyeyasu. The Shogunate which he set up at Yedo, now Tokyo, in the province of Musashi, continued for more than two centuries and a half. Not only was it the longest in duration among our Shogunates, but it exceeded most of the European dynasties in the number of years which it covered, being a little longer than the reign of the Bourbons in France, including that of the branch of Orleans and of the Restoration. During this long regime of the single house of the Tokugawa, j.a.pan had been able to prepare herself slowly to attain the stage on which all the world witnesses her now standing.

The history of j.a.pan under this Shogunate shows that throughout the whole epoch our country had not yet been entirely stripped of her medieval garments, but it is absurd at the same time to designate the period as essentially not modern. For long years we have been on our forward march, always dragging along with us the ever-acc.u.mulating residue of the civilisation of the past. If any one, however, should venture to judge us by the enormous heaps of these souvenirs of a by-gone civilisation overburdening us, and should say that the j.a.panese had been standing still these two centuries and a half, then he would be entirely mistaken. The overestimation of j.a.pan of the Meidji era by a great many foreigners is, though seconded by not a few j.a.panese, a fault which had its origin in this misapprehension about our country under the Tokugawa regime. The attention of these observers was engrossed, when they took their first views of the land and people, by those things which seemed to them strange and curious, being quite different from what they themselves possessed at home, or which were thought by them anachronistic, on account of having been abandoned by them long ago, though once they had them also in their own countries. As regards what they had been accustomed to at home, they took very little notice of it in j.a.pan, and considered the existence of such things in our country as a matter of course, if they happened to come across them. Most of them came over to j.a.pan, prepossessed already by their expectations of finding here a unique country, and were thus unconsciously led, after their view of the country itself, to depict it in a very quaint light, as something entirely different from anything they had ever experienced anywhere; an error which even the most studious and acute observer, such as Engelhardt Kaempfer, was not able to escape. No need to mention the rest, especially those missionaries who wished to extol their own merits at the expense of the j.a.panese. We are still suffering from misconceptions about our country on the part of Europeans,--misconceptions which are the legacy of the misrepresentation of j.a.pan by those early observers. By no means, however, do I presume to try to exhibit j.a.pan only in her brightest colours. Far from it, and what I ask foreign readers not to forget is that the history of j.a.pan under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the period which was essentially modern, should not be superficially judged by its abundance of feudal trammels fondly described by contemporary Europeans. In this chapter, I shall first make manifest which were the things medieval retained in the time of the Tokugawa, and then treat about the essential character of the age which should be called all but modern.

In the foregoing chapter I spoke about some resemblances between our later Ashikaga period and the Italian renaissance of the Quattrocento.

In the successive phases which followed in the East and in the West, there might be found some other similarities. History, however, has not been ordained to run in streams exactly parallel to one another in all countries, and to be a counterpart of the age of the Reformation, the epochs of the Oda and the Toyotomi are not more appropriate than the age of the Kamakura Shogunate. A style in j.a.panese art, prevalent during and after the regime of Hideyoshi and called "the Momoyama" by recent connoisseurs had a striking resemblance to the Empire style, which followed the Rococo in Europe, and in some respects indeed the later Ashikaga period of our history might be likened to Europe of the eighteenth century, without gross inappropriateness, while at other points it might be compared to the Renaissance with equal fairness. It would be very stupid, however, to surmise that j.a.pan in the Tokugawa period attained to a culture which in its general aspect belonged almost to the same stage as that prevailing in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Art, though an important cultural factor, cannot be made the sole criterion of the civilisation of any nation or people. It is quite indisputable that j.a.pan under the Tokugawa Shogunate had many things about which we could not boast.

So long as war is a calamity unavoidable in this world, it is folly to expect in any country that the cruelty of men to men will entirely cease. But if the intensity of cruelty in warfare be taken as being in inverse ratio to the progress of civilisation, as it generally used to be, then the Tokugawa period evidently should not be lauded as an age of great enlightenment. Until the end of the Shogunate of this house it had been the custom for a warrior on the battlefield to cut off the head of the antagonist whom he had slain. Though we have had no such demoralising sort of warfare in our history as that carried on by mercenary troops in medieval Europe, where defeated warriors were taken prisoners in order to obtain from them as rich ransoms as they could afford to pay, in other words, though the nature of warfare in j.a.pan was far more serious in general than in the West, it was on that account far more dangerous for the combatants engaged. It was the custom in any battle to reward that warrior who first decapitated an enemy's head as generously as one who was the first over the wall in an attack on a fortress. Moreover, during the ceremony in celebration of a victory on a battlefield, all those enemy heads were collected and brought for the inspection of the commanding general of the victorious army. Such a custom in warfare, however efficient it might have been in stimulating the martial courage of warriors, cannot be regarded as praiseworthy in any civilised country, even where war is considered as the highest occupation of the people.

The j.a.panese manner of suicide called _hara-kiri_ or _seppuku_, a custom of world-wide celebrity, is another thing which is well to be commented on here. If any foreigner should suppose that _seppuku_ has been very frequently committed in the same manner as we see it practised on the stage, he would be greatly misled in appreciating the true national character of the j.a.panese. On the contrary, _seppuku_ has not been a matter of everyday occurrence, having taken place far less frequently than one hears now-a-days about railway accidents. Moreover, when it was performed, it was carried out in decent ways, if we may use the word decent here, and not in the grotesque mode displayed on the j.a.panese stage, accompanied by sardonic laughter, with bowels exposed after cutting the belly crosswise. The reason why the j.a.panese warrior resorted to _seppuku_ in committing suicide was not to kill himself in a methodically cruel manner, but to die an honourable and manly death by his own hand. For such methods of committing suicide, as taking poison, drowning, strangling oneself, and the like, were considered very ign.o.ble, and especially unworthy of warriors. Even to die by merely cutting one's throat was held to be rather effeminate. The fear of the protraction of the death agony was looked on as a token of cowardice, and therefore to be able to kill one's self in the most sober and circ.u.mstantial manner, and at the same time to do it with every consideration of others, was thought to be one of the requisite qualifications of a brave warrior in an emergency. In short, for a suicide to be honourable, it had to be proved that it was not the result of insanity. Thus we can see that not the spirit of cruelty but martial honour was the motive of committing _seppuku_, and it would be unfair to stigmatise the j.a.panese as a cruel people because of the practice. Still I am far from wishing to vindicate this custom in all its aspects. The fact that this method of killing one's self continued during the whole of the Tokugawa regime as a penalty, without loss of honour, for capital crimes of the _samurai_ show that the humane culture of the age left much to be wished for.

Cla.s.s distinction was another dark spot on the culture of the age. All sorts of people outside the fighting cla.s.s were roughly cla.s.sified into three bodies, that is to say, peasants, artisans, and merchants, and were held in utter subjection, as cla.s.ses made simply to be governed.

But the often-quoted tradition that warriors of that time had as their privilege the right to kill any of the commonalty at their sweet will and pleasure, without the risk of incurring the slightest punishment thereby, is erroneous, having no foundation in real historical fact.

Those warriors who had committed a homicide were without prejudice called upon to justify their act before the proper authority. If they failed to prove that they were the provoked and injured party, they were sure to have severe penalties inflicted on them. On the whole, however, the common people in the Tokugawa age were looked down upon by warriors as inferiors in reasoning and understanding, and therefore as disqualified to partic.i.p.ate in public affairs, social as well as political. That their intellectual defects must have been due to their neglected education was a matter clean put out of mind. As regards the respective professions of the above-mentioned three cla.s.ses of plebeians, agriculture was thought to be the most honourable, on account of producing the staple food-material, so that warriors, especially of the lower cla.s.ses, did not disdain to engage in tilling the lands allotted to them or in exploring new arable lands. The peasants themselves, however, were not so greatly esteemed on account of their engaging in a profession which was held honourable. Handicrafts in general and artisans employed in them had not been held particularly respectable by themselves, but as the profession was productive, it was recognised as indispensable, despised by no means. Moreover, many artistic geniuses, who had come out of the innumerable mult.i.tudes of artisans of various trades, have been held in very high regard in our country, where the people have the reputation of being one of the most artistic in the world; and those articles of rare talent unwittingly raised the esteem of the crafts in which they were engaged. That which was most despised as a profession was the business of merchants in all lines, for to gain by buying and selling was thought from times past to be a transaction approaching almost to chicanery, and therefore by no means to be encouraged from the standpoint of national and martial morals. Pedlars and small shop-keepers were therefore simply held in contempt. Great merchants, however, though not much esteemed on account of their profession, were generally treated with due consideration in virtue of their ama.s.sed wealth. Only too frequently had the Shogunate, as well as various _daimyo_, been obliged to stoop to court the goodwill of rich merchants in order to get money from them.

The methods of taxation were very arbitrary, and the person and the rights of property of individuals were not very highly respected at that time, the common people under the Shogunate being often subjected to hard and brutal treatment, their persons maltreated and injured and their properties confiscated on various trifling pretences. Though the way to pet.i.tion was not absolutely debarred to them, it was made very irksome and perilous for plebeians to sue and obtain a hearing for their manifold complaints. On the other hand, as they were not recognised as a part of the nation to be necessarily consulted, and as the _vox populi_ was not heeded in the management of public affairs, their education was not regarded as an indispensable duty of the government. No serious endeavour had ever been made to improve the common people intellectually, nor to raise their standard of living. If a number of them showed themselves able to behave like gentle folk, as if they had been warriors by birth and, therefore, well-educated, they were rewarded as men of extraordinary merits such as could not be reasonably expected of them.

The status of the political organisation of the country during the Tokugawa regime was also what ought to be called medieval, if we draw our conclusions from the materials ranged on the darker side only. The country had been divided into parcels, large and small, numbering in all a little less than three hundred, each with a territorial lord or a _daimyo_ as its quasi-independent autocratic ruler. The frontier line dividing adjacent territories belonging to different _daimyo_ used to be guarded very vigilantly on both sides, and pa.s.sage, both in and out, was minutely scrutinised. For that purpose numerous barrier-gates were set up along and within the boundary. Any land bounded by such frontiers, and conferred on a _daimyo_ by the Shogunate as his hereditary possession, was by its nature a self-const.i.tuted state, the political system prevailing within which having been modelled after that of the Shogunate itself. At the same time the territory of a _daimyo_ was economically a self-providing, self-sufficient body. To become in such wise independent at least was the ideal of the _daimyo_ possessing the territory or of the territorial statesmen under him. In other words, the territory of a _daimyo_ was an ent.i.ty, political and economical. In each territory certain kinds of produce from those confines had been strictly prohibited by regulation to be exported beyond the frontier, for fear that there might sometimes occur a scarcity of those commodities for the use of the inhabitants of the territory, or lest other territories should imitate the cultivation of like kinds of produce, so that the value of their own commodities might decrease thereby. In case of a famine, that is to say, of the failure of rice crops in a territory, a phenomenon which has by no means been of rare occurrence in our country, the export of cereals used to be forbidden in most of the neighboring territories, even when they had a "b.u.mper crop."

Such an internal embargo testifies that not only had j.a.pan been closed against foreigners, but within herself each territory cared only for its own welfare, adhering to a mercantilist principle, as if it stood quite secluded from the rest of the country. Very little of the cohesion necessary to an integral state could be perceived in j.a.pan of that time.

Such was the condition of j.a.pan under the Tokugawa Shogunate presented to the eyes of, and easily noticed by, the foreign observers, who visited our country at the beginning and the middle of the period. Nay, many of the foreigners who wrote about our land and people seem to have shared nearly the same views as above. In truth, however, many important factors of the j.a.panese history of this epoch have been omitted by them, and the idea they could form of j.a.pan from the one-sided and scanty material at their disposal was only a very incomplete image of modern j.a.panese civilisation. I shall, therefore, try to give a general survey of the political and social condition of our country from the beginning of the seventeenth century down to the Revolution of the Meidji, and then shall treat in brief about the civilisation of the age.

The Shogunate of the house of the Tokugawa was not an entirely new invention. It was a partial recognition of the old regime which Iyeyasu had inherited from Hideyoshi, as far as the territorial lords were concerned, who were installed or recognised anterior to the advent of Iyeyasu to power. Though a great many of the former feudatories, especially those who had been faithful to the House of the Toyotomi to the last, had been killed or deprived of their possessions after the decisive battle of Sekigahara, not a few of them survived, counting among them the most powerful of the _daimyo_, the House of Mayeta, who was the master of Kaga and two other provinces on the Sea of j.a.pan. The lords of this kind had formerly been the equals of the Tokugawa, when the latter was standing under the protection of Hideyoshi, and it was difficult for the new Shogunate, in a country where the Emperor has ever been the paramount sovereign, to make those lords formally swear the oath of fealty to itself. The nature of the sovereignty, therefore, of the Tokugawa over the feudatories aforesaid was only that of _primus inter pares_. The _daimyo_ who stood in this relation to the Shogunate were called _tozama_.

The rest of the _daimyo_, together with the bodyguard of the Shogun, the so-called "eighty thousand" with their habitual residence at Yedo, made up the hereditary retainers or _fudai_. The non-domestic _daimyo_ had nothing to do with the Shogun's central government, all the posts of which, from such high functionaries as the _rochu_ or elders, who were none other than the cabinet ministers of the Shogunate, down to such petty officials as scribes and watchmen, had been all filled with domestics of various grades. As far as these domestics or direct retainers of the Shogunate were concerned, the military regime of the Tokugawa can be held to have been a revived form of that of Kamakura. In the former, however, the disparity in power and wealth between the upper and the lower domestics of the Shogun was far more remarkable than it had been among the retainers of the latter, that is to say, the _djito_.

The term "go-kenin," held to be honourable in the time of Kamakura, became, in the Tokugawa period, a designation of the lowest order of the direct va.s.sals of the Shogun. A certain number belonging to the upper cla.s.s of the _fudai_ or domestics of the Tokugawa Shogunate were made _daimyo_, and placed on the same footing as feudatories of historical lineage, the former equals of the Tokugawa, and formed with them henceforth the highest military n.o.bility of the country. The remainder of the domestics, who were not raised to the rank of _daimyo_, were comprised under the name of _hatamoto_, which means "under the standard," that is to say, the Body-guard of the Shogun. Among the members of this body there were indeed numerous scales of gradation. The lowest of them had to lead a very miserable and straitened life in some obscure corners of the city of Yedo, while the best of them stood as regards income very near to minor _daimyo_, and were often more influential. Their political status, however, notwithstanding manifold differences in rank among them, was all the same, all being equally, direct va.s.sals of the Shogunate, and having no regular warriors or _samurai_ as their own va.s.sals. They, therefore, belonged to the lowest grade of the privileged cla.s.ses in the military hierarchy, and in this respect there was no cardinal difference between them and the common _samurai_ who were va.s.sals of ordinary _daimyo_. That they were, however, the immediate subjects of the Shogun, and that they did not owe fealty to any _daimyo_, who was in reality subordinate at least to the Shogun, if not his va.s.sal in name, placed them in a status like that of the knights immediate of the Holy Roman Empire or of the mediatised princes of recent Germany; in short, above the status of ordinary _samurai_ attached to an ordinary _daimyo_. Strictly speaking, between these two there interposed another group of _samurai_. They were the va.s.sals of the three _daimyo_ of extraordinary distinction, of Nagoya in the province of Owari, of Wakayama in the province of Kii, and of Mito in the province of Hitachi. All these three being of the lateral branches of the Tokugawa, were held in specially high regard, and put at the topmost of all the other _daimyo_, so that their va.s.sals considered themselves to be quasi-_hatamoto_ and therefore above the "common" or "garden" _samurai_.

The _daimyo_ acted as virtual potentates in territories granted to them, and held a court and a government there, both modelled largely after the household and the government of the Shogun at Yedo. The better part of the _daimyo_ resided in castles built imposingly after the architectural style of the fortresses in Europe at that time, the technic having perhaps been introduced along with Christianity, and they led a life far more easy and elegant, though more regular, than the _shugo_ of the Ashikaga age. It has been ascribed, by the way, to the rare sagacity of Iyeyasu as a politician, that the territories of the two kinds of _daimyo_, _tozama_ and _fudai_, were so adroitly juxtaposed, that the latter were able to keep watch over the former's att.i.tude toward the Shogunate.

The _daimyo_ were ranked according to the officially estimated amount of rice to be produced in the territory of each. In the time of Kamakura, the renumeration of the _djito_ was counted by the area of ricefields in the manor entrusted to his care. By and by, the land which was the source of the renumeration for a _djito_ came to be part.i.tioned among his numerous descendants, and some of the portions allotted became so small, that it was but ridiculous to think of exercising the jurisdiction of military police over them. Area of land began to cease thus to be the standard of valuation of the income of a _djito_, when the office of _djito_ meant only the emolument accompanying it, and no longer carried with it the responsibility inc.u.mbent on it at its first establishment. The ultimate result of such a change was that the quant.i.ty or the price of rice produced began to be adopted gradually as the standard of valuation of the income of territorial lords, and for a while the two standards were in use together till the end of the Ashikaga age. Moreover, infrequently part of the income of a _shugo_ was reckoned by the quant.i.ty of rice, while another part of the income of the same _shugo_ was a.s.sessed by the sale-price of the rice cultivated.

This promiscuous way of valuation, however, caused great irregularity and confusion. For, added to the disagreement about the real quant.i.ty of rice produced and the amount registered to be produced, the price of the cereal itself had been so ceaselessly fluctuating according to the inconstant condition of crops, that there was no such thing as a regular standard price of rice invariably applicable to any year and to any locality. Nevertheless, in an age when no uniform system of currency was established and to accept any coin at its face value was an impossible matter, in other words, when it was difficult to represent the price of rice in any sort of coin then in use, to make a standard of value, not of the actual amount of rice but of its unceasingly vacillating price, could not but cause a great deal of inconvenience and confusion. We can easily see from the above that the quant.i.ty of rice was by far the surer means of bargaining than the money, which was not only indeterminate in value but insufficient to boot. Hideyoshi, therefore, put a stop to the use of the method of indicating the income of a territorial lord by its valuation in money, and decreed that henceforth only the yearly estimated yield of rice, counted by the _koku_ as a unit, should be adopted as the means of denoting the revenue of a territory, a _koku_ roughly corresponding to five bushels in English measure. The land-survey, which he undertook on a grand scale throughout the whole empire, had as its main purpose to measure the area of land cla.s.sed as rice-fields in the territories of the _daimyo_, according to the units newly decreed, and to make the estimate of the amount of rice said to be produced commensurate as nearly as possible with the average crop realisable. Withal, the inequality of the standard of estimate in different localities was rectified by this a.s.sessment of Hideyoshi's.

This method of estimating the income of a _daimyo_ had come into general use since the beginning of the Tokugawa Shogunate. As there was then no system in our country of gradating the _daimyo_ by t.i.tles, such as dukes, counts, and so forth, the estimated annual yield of rice in _koku_ was used as the sole means of determining the rank of the lords of the various territories in the long queue of the Tokugawa _daimyo_, with the exception of a very few who had been placed in a comparatively high rank on account of their specially n.o.ble lineage or the unique position of their families in the national history, though most of the n.o.bles belonging to the latter cla.s.s were cla.s.sed as an intervening group. The minimum number of _koku_ a.s.signed to a _daimyo_ was ten thousand. As regards the maximum number of _koku_, there was no legal limit. One who stood, however, highest in order was the above-mentioned House of Mayeta, the lord of Kaga etc., whose domain was a.s.sessed at more than a million _koku_. About three hundred _daimyo_, who were ranged between the two extremes, were divided into three orders. All those worth more than two hundred thousand _koku_ formed a cla.s.s of the _daimyo_ major, and those worth less than one hundred thousand were comprised in a group of the _daimyo_ minor, while the rest, that is to say, those between one and two hundred thousand formed the middle corps.

In the Shogun's court, a seat was a.s.signed to each _daimyo_ in a specified room, according to the cla.s.s to which he belonged. One could, therefore, easily tell the rank of a _daimyo_ by the name of the room in which he had to wait when he attended on the Shogun. All _daimyo_, almost without exception, had to move in and out at fixed intervals between his territory, where his castle or camp stood, and Yedo, where he kept, or, to say more correctly, was granted by the Shogun, residences, generally more than two in number. The interval allowed to a _daimyo_ for remaining in his territory varied according to the distance of that territory from Yedo, being the shorter and oftener for the nearer. He was obliged to leave his wife and children constantly in one of his residences at Yedo, as hostages for his fidelity to the Shogun.

As to the va.s.sals or _samurai_ of a _daimyo_, there were also two sorts.

By far the greater part of the _samurai_ belonging to a _daimyo_ had their dwellings in their master's territory, generally in the vicinity of his castle. These _samurai_ were the main support of their lord, and had to accompany him by turns in his official tour to Yedo and back. The rest of the _samurai_ under the same lord, a band which formed the small minority, lived constantly in Yedo, each family in a compartment of the accessory buildings surrounding the lord's residence like a colony.

These were as a rule men who were enlisted into the service of a _daimyo_ more for the sake of making a gallant show at his official and social functions at Yedo, than for the sake of strengthening his fighting forces. It was natural that men accustomed to the polished life of the military capital were thought better qualified to fulfil such functions than the rustic _samurai_ fresh from his territories who were good only for fighting and other serious kinds of business. While a _daimyo_ was absent in his territory, a _samurai_ of his, belonging to this metropolitan group, was entrusted with the care of his residences and their occupants in Yedo, and also with the duty of receiving orders from the Shogunate or of transacting inter-territorial business with representatives of other _daimyo_ at Yedo. The meetings held by these representatives of the _daimyo_ were said to be one of the most fashionable gatherings in Yedo. That the doyen of such functionaries had a certain prestige over others, was very similar to the usage among the diplomatic corps in Europe.

The _samurai_ who had their abode in their lord's territory, however, represented the real strength of a _daimyo_, and were the soul and body of the whole military regime. The number of _samurai_ in a territory differed according to the rank and the resources of a _daimyo_. Some of the powerful n.o.bles counted more than ten thousand regular _samurai_ under them, while minor ones could maintain only a few hundred as necessary retainers. In the latter case almost all of the _samurai_ had their dwellings cl.u.s.tering around the castle or camp of their lord. If there were any _samurai_ who lived outside of the residential town, they led an agricultural rather than a soldierly life. The relation of va.s.salage in such a territory was simple, for under the _samurai_ consisting of a single order there was no swords-wearer serving them. In the territory of the powerful _daimyo_, however, especially in those of the big _daimyo_ in Kyushu and the northern part of Honto, comprising an area of two or more average provinces in Middle j.a.pan, the relation of va.s.salage was very complicated, sometimes forming a feudalism of the second order. That is to say, the most influential _samurai_ under those _daimyo_ had also their own small territory granted by their lord, just as the latter had his granted or recognised by the Shogunate, and held several hundred swords-wearers, non-commissioned _samurai_, in their service. It was not rare that some of these magnates surpa.s.sed in income many minor independent _daimyo_, and had in their hands the destiny of a greater number of people, for their emolument rose often to twenty or thirty thousand _koku_. Their rank in the military regime, however, was indisputably lower than that of the smallest of _daimyo_, on account of their being only indirectly subordinate to the Shogun.

In all territories throughout the whole country, the emolument of the _samurai_ was granted in the form of land, or of rice from the granaries of the _daimyo_, or paid in cash. Sometimes we see a combination of two or three of these forms given to one _samurai_. Besides this pay a patch of ground was allotted to each _samurai_ as his homestead, and a part of that ground used to be cultivated to produce vegetables for family consumption. In whatever form a _samurai_ might receive his stipend, it was officially denoted by the number of _koku_, registered as his nominal income, and that very number determined his position in the list of va.s.sals of a _daimyo_, unless he came from an extraordinarily distinguished lineage. As regards the maximum and the minimum number of _koku_ given to _samurai_, there was no uniform standard applicable to all of the territories. Such powerful _daimyo_ as Mayeta in Kaga, Shimatsu in Satsuma, and Date in Mutsu owned many va.s.sal-_samurai_ who were so puissant as to be fairly comparable to small _daimyo_, while in the territories of the latter, a _samurai_ of pretty high position in his small territorial circle received an allowance of _koku_ so scant that one of the lowest rank, if he were a regular _samurai_, would disdain to receive in big territories.

Generally speaking, however, one hundred _koku_ was considered to be an average standard, applicable to _samurai_ under any _daimyo_, to distinguish those of the respectable or official cla.s.s from those of the non-commissioned or subaltern cla.s.s. Only the _samurai_ above this standard could keep servants bearing two swords, long and short, as a _samurai_ himself did. Not only all officers in time of war, but all high civil functionaries in the territorial government of a _daimyo_ were taken from this body of orthodox _samurai_. The _samurai_ below this level could keep a servant wearing only one sword, the shorter, and they had to serve their lord as officials of the inferior cla.s.s, such as scribes, cashiers, butlers, etc.

The lowest in the scale of the military regime was the group of _ashigaru_, that is to say, of the light infantry. Those who belonged to this group, though wearers of two swords, were not counted as of the corps of _samurai_. Being legally va.s.sals of a _daimyo_, they had yet very rare chances of serving him directly, and often they enlisted into the household service of a higher _samurai_. Between the _ashigaru_ and the regular _samurai_, there was another intermediate group of two-sworded men, called _kachi_, which means warriors-on-foot. In feudal times all warriors, if of _samurai_ rank, were presumed to be cavaliers, though in reality most of them had not even a stable, and skill in horsemanship was not rigorously required from the _samurai_ of the lower cla.s.s. The name _kachi_, given to those who in rank came next to the _samurai_, implied that this intermediate group of quasi-_samurai_ was not allowed to ride on horse-back. This group was, however, much nearer to the _samurai_ than to the _ashigaru_ group.

So far I have given a rough sketch of the gradations in the military regime in the territory of a _daimyo_. It should be here noticed that, besides the cla.s.ses above stated, there were many other minor groups below the regular _samurai_, and that there were also diverse heterogeneities of system in the territories of different _daimyo_.