Global Crisis
Page 82
Other Japanese lords followed Iemitsu's example whenever their estates faced a crisis. Thus in August 1654 Ikeda Mitsumasa, lord of Bizen province (central Honshu), confided to his diary that ‘this year's drought and flood are the greatest disasters to befall my tenure as daimyō’, and he therefore decided that ‘we must avail ourselves of the wisdom of the entire domain. Consequently a suggestion box will be set up. All, from the elders to men of those of lowest status, should write recommendations anonymously and place them in the box.’ Ikeda also instructed his tenants to harvest the local rice early and purchased additional supplies in Osaka; he postponed tax payments and ‘forgave’ arrears; and he heard petitions from the poor and exempted those deemed incapable of paying.42 Although the survival of his diary may make Ikeda seem particularly solicitous, he was far from unique in seeking to preserve and protect his vassals: other daimyō emulated Tokugawa ‘policies even when they were not, strictly speaking, required to do so’ and always took care to articulate policies that fell ‘within the broad outlines established’ by the central government. Thus the lord of Okayama (central Honshu) reminded his officials in 1657 that the shogun
Desires nothing but that there be no one in the entire country who is starving or cold, and that the entire country prosper. However, since he cannot accomplish this alone, he has entrusted whole provinces to [major vassals like me] … Likewise, I cannot compass all the affairs of the domain alone, and so I have entrusted [parts of it] to all of you in fief, and have commanded you to govern them in accordance with my original intentions. And yet you act as if [these fiefs] were your own private property, so that things have now come to the point that you exploit the lower orders, and you do not even realize that there are people starving… If we rule carelessly, and govern so that there are people starving and cold, or so that parts of the province are depopulated, then we shall not escape confiscation of the domain by His Majesty.43
It would be hard to find a better summary of Tokugawa domestic policies during the Little Ice Age.
Pursuit of a risk-averse foreign policy formed the last critical element in Iemitsu's efforts to preserve Japan from crisis. Not only did he strictly limit all contact with foreigners, confining to islands in Nagasaki Bay first the Portuguese, then the Dutch, and finally also the Chinese, he also forbade all except occasional Korean and Ryukyuan embassies to enter the country. More important, the shogun scrupulously avoided foreign intervention. Admittedly, when the Manchus invaded Korea, in 1627–8 and again in 1637, Iemitsu offered to send troops to help repel the invaders (recalling the devastating Japanese invasions in the 1590s, the Koreans naturally declined). Then in 1646, the shogun's officials at Nagasaki turned away Chinese junks manned by crews ‘whose heads were shaved like Tartars’ – that is, who had followed the orders of the Qing and shaved their foreheads – ‘with orders to return only if they looked like Chinese’.44 Even more provocatively, Iemitsu offered asylum to some Ming loyalists. But he went no further: in 1646 and again in 1650 the shogun rejected requests for military assistance from Ming loyalists who opposed the Qing ‘usurpers’ (see chapter 5 above). Likewise, in 1637 and in 1643 he declined Dutch invitations to launch a joint attack on Spanish Manila – although on the latter occasion he had a Spanish renegade draw him a map of Manila, and then checked it for accuracy with a Dutch merchant visiting Edo. He also personally interrogated some Dutch captives about how they had captured a Spanish fort on Taiwan, and how they fought at sea, before releasing them.45
The importance of avoiding foreign entanglements cannot be overestimated. Whereas Europe knew only four years of peace during the seventeenth century, and China knew none, Tokugawa Japan knew only four years of war (and none at all after 1638). By avoiding war, the sink that drained the revenues of most other early modern states, the shoguns managed to keep tax rates relatively low and yet still accumulate resources with which to respond effectively in case of a natural disaster.
The Tipping Point: Onwards and Upwards
In 1651 Iemitsu died after a long illness, leaving a 10-year-old son to succeed him, guided by a council of regency – but, because they had been the shogun's catamites, two of the senior regents immediately ‘followed their lord in death’ by committing suicide. This created a vacuum of power for which some of those whom the Tokugawa had oppressed had long prepared.46
Iemitsu's success in avoiding war both at home and abroad had deprived the samurai of their raison d'être, and many of them either taught or studied at schools and academies. In the words of Mary Elizabeth Berry: ‘For peacetime soldiers, stripped of battleground activity and notoriously underemployed by the shogunal and daimyō bureaucracies, learning became both a rationale for privilege and an opportunity for work – as doctors, political advisors, tutors, teachers, and authors.’47 Not all samurai managed to adjust to being ‘peacetime soldiers’, however. Above all, each time the shogun confiscated a fief he created tens of thousands of rōnin, ‘masterless samurai’, each of whom harboured bitter resentment towards the Tokugawa; and the ability of just 200 rōnin to turn the Shimabara rebellion into a major challenge to the regime graphically revealed their disruptive potential. Reports of Iemitsu's prolonged final illness gave time for several groups of disgruntled samurai to lay plans to seize power as soon as he died.
Yui Shōsetsu, who taught at a military academy in the capital, led one group of samurai conspirators that aimed to capture and blow up the Edo arsenal (whose deputy commander they had suborned), set fires in 20 places around the capital, seize the great castle built by Iemitsu as his headquarters and kill the remaining regents during the ensuing chaos. They might have succeeded but for the fact that, at the moment of Iemitsu's death, one of the leading conspirators was ill and Yui decided to wait until he recovered. During the interval another leader developed a fever, and in his delirium betrayed details of the plot. The government therefore managed to nip the conspiracy in the bud, crucifying or beheading over 30 rebels. Tokugawa power remained intact for the next two centuries.48
There was much more to Tokugawa success in surmounting the crisis of 1651 than contingency and a few executions, however. Elsewhere, the succession of a child ruler (for example, in France after the death of Henry IV or Louis XIII, or in the Dutch Republic after the death of William II), like the death or incapacity of an old one (such as Christian IV of Denmark or the Mughal Shah Jahan), often caused either regime change or civil war, and no sooner had news of the death of Iemitsu and his principal ministers arrived in Nagasaki than the Japanese interpreters attached to the Dutch embassy predicted disaster. The ‘alternate attendance’ system filled Edo with daimyō, some of whom had opposed the Tokugawa during the civil wars, accompanied by thousands of devoted samurai; and the interpreters noted ‘the alterations and feelings this great change had created among the community. Because the prince [Iemitsu's son] is still a minor and the government of this empire will be entrusted to the councillors in the meantime, they fear that jealousy and thirst for power among the nobles will ignite disorder and revolts.’49 Why, then, did these violent outcomes not occur?
On the negative side, the arbitrary policies pursued by the first three Tokugawa shoguns had destroyed or weakened their opponents so effectively that by 1651 no viable alternative focus for loyalty remained. The emperor, the major temples and most of the daimyō had all incurred heavy debts (often through providing the ‘donations’ required by the shoguns for their building projects, and in maintaining lavish mansions in Edo dictated by the ‘alternative attendance’ system). They therefore lacked the resources to exploit the temporary vacuum of power caused by Iemitsu's death. In addition, the ‘one castle per fief’ policy left the daimyō at a severe disadvantage in challenging the central government, which held dozens of strongholds, strategically located throughout the country – including the great castle in Edo that, according to a Dutch envoy, ‘can be compared to one of the largest walled cities in Europe’ and contained enough weapons to equip 100,000 soldiers.50
Furthermore, despite its arbitrary aspects, Tokugawa rule had brought tangible benefits to almost all social groups. The daimyō gained because the shoguns protected lesser lords against their larger neighbours: for 250 years, no daimyō attacked the lands of another (a major contrast with the sixteenth century), and those with a grievance could always seek redress in Edo. The towns prospered because the samurai and other retainers who now thronged the castletowns increased demand for both food and artefacts. Merchants appreciated the creation of beacons, lighthouses and rescue facilities, which made seaborne trade safer, while improved roads and bridges facilitated land commerce. All these developments increased the demand for manufactured goods: a manual published in 1637 tabulated over 1,800 ‘notable products’ for sale in Japan.51
Finally, Tokugawa rule also brought both peace and prosperity to the peasantry. Politically, the shoguns promoted mechanisms for defusing ‘contentious events’: they permitted ‘organized flight’, and although rebellion inexorably brought repression, the protestors normally achieved at least some of their goals (albeit often posthumously).52 Economically, the state's fiscal demands declined. As Hayami Akira observed: ‘Taxes in Tokugawa Japan were based on the principle of establishing a fixed level of production, and levying taxes on that’ – that is, most communities continued to pay their taxes on the basis of the surveys carried out under Hideyoshi in the 1590s, which excluded the yield of new or improved arable lands. Thus a tax rate of 50 per cent on a village with a registered production of 1,000 koku of rice in the 1590s required the payment of 500 koku in tax, even if by 1651 the village actually produced 2,000, 3,000 or more koku. This would be the same as taxing US farmers today according to the yield of their fields in (say) 1945. In addition, neither the shogun nor the daimyō taxed income from the non-agricultural activities of their peasants – cotton fabric, silk thread, paper, soy sauce, and so on – while the Tokugawa levied no income tax, no inheritance tax, and no regular taxes on commerce.53
These measures not only favoured the ‘industrious revolution’ but also promoted economic growth. Whereas past generations of peasants had worked only for sustenance and to pay their taxes, increased market demand and the prospect of retaining their profits encouraged peasants to increase their production. Since low tax rates by the state also benefited landlords, they too promoted the ‘industrious revolution’: some imported new strains of rice and improved existing ones, allowing farmers to select the seed best suited to local conditions, while others distributed iron-tipped farming tools among their peasants and promoted technological improvements in civil engineering (above all irrigation and water supply). Finally, peasants gained from the requirement that samurai migrate from their villages to the lord's castle, because whereas resident samurai could determine the assets and income of each peasant household by personal inspection, surveyors sent by absentee samurai could more easily be deceived.54
Despite all these benefits, the Tokugawa regime might yet have crumbled in 1651 had the regents failed to address the principal grievances that had motivated the conspirators. Henceforth, they drastically reduced demands for daimyō ‘donations’ to Tokugawa building projects. For example, although several regents wanted to rebuild Iemitsu's proud tower at Edo Castle after the Meireki fire of 1657, Hoshina Masayuki (the late shogun's half-brother and now the senior regent) ‘argued that the Tokugawa peace was so stable that the shogun's castle no longer needed a tower’. Instead he devoted all available resources to rebuilding the city. A Dutch delegation to the city a few months later noted with astonishment the passage of ‘fifty of the shogun's horses, each packed with three chests or 3,000 taels of silver’; and were more astonished still when their landlord informed them that the treasure came from the Tokugawa reserves held in Osaka Castle, and that ‘from now till the end of their year, which is another 10½ months, this will be done every day… The money will be distributed by the shogun for the rebuilding of houses in Edo.’55 In addition, after 1651 the shoguns seldom interfered in how the daimyō ran their domains, allowing them to issue their own coinage (and, later, paper money) as well as their own legal codes; while the daimyō respected the shogun's exclusive right to mediate their disputes, to determine all matters of national concern (such as religion, defence and overseas trade) and to regulate public display. They accepted the obligation of ‘alternate attendance’ at Edo, arriving and departing on schedule and maintaining lavish mansions in the capital where many of them had been born and raised.
The only major problem that the Tokugawa failed to solve after 1651 was samurai unemployment. They did their best. They virtually ceased to confiscate fiefs, thus eliminating the principal cause of the masterless samurai whose resentment had threatened the regime. They then provided salaried positions for as many samurai as they could – for example, employing 1,200 of them as an elite fire brigade in Edo after the Meireki fire, and paying others to employ their pens in creating an ideology of unconditional obedience. Herman Ooms has noted the extraordinary durability of the tracts written by Suzuki Shōsan and other samurai (page 493 above). In the 1930s, ‘when an even sharper delineation of nationhood was needed, one that could mobilize the Japanese to the highest degree’, the state deployed the absolutist writings of the seventeenth-century Tokugawa apologists. ‘Social and political values in present-day Japan maintain the structure they received in the seventeenth century.’56
Japan in Print
Just as the Tokugawa knew what they liked, so they knew what they did not like. In 1630 Iemitsu issued an edict banning 32 books in Chinese (most of them translations of European works), and also set up a censor's office in the Confucian Academy in Nagasaki to examine and report on all foreign books arriving in the city, the principal entrepot for trade between Japan and the outside world. On the basis of the censors' reports, the city magistrates burned and banned any condemned work, and obliterated or removed from other works any page that contained any reference to Christianity. In addition, the shogun commanded booksellers throughout Japan to bring in for scrutiny any Japanese work that mentioned foreign religions, and the surviving evidence suggests that they complied: printing blocks were destroyed and publishers punished (although manuscript copies of a few banned works circulated). Those found with Christian literature faced draconian penalties. Thus in 1643, three years after the massacre of the delegation from Macao (page 492 above), a boat carrying four European priests and six Japanese converts came ashore on the island of Kyushu, where the local population immediately captured them and turned them over to the magistrates. Iemitsu ordered them to be brought to Edo and imprisoned at the house of one of his catamites, and he made 11 visits to supervise the torture that secured the apostasy of two and the death of the rest.57
The Tokugawa censors showed less vigilance in non-religious matters. On paper, the government proscribed unauthorized items about the dynasty itself, its advisers and its policies, or about Hideyoshi and his family; any work that criticized the elite, or contained pornography, anything about ‘strange events that have happened recently’ (including love suicides, adultery, vendettas and major fires as well as foreign news), or (in the words of an Edo ordinance of 1673) �
�anything that might offend others, or that deals with new and curious matters’. An ordinance of 1686 not only forbade the publication of ‘such outrageous materials as reckless songs and rumours about recent events’ but also ordered the arrest of ‘those who sell these items on street corners’. Nevertheless, practice rarely matched theory. Most of the shogun's edicts concerning printed materials responded to an individual transgression, and tended to be exhortatory rather than prescriptive. Occasionally the government placed the author and publisher of a condemned work under house arrest, but even then some printed copies normally remained available and manuscript copies abounded. From the 1680s (if not before) street vendors sold broadsheets containing news of current non-political events thanks to a subterfuge: although their activity breached the ban on mentioning current events in publications, they wore masks and so the government tolerated them. Authors also circumvented the censors by producing fictionalized accounts: thus Japan's best-known playwright, Chikamatsu Monzaemon, even managed to publish and perform a play about the 1637–8 Shimabara uprising by ostensibly setting it in the twelfth century. Except where Christianity was concerned, Tokugawa censorship was far from the thought control exercised by the Qing, the Romanovs, the Papacy and other European rulers.58
The Tokugawa fully realized the power of print and promoted works of which they approved. Starting in 1643, just after the sankin kōtai system became mandatory, Edo printers began to publish personnel rosters giving the name, rank, age, crest, income and address of each daimyō; their families and their retainers, their schedule of attendance on the shogun; the distance travelled from each fief; the gifts presented; and so on. Starting in 1659, other printed rosters listed the main officeholders of the Tokugawa, both in the capital and in the provinces, together with their duties, address, stipend, deputies, tenure in office and previous appointments. Tens of thousands of copies flowed from the presses every year, each one duly updated (Plate 20).59