Although Tokugawa literary culture at first served primarily samurai readers in the cities, and especially in the ‘three metropoles’ (santō: Edo, Kyoto and Osaka), the spate of legislation issued by the central government, copied by most daimyō, and the insistence on receiving petitions and reports in writing, meant that every one of the archipelago's 70,000 villages required at least some literate males to read out and copy each text into a special register before passing it on to the next village according to a fixed schedule (the headman of the last village on the schedule certified that the original had completed its required circulation). The same was true of the trade guilds and city wards: both required men with skills in literacy.60
According to Eiko Ikegami's study of the culture of Tokugawa Japan, whereas around 1600 ‘most Japanese with good reading ability – including the ability to read Chinese characters – were either upper-class townspeople or farmers who did not have to perform manual labour’, literacy soon expanded dramatically. A story of the day nicely illustrates the cumulative impact. The father of a family that runs a rice-cleaning shop is telling his children (as fathers everywhere tend to do) how incredibly lucky they are:
When your dad was young, kids weren't given a tutor for writing and reading unless the family was really well-off. In any town ward there were at most only three to five people who could write. Your dad, of course, didn't have a tutor. I can't even form the character ‘i’ [the first character in the Japanese syllabary] correctly. Somehow, though, I managed to learn to read from experience. Nowadays the world has changed, and even a daughter of a humble household like ours can have lessons in writing and reading.61
The lucky and literate daughters of such diligent but deprived fathers could choose from a wide range of reading material. Before 1590, Japanese printers, most of them attached to Buddhist monasteries, had brought out fewer than 500 titles (almost all of them Buddhist religious texts in Chinese); but thereafter a rapidly increasing number of commercial publishers produced books: 12 firms by 1615, over 120 by 1650, and almost 800 by 1700 (Fig. 47). Although many of these firms engaged in other activities besides printing, their collective output was impressive. By 1625, another 500 titles had appeared, doubling the total of Japanese works ever printed, and in 1666 the first List of Japanese and Chinese books in print included over 2,500 titles. The pace continued to quicken, with almost 4,000 titles in the 1670 list, almost 6,000 in the 1685 list, and over 7,000 in the 1692 list.62 This rapid expansion reduced but did not eliminate the preponderance of religious texts, which even in 1693 made up almost half of the total titles – but the other half displayed an amazing intellectual range. Books of haikai no renga (‘playful linked verse’) poetry grew fastest: from 133 titles in 1670 to 676 in 1692. Although now associated principally with Bashō Matsuo (1644–94), Bashō was only one exponent among many masters of haikai, and he could only undertake the famous journeys during which he composed his verses because other haikai enthusiasts all over Japan welcomed and entertained him. These practitioners also paid to enter poetry competitions, some of which offered substantial prize money. In the year of Bashō's death, a Kyoto booklet announced the results of one recent competition that had attracted over 10,000 entries from 15 provinces.63
47. The growth of publishing houses in Japan, 1591–1818.
Starting in the late sixteenth century, Japanese printing burgeoned until more publishing houses existed in 1700 than at any time in over two centuries. The majority of the publishers at that time worked in Kyoto, followed by Osaka and Edo.
Although some entrants no doubt learned to compose poetry from Bashō or another master, others would have consulted one of the numerous printed reference books that taught the rules of composition. By the 1690s, Japanese readers could find reference works describing almost every aesthetic pursuit and hobby: how to arrange flowers, perform the tea ceremony, play shamisen, and write letters. They could also consult travel guides, or illustrated works containing the different patterns of the kimonos and other garments worn by the Kabuki actors and courtesans of the big cities. Fifty-five titles in the 1685 List of Japanese and Chinese books in print described the ‘amorous arts’, as did 119 titles in the 1692 List. Despite the shoguns' ban on pornography, some of these works contained striking woodblock illustrations (often hand coloured) representing sexual acts – both heterosexual and homosexual – with the protagonists' genitals prominently displayed.64
The prolific writer (and former samurai) Asai Ryōi popularized these and other delights in a book entitled Tales of the floating world, published in 1661. He wrote in the name of those who
Live only for the moment, turning our full attention to the pleasures of the moon, the snow, the cherry blossoms and the maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves in just floating, floating; caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face, refusing to be disheartened, like a gourd floating along with the river current: this is what we call the floating world.65
The ‘floating’ took place in two principal locations, both of them new in the seventeenth century. The first was the theatre district in each major city, where actors (and until 1627 actresses) staged kabuki (literally ‘not straight’) plays, an art form that emerged from a combination of classical Noh drama with Shinto dances and popular pantomime. The second was the ‘pleasure-quarter’ (akusho; literally ‘bad place’), licensed by the magistrates of almost every major town. Edo's pleasure-quarter, Yoshiwara, was by far the largest, in part because the sankin kōtai system brought a huge number of single adult males to the capital. By the 1680s, several tourist guides to Edo provided a convenient list of the names, ranks and residences (plus, in some cases, the fees, physical appearances and specialties) of over 1,000 courtesans.66
Asai published his Tales of the floating world only four years after the Meireki fire destroyed three-quarters of Edo, and so he did not exaggerate when he described his protagonists as ‘living only for the moment’ and ‘caring not a whit for the pauperism staring us in the face’. Some of the survivors lived literally among ashes and ruins. When another fire threatened the lodgings of a Dutch delegation to Edo in 1661, they noted that ‘our poor landlord, three times in four years, namely in 1657, '58 and '60, had been afflicted’ and had lost ‘his home and many goods’. Shortly afterwards, their successors noted that ‘it is dangerous to have a long stay in this fearsome seat of fires’; while on their arrival in the shogun's capital in 1668, another group of merchants found that ‘yet another fire had consumed four more streets than the great [Meireki] fire’.67
Getting it Right?
Tokugawa Japan thus did not differ significantly from the rest of the world in exposure either to the Little Ice Age or to other natural disasters (such as urban conflagrations): both regularly devastated the archipelago. The main distinctions lay elsewhere. First, where other regions became overpopulated, thanks largely to the expansion of agriculture into marginal areas, Japan began the seventeenth century underpopulated, due mostly to the ‘Warring States Era’. Second, Tokugawa rulers made policy choices that mitigated rather than exacerbated the effects of adverse climate. The risk-averse foreign policies of the shoguns meant not only that their subjects never suffered the devastation caused by armies on the rampage, but also that no major social group had to pay higher taxes and few had to make forced loans that stood little chance of being repaid. Moreover, from 1615 onwards, the Pax Tokugawa turned the warrior elite into urban consumers living on stipends, and thus dependent upon a commercial economy that delivered cheap labour, goods and services. It was therefore in their interest to promote initiatives (such as land-reclamation schemes and improved crop strains) that maintained or increased that supply of cheap labour, goods and services.
Nevertheless, ‘getting it right’ in Tokugawa Japan did not stem from the consistent and rational application of sound economic policies by the ruling elite – although Ieyasu's investment in roads and bridges, and Iemitsu's response to the Kan'ei fam
ine, were both remarkably adroit measures. On the contrary, many beneficial outcomes of Tokugawa rule stemmed from inertia (failing to tax most forms of commerce and production), from complicity (allowing villages to under-report increased productivity and improved crop yields) and from an atavistic intellectual outlook (enjoining frugality and other traditional virtues) – because, in a time of economic crisis, sometimes ‘less is more’. In particular, minimizing taxes on the population at large, which allowed demand for goods and services to grow, served as a powerful stimulus to the Industrious Revolution; and avoiding wars both at home and abroad also avoided the deleterious fiscal policies that stunted growth in so many other states.
The Pax Tokugawa nevertheless came at a cost. In political terms, the shoguns deprived their subjects of many freedoms: no Japanese could engage in foreign trade, travel abroad, embrace a religion prohibited by the regime, or handle certain forms of literature. Vassals lost their right to organize collective protests against abusive lords or petition the shogun for redress. In economic terms, although the Industrious Revolution significantly increased output, it required not only relentless and ruthless ‘self-exploitation’ by producers but also (in the case of farmers) massive deforestation and the tillage of low-quality soils on sites that required constant maintenance. In the lapidary verdict of Conrad Totman, in the course of the seventeenth century farmers ‘became trapped in an inflexible, high-risk, high-input, low-yield operation that could be sustained only by the most attentive husbandry’; while the widespread deforestation to build and heat the new towns meant that
Nearby crop land faced a greatly increased risk of frost, flood and drought. Even without abnormalities or fluctuations of climate, the sharp reduction in forest cover was bound to multiply incidents of crop failure. In addition, during that same century more and more upland and northerly areas were opened to tillage, and these new lands crowded the biological boundaries of crop viability (for reasons of both climatic marginality and soil character) and exacerbated the danger of crop failure.68
Likewise, in military terms, avoiding war led to the neglect of military innovation, so that when in 1853 navies arrived from states that had invested heavily in military technology, the Tokugawa regime was powerless to resist them: Japan had to accept humiliating trading agreements, and rebellions brought down the shogunate.
By then, the Tokugawa system had brought peace to all Japan for more than two centuries – an unparalleled achievement for such a large population – and protected the archipelagos from the famines that afflicted much of the northern hemisphere in the 1690s, the ‘climax of the Little Ice Age’, when average temperatures fell 1.5°C below those of the later twentieth century. The first major food crisis after the Kan'ei famine of 1641–2 did not occur until 1732 – a respite of almost a century: another unparalleled achievement. For most subjects of the Tokugawa, after 1642 the Global Crisis was something that happened to other people.
PART IV
CONFRONTING THE CRISIS
MANY SEVENTEENTH–CENTURY WRITERS ATTRIBUTED THE VIOLENT disorders they saw around them to the innate defects of human nature. According to Thomas Hobbes in 1641, ‘man's natural state, before they came together into society, was war; and not simply war, but the war of every man against every man’. In 1643, with civil war raging in England, a London pamphleteer considered that ‘we see such an eager division in all families, and it is so universal, that no county, scarce any city or corporation, is so unanimous but they have division enough to undo themselves. And it is evident enough, that this rent will increase until we shall be quite torn in pieces.’ That same year, one of Philip IV's Spanish chaplains asserted that ‘God wanted the wide world, and the small world which is Man, to be governed by opposition, and everything on earth to be a continual war’ – a point that Blaise Pascal put more concisely a decade later: ‘All men by their nature hate one another.’1
These writers, like many of their contemporaries, saw life as a ‘zero-sum game’ in which assets could only be redistributed, not created – or, in the aphorism of Francis Bacon: ‘whatsoever is some where gotten is some where lost’. In every rural community, this zero-sum mentality led to intense, unstable and endless competition, encapsulated in the Arab proverb: ‘Me against my brother; my brother and me against my cousin; my brother, my cousin and me against our neighbours’. A recent study of early modern France has noted that ‘amity and enmity shaped all social relationships among individuals and groups’; while a historian of rural India also found that ‘inequality and conflict’ (and not ‘simple homogeneous harmony') characterized village life: ‘Diversity within a peasantry and conflict among various villagers define rural settings.’ Another scholar who found the same ‘inequality and conflict’ among Japanese villagers noted that rivalry was normally ‘covert rather than open, but [it was] fierce and unrelenting nevertheless. Farming was the arena of conflict, and the tools of victory were skill, ingenuity, hard work and perseverance.’2
The same ‘zero-sum game’ created similar rivalries in towns – where, as in the country, the only way to maintain one's position in the community was constantly to protect all assets against encroachment; but because towns were more complex organisms, and because the contrasts between rich and poor were greater, families tended to form associations to protect their assets: guilds for economic concerns, confraternities for religious and social issues, and factions for politics. In the seventeenth century, factions formed ‘part of the landscape in towns of any size’, each one of them capable of generating ‘programmes and slogans and organized public demonstrations’ that, just like other forms of conflict, normally became more common and more intense whenever resources ran short because, as the Scottish philanthropist and politician Sir Robert Sibbald put it, whereas ‘poverty and want emasculate the mindes of many … those that are of a firy and active temperament, it maketh them unquiet, rapacious, frantick or desperate’.3
Most of the ‘organized public demonstrations’ by those of a ‘firy and active temperament’ in the seventeenth century fell into certain distinct categories. Lü Kun, a gifted bureaucrat of late Ming China, identified the most important of them. ‘From of old,’ he informed his emperor, ‘there have been four kinds of people who like to rebel’:
First are those who have no means of support, no food or clothing, whose families are in difficulties, and who consider rebelling in hopes of delaying their demise. Second are people who do not know how to behave, who have high spirits and violent natures, who violate the laws to make life easier for themselves, who are fond of jade and silk and sons and daughters but cannot get them legitimately, and who think that if there is a rebellion they can steal what they want. Third are the people of heterodox beliefs … whose teachers preach and attract crowds, and who will respond to and join up with anyone who calls them. Fourth there are the people without self-control, who turn petty rifts into major fights, who think only of being strong, who hope only for a change, and who take no pleasure in the existing peace in the world.4
The categories identified by Lü Kun applied not only to China but also to other areas in the seventeenth century. Chapter 17 examines the motives and protocols of those who rebelled because they ‘have no means of support, no food or clothing, whose families are in difficulties’ due to economic adversity (especially dearth, unemployment, high taxation and state oppression), as well as the fellow travellers with ‘high spirits and violent natures’ who ‘think that if there is a rebellion they can steal what they want’. Chapter 18 considers protests by ‘people of heterodox beliefs’ (that is, critics of the government) ‘who hope only for a change’ – above all the nobles, clerics and intellectuals who created ideologies to underpin political as well as economic grievances, and advanced alternative solutions for the problems of the day. Chapter 19 focuses on how these and other groups of rebels managed to ‘preach and attract crowds’, using all available media to ‘spread the word’ about their grievances and their strategies of redress, in
the hope that attracting wider domestic and foreign support would not only gain greater concessions but also avoid repression by the authorities. In the mid-seventeenth century, the combined actions of these ‘unquiet, rapacious, frantick or desperate’ people would bring almost half the states of the northern hemisphere to their knees.
17
‘Those who have no means of support’: The Parameters of Popular Resistance1
Public and Hidden Transcripts
COLLECTIVE RESISTANCE WAS PERHAPS THE MOST COMMON HUMAN reaction to the seventeenth-century crisis. As a disgruntled English landowner observed, ‘The meaner sort of people [are] always apt to rebel and mutiny on the least occasion’ – and, indeed, the total number of food riots in England rose from 12 between 1600 and 1620 to 36 between 1621 and 1631, with 14 more in 1647–9. In Germany and Switzerland, more than half of the total of major peasant revolts recorded in the seventeenth century took place between 1626 and 1650; while in France, popular revolts peaked in the middle decades of the century.2
The Frequency of French Popular Revolts, 1590–1715
* * *
Date Aquitaine (southwest France) Provence (southeast France)
Number Annual average Number Annual average
* * *
1590–1634 47 1 108 2.4
1635–1660 282 11.3 156 6.3
1661–1715 130 2.7 110 2
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