Tokugawa Japan: Section 2: Hierarchy in Japan

 

The Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868)

Guiding Questions:

What challenges did the 3 Unifiers of Japan and the Tokugawa Shogunate face? 

How did they centralize power?

 

Section 2: Hierarchy in Japan

The shogun (the actual rulers of Japan) and daimyo (domain lords who ruled over individual provinces) had the most power in Japan. Section 1 explains the shogun’s power and how he tamed the daimyo; this section will describe how everyone else fit into the Tokugawa period’s rigid social hierarchy.  

There were 45 daimyo in Hideyoshi’s time and each one had enormous power over the people who lived in his domain. They could prevent people from marrying, leaving their villages, wearing certain kinds of clothes, eating certain foods, and they even banned forms of entertainment at weddings and festivals they considered disruptive. 

Hideyoshi forbade any daimyo from having more than one castle, systematically destroying all other fortifications in their former domain. As he stated in 1582, “I shall order them to level the castles of the whole land to prevent further rebellions and to preserve the nation in peace.” 

Daimyo also had to ask the shogun permission to marry, stopping a common form of alliance building. They had to contribute a lot of peasant labor (corvee) and money to build the shogunal and imperial palaces. These palaces were so lavishly built that, “and so imposing… they may be regarded as statements of symbolic authority by which the [daimyo] had been forced to recognize the supremacy” of the Shogun. 

 

Daimyo were responsible for public order in their domains, so they kept some of their soldiers and samurai on the payroll. These private armies were a lot smaller than during the Sengoku period though, when some daimyo fielded armies of tens of thousands of men. 

Like in France under Louis XIV, daimyo didn’t have to pay taxes, because keeping order in their domains was considered contribution enough. Both Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa shoguns allowed the daimyo to run their home domains, provided that they acknowledged the Shogun as their ruler and contributed soldiers to their wars. While keeping tight control over foreign policy and other matters of national importance, Japan’s rulers practiced a kind of federalism, allowing the descendants of warring states leaders to make most of the important decisions that affected their domains. 

Other groups and individuals also played important roles in society. Chief among them was the emperor, who was officially the head of state and a descendant of the Sun Goddess, but in reality didn’t control much beyond his own palace in Kyoto. 

Japanese emperors served various symbolic functions, since the real power was usually in the hands of the shogun. Most of an emperor’s time was spent conducting rituals, either publicly or privately. These ceremonies stem from several sources. Some are based on the worship of Shinto kami, or spirits associated with significant places or prominent leaders from the past. Buddhist rites were also given prominence. 

Other rites come from Chinese court traditions, and often follow the Chinese practice of taking place on auspicious days of the traditional Chinese calendar. There were rituals tied to anniversaries of famous battles or mourning past emperors and heroes. Finally, there were ceremonial occasions that were more for entertainment–archery competitions, kickball tournaments (an elaborate form of hackey sack) or sumo wrestling, for example. 

Over the centuries, some rituals fell out of practice, while others were added, but the end result was a very full calendar for the emperor. In a book on the culture of the imperial court during the Sengoku and Unification eras, a historian lists 17 rituals for the month of January alone, including bowing to the four directions and the tombs of past emperors, the White Horse Feast (involving viewing beautiful white horses, a symbol of luck), and “The ceremony of raising court rank for women.” 

While everything that the shogun or his officials did was “in the name of the emperor”, he was rarely consulted ahead of time. One of the steps the Tokugawa shogunate took to limit the power of both the emperor and the daimyo was to make illegal any daimyo appeal directly to the emperor. Instead, any daimyo wanting to communicate something to the emperor had to go through the shogun. While the shogun lived in Edo (modern day Tokyo), the emperor stayed in the ancient capital of Kyoto. The shogun kept close watch on the emperor and his court, constructing a huge castle in Kyoto to make it clear that although the emperor was officially in charge, the shogun was at least his equal. 

The shogun also directed massive tax revenue towards building palaces for the emperor and other court officials to keep them happy. During the Sengoku period, emperors were reduced to begging for money to pay their bills. One emperor even sold off art and other imperial treasures from the palace just to meet basic expenses. The Onin War at the start of the Sengoku period destroyed much of Kyoto, including the homes of many court officials, so they were all particularly grateful to the shoguns for providing the funds and security necessary for them to live at an appropriately high level of comfort and dignity. 

Samurai: There were an estimated 350,00 samurai at the start of the Tokugawa shogunate. During the early years of the Sengoku period, samurai were the leading warriors of the land, dominating the battlefield with their fearsome combat skills.  As firearms became more common, however, the samurai became less important on the battlefield. Nevertheless, they remained a privileged class, with the right to kill any peasant or merchant who offended them. Keeping this large group of warriors busy so that they didn’t disrupt society was an important goal.

Traditionally, samurai directly ruled over villages and plots of land, worked by peasants. The tax revenue from that land supplied a samurai with the means to purchase weapons, engage in high society and learn to read and write. The Tokugawa shogunate removed samurai from the countryside by ordering them to live in cities or castle towns. They continued to live off the taxes on the same land as before, but they weren’t allowed to live on the land, which cut them off from their power base. Instead, their generally high literacy rate was put to good use as bureaucrats, since Japan had very few wars under Tokugawa rule and therefore no real use for hundreds of thousands of highly trained killers. Ironically, while samurai were proud to be the only class allowed to carry weapons, the vast majority never had the opportunity to use them.  By separating them permanently from the countryside, the Tokugawa turned a fierce warrior class attached firmly to the land into a group of tame, city-dwelling officials.

What about the peasants? When Hideyoshi re-unified Japan, he put in place a strict social hierarchy. If you were born a peasant, you stayed a peasant. Tokugawa Ieyasu’s chief adviser articulated the ruling philosophy in this way:

If we can understand the meaning of the order existing between heaven and earth, we can also perceive that in everything there is an order separating those who are above and those who are below… [W]e cannot allow disorder in the relations between the ruler and the subject, and between those who are above and those who are below. The separation into four classes of samurai, farmers, artisans and merchants, like the five relationships [of ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, older and younger brother, and friend and friend] is part of the principles of heaven and is the Way which was taught by the Sage (Confucius).

The Tokugawa family directly owned and taxed 25% of Japan’s agricultural production. The daimyo controlled the rest of the wealth, leaving little for the peasants, who mostly didn’t own anything. 

Peasants were bound to the land and only rarely given permission to travel. In 1588, Hideyoshi ordered a “sword hunt”, confiscating all weapons from the peasantry, who had become very well armed during the Sengoku period. For Japan’s ruling class, peasants “had to be bound to the land; social distinctions had to be thrown up around them like so many physical barriers; and, to remove all temptations to indolence and luxury, they had to be left only enough of whatever they produced [to eat after paying their taxes] to let them continue producing.” 

A famous quote from the time sums up the attitude that Japan’s rulers had towards the majority of their people: “Sesame seeds and peasants are much alike. The more you squeeze them, the more you can extract from them.” Taxes of 50% or more of their crops was common, even during famine.  

In addition, corvee labor was used to maintain roads and public buildings. Massive construction projects aimed at increasing the shogunate’s prestige involved large numbers of forced laborers. 62,000 men from 28 regions built the Great Buddha in Kyoto in 1591 under Hideyoshi and hundreds of thousands more worked on his various palaces.

There were, “a tax on the field, a tax on doors, a tax on windows, a tax on female children according to age, a tax on cloth, a tax on sake, a tax on hazel trees, a tax on beans, a tax on hemp… if the peasant added a room to his hut a tax was levied upon it.”