III.

The Moulding of Edo Society

Tokugawa lawmakers devoted equal attention to society below daimyo level. Following practices begun by Hideyoshi, and the Neo-Confucian doctrines of Ieyasu’s counsellors, society was divided into four layers of descending status: samurai, peasants, craftsmen, and merchants. A fifth group, composed of leatherworkers, butchers, and others whose occupations were condemned by Buddhism, became outcastes. The most politically important class, the samurai, kept their right to carry two swords (and initially to cut down any member of the lower orders who displeased them). However, in all but a few backward fiefs, they were removed from the villages where they had traditionally lived off the peasantry, and segregated in wards of the castle towns where their daimyo lords lived. Here they were paid in rice and employed in bakuhan administration, becoming civil servants and officials, or even simply clerks and constables, disciplined by the code of bushido. The castle towns themselves rapidly lost their military purpose and became centres of government and trade, while major cities such as Nagoya and Osaka remained under direct shogunal control. The peasants, though in theory second only to the samurai, were denied weapons, forbidden to leave their lands, and ordered to live frugally and farm diligently to feed their superiors. In fact, the removal of the samurai freed peasants to organize village life to suit themselves; the village headman was usually the only one in direct contact with the upper classes. The artisans and merchants merged into the chonin (townspeople) who supplied goods for the daimyo and samurai in Edo and the castle towns.

The Tokugawa insisted on regulating their subjects’ religious lives because of fears of subversion, especially by Christians. The 16th-century unifiers of Japan had fought to subdue militant peasant sects professing Pure Land Buddhism. Christianity, previously introduced by European missionaries, was feared as an alien creed, and persecuted accordingly. All Japanese families were made to register at a Buddhist temple and demonstrate that they were not Christian. Such persecution led to the Shimabara Rebellion, a Christian uprising in 1637-1638 in which some 37,000 men, women, and children held off a shogunal army in a castle on the Shimabara Peninsula on Kyushu, then perished when the castle fell. Significantly, many of the rebels were ronin, masterless samurai who had lost their place in peaceful Edo society. Actual Christians were little threat to the Tokugawa system, but kept their faith in secret, in constant danger of exposure and execution.

Christianity was a major factor in the Tokugawa decision to cut Japan off from the outside world after the 1630s. Foreign ideas and contacts were feared by the shogunate as endangering national stability and Tokugawa supremacy. Rules against the building of large ocean-going ships kept the daimyo from developing naval forces or trading abroad. In 1635 all Japanese were officially forbidden foreign travel, and the Japanese merchant communities in the Philippines and elsewhere were cut off. In 1639 the Portuguese Empire was banned from trading with Japan: only the Dutch Empire was allowed a trading presence, confined to an artificial island in Nagasaki harbour. More trade with Korea and China continued, but usually via foreign ships and under close supervision.

Trade inside Japan was encouraged by improved highways, including the famous Tokaido, radiating from Edo and maintained by roadside villages. The shogunate issued improved gold and silver currency from 1601, and took control of Japan’s mines, especially the silver mines on the island of Sado, to feed its mints and coffers: nearly 50 new bullion mines were opened in Ieyasu’s lifetime. These and the new standardized shogunal weights and measures aided commerce, but also emphasized Tokugawa legitimacy. Tokugawa supremacy was signified by the building in 1634-1636 of the great family shrine, the Toshogu, at Nikko, where the remains of Ieyasu (now deified) were enshrined in an ornate, awe-inspiring complex mingling Shinto, Buddhism, and Chinese Confucianism.