Japan

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The Bakuhan System

The Tokugawa shogunate consolidated its power during the reigns of Ieyasu (1603-1605), his son Hidetada (1605-1623), and his grandson Iemitsu (1623-1651). The Tokugawa shogunate was the most effective government that Japan had experienced so far in its history, but it was not a centralized monarchy like the old imperial government at Kyōto. The shogun shared power and authority with the local daimyo in a system known as bakuhan (a combination of the bakufu, which functioned as the central government, and the han, feudal domains under the control of the daimyo). The Tokugawa family had direct control over only about one quarter of the productive land in the country. The rest was dominated by the daimyo, who had their own governments, castle towns, warrior armies, tax and land systems, and courts. Altogether there were about 250 to 300 daimyo. The emperor continued to rule as the civil monarch in Kyōto, but he had little actual power.

Many daimyo had survived military unification with their existing domains intact, while other domains were newly created by Ieyasu and his heirs. In redistributing land, Ieyasu made a distinction between the daimyo who had fought with the Tokugawa at the Battle of Sekigahara (known as fudai, “hereditary vassals”), and those who had fought against them (known as tozama, “outside lords”). The tozama were assigned domains on the periphery of the islands and were generally excluded from positions in the central government. All daimyo, however, were required to pledge their personal feudal loyalty to the shogun in return for the right to rule their domains.

As a feudal ruler, the shogun imposed many duties on the daimyo to keep them in line. First, the daimyo were required to spend half their time in Edo and to keep their wives and children there all the time. This practice, known as the sankin kōtai (“alternate attendance”) system, enabled the shogunate to keep the daimyo under constant surveillance. Second, the daimyo were required to provide materials, labor, and funds for the construction of large public works, such as the shogun’s castles and the mausoleum for Ieyasu at Nikkō. Finally, the daimyo had to secure the shogun’s permission to build new castles, repair military fortifications, or contract marriages with other daimyo families. If a daimyo committed some infraction of bakufu laws or died without an heir, the shogun had the right to confiscate his land or reassign him to a new domain. Under the first three shoguns, such transfers and confiscations were quite common.

While consolidating their domestic position, the first three shoguns also restricted Japan’s contacts with the outside world. The Tokugawa welcomed foreign traders but were concerned about the spread of Christianity. They feared that the missionaries were simply a prelude to European conquest. Further, they regarded Christianity, which demanded that the highest loyalty be given to God, as a subversive religion that would undermine authority within society and the family. In 1614 Ieyasu, announcing that Christianity was a “pernicious doctrine,” ordered the expulsion of Christian missionaries, and in the 1620s Japanese converts to Christianity endured persecutions and massacres.

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In the 1630s the shogunate issued a series of decrees forbidding imports of Christian books, prohibiting travel or trade outside the country, and forbidding the construction of ocean-going vessels. The only Westerners permitted to trade in Japan were the Dutch, who were confined to Deshima, an artificial island in the harbor of Nagasaki on Kyūshū. But the Japanese continued to trade with their Asian neighbors. Chinese merchants were permitted to live in their own quarter in Nagasaki, and the Japanese carried on trade with the Ryukyu Islands and with Korea through the island of Tsushima in the Korean Strait.

The Tokugawa political system, bolstered by its policy of limited isolation from the outside world, successfully maintained domestic peace until the mid-19th century. Several major local rebellions occurred in the 17th century, but none threatened the existence of the regime.

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Forces of Social Change

The Tokugawa shoguns also attempted to impose a rigid status system on the country that made a sharp distinction between the samurai warrior elite, who constituted between 5 and 6 percent of the population, and the commoners—peasant farmers, town merchants, and artisans—who made up the rest. The samurai, who wore two swords as a mark of status, enjoyed the highest prestige in Tokugawa society and were subject to different laws and punishments than were the commoners.

Society did not remain rigidly frozen, however. On the contrary, domestic peace set in motion forces of social change. With the endemic warfare of previous centuries at an end, the samurai class underwent a transformation. The daimyo, seeking to prevent their vassals from plotting against them, had already begun to move the samurai off the land into castle towns in the 16th century, and they completed the process in the 17th. The samurai were no longer a landed class but an urbanized one. Their income came not from rents collected from peasant cultivators but from stipends paid by the daimyo. No longer needed as warriors, the samurai instead served as officials in the shogunal or daimyo governments, where reading, writing, and arithmetic were more important skills than horsemanship, swordsmanship, and archery.

Even though the samurai were now civil bureaucrats rather than battle-scarred warriors, they set themselves apart from the commoners by maintaining a different set of values, later known as Bushido. Young samurai were trained to prize not only the martial values of physical courage and loyalty to their lord but also the social values of obedience to superiors, piety toward parents, personal self-control, frugality, and hard work. Many of these values rested on the older warrior tradition, but they were also influenced heavily by Confucianism, the major source of elite political and social ideas during the Tokugawa period.

Peace also brought in its wake a spurt of economic development. The daimyo and the shogun were able to devote their human and material resources toward reconstruction, and a burst in population growth in the 17th century stimulated production and trade. Under the impact of the sankin kōtai system, the shogun’s capital and local castle towns grew rapidly. By the end of the 17th century Japan was probably one of the most urbanized societies in the world. To meet growing urban demand, agricultural production grew steadily, as did the production of many consumer goods. Even in rural villages, many peasant farmers began to buy goods and utensils that they had once made for themselves.

The growth of the economy brought with it changing patterns in the distribution of wealth. While the daimyo and samurai class remained dependent on agricultural taxes collected from the peasants, many commoners became more affluent through the expanding commercial market. By the 18th century a class of wealthy merchants had emerged in Japan’s major cities and castle towns. The shogunate and the daimyo, who borrowed heavily from merchants to finance their elegant lifestyles, found themselves increasingly burdened with debt, and in some domains merchants served as financial advisers to the daimyo. As a result, the boundaries of the official status hierarchy began to blur.

Affluent merchants and commoners in the cities patronized a new urban culture centering on theaters and pleasure quarters (entertainment districts). In the late 17th and early 18th centuries, the kabuki and puppet (bunraku) theaters flourished, and short stories about denizens of the pleasure quarters proliferated. Poets perfected a new form of poetry, the 17-syllable haiku, and by the early 19th century readers devoured popular novels and stories. In the realm of visual arts, woodblock prints portraying courtesans, actors, and other scenes from urban life became extremely popular (see Ukiyo-e). Urban commoners, particularly the wealthy merchant class, consumed all these new art forms, which also found an audience among the samurai elite.

Economic growth brought increasing unrest in the countryside. A gap developed between the mass of the peasantry, who were either small landholders or tenant farmers, and a well-to-do landlord class. The landlords, who used their wealth to invest in activities such as money-lending and rural industry, took advantage of their less fortunate neighbors. More and more land became concentrated in landlords’ hands.

Beginning in the 18th century, peasant riots became more and more frequent, especially in times of bad harvest, such as the 1780s and the 1830s. The samurai elite, who saw the rural wealthy class beginning to copy their own lifestyle, were deeply disturbed by this social turmoil. By the early 19th century many conservative samurai scholars and intellectuals called for a return to the good old days, when everyone knew his or her proper place in society.

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Decline of the Shogunate

Internal social changes might eventually have brought about the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate, but they were overtaken by new pressures from the outside. In the late 18th century Westerners began to challenge the Tokugawa policy of limiting trade and other contacts. The first to do so were Russians, who made probes into the northern island of Hokkaidō (then called Ezo) in the 1790s hoping to open up trade. Further breaches of the seclusion policy soon followed, as British, French, and other foreign ships began to appear in Japanese harbors with increasing frequency. Although the shogunate issued orders to rebuff any attempt by the ships to land, Japanese defenders, with their outdated weapons and organization, could offer little resistance to modern warships.

The threat to the shogunate from foreign intrusion was twofold: On one hand, the central government’s power and authority had been maintained for more than two centuries through the policy of seclusion, and to abandon it now would place the shogun’s dominant position at risk. On the other hand, predatory Western powers presented a real danger to Japan’s sovereignty. Britain’s victory over China in the first Opium War in the early 1840s and the subsequent forced opening of Chinese trading ports provided an alarming example of what might happen to Japan. Many daimyo were not sympathetic to the shogunate’s predicament, however. They wanted to maintain the policy of seclusion at all costs.

The arrival of a United States gunboat expedition led by Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry in 1853 threw Japan’s leadership into turmoil. The United States had become interested in opening Japan to normal trading and diplomatic relationships in the 1840s, largely in order to secure good treatment for U.S. whalers plying the northwest Pacific and U.S. merchants involved in the China trade. Now Perry used the implied threat of his warships to pressure the shogunate to sign a treaty of friendship with the United States. Failing to achieve consensus after unprecedented consultations with the daimyo, the shogunate reluctantly agreed to sign the treaty in 1854.

Foreign demands for further concessions followed rapidly. In 1858 the United States, represented by Townsend Harris, successfully negotiated a second, commercial treaty that opened more Japanese ports to trade, fixed tariffs (government taxes on trade), and guaranteed Americans extraterritorial rights (which extended U.S. laws and jurisdiction to U.S. citizens in Japan). Other Western powers soon followed suit by demanding similar treaties, which came to be called “unequal treaties” because they placed Japan in a subordinate diplomatic position.

The opening of the country under foreign pressure undermined the authority and legitimacy of the Tokugawa shogunate. The Tokugawa leaders had shown themselves to be too weak to fend off the “Western barbarians,” and they had defied the wishes of the emperor at Kyōto, who opposed the 1858 trade treaty. In the late 1850s and early 1860s, antiforeign sentiments swept through the samurai class. Antiforeign activists sought to rally the country around the emperor under the slogan “Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians” (sonnō jōi). Foreign residents in the newly opened ports were attacked, and in 1863 the domain of Chōshū fired on foreign vessels sailing through the Straits of Shimonseki. Although it was obvious that the Westerners could not be expelled by military force, this did not prevent the antiforeign movement from further eroding the position of the shogunate.

The antiforeign movement was particularly strong in the large domains of the tozama daimyo of western Japan, who as “outside lords” had always resented Tokugawa rule. During the 1860s many of these domains, including Satsuma, Chōshū, Tosa, and Saga, began to build up their own military strength by importing Western weapons and ships, hiring Western military instructors, and training Western-style military units. The shogunate, which had sent an unsuccessful military expedition against Chōshū to punish its antiforeign activities, began its own military modernization program as well.

Leaders of the western domains, however, feared that the shogunate’s main goal was not to protect the country but to preserve its own dynastic interests. Chōshū and Satsuma, coming together through the mediation of Tosa, agreed to put an end to the shogunate and establish a new imperial government in its place. In late 1867 leaders from Tosa convinced the shogun to resign in order to assume a leading role in a restructured government. Before this government could be established, however, in January 1868 a palace coup in Kyōto, backed by the military forces of Satsuma and Chōshū, brought to power the young emperor Meiji. The emperor abolished the office of shogun, ordered the Tokugawa family to surrender their ancestral lands, and announced the creation of a new imperial government. The following month, in a brief battle outside of Kyōto, the new imperial army rolled back the only serious military challenge made by Tokugawa forces. Sporadic fighting followed in isolated pockets of Japan. Known as the Boshin Civil War, the conflict ended with the surrender of pro-Tokugawa forces in Hokkaidō in 1869.

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The Meiji Restoration

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Abolition of Feudalism

The overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate was described as a restoration of imperial authority, but the new imperial government soon launched a sweeping program to transform Japan into a modern nation state. The core government leaders were younger samurai from Chōshū, Satsuma, Tosa, and Hizen who had plotted to bring down the Tokugawa. These leaders were united in their belief that the shogunate was not up to the task of strengthening the country or renegotiating the unequal treaties imposed by the foreign powers. However, they were divided in their views of what kind of change was needed. Some, like Saigō Takamori of Satsuma, wished to preserve as much of the old social and political order as possible; others, such as Ōkubo Toshimichi of Satsuma and Kido Takayoshi of Chōshū, advocated more radical reform. The radicals prevailed. In April 1868 the new regime proclaimed its reform goals in the Charter Oath, promising to base its decisions on wide consultation, to seek knowledge from the outside world, and to abandon outmoded customs. The emperor’s main function was to legitimate the new regime and symbolize a united nation.

The division of Japan into independent domains made it difficult to deal with foreigners in a concerted way or to fully mobilize national resources. Thus, the Meiji government’s first task was to unify the country territorially. In late 1868 the imperial capital was moved to Edo (which was renamed Tokyo), where the emperor took up residence in the shogun’s former castle. In 1869 the daimyo of Chōshū, Satsuma, Tosa, and Hizen surrendered their lands and census records to the imperial government and asked that their domains’ laws, institutions, and regulations be placed under unified control. Other domains soon followed suit. In 1871 all the daimyo domains were abolished by imperial decree and were replaced by a system of centrally administered prefectures governed by imperially appointed officials.

From 1871 to 1873 the new Meiji leaders felt confident enough to send half of their number on a diplomatic mission around the world. Under the leadership of Iwakura Tomomi, they were to learn about the institutions, laws, and customs of economically and technologically advanced countries of the West, such as the United States and Britain. The Iwakura mission’s direct observation of the West left them feeling challenged but hopeful. Much of the progress that Western countries had made in military science, industry, technology, education, and society had occurred only within the past two generations, and a number of the European nations, such as Germany and Italy, were quite new themselves. It did not seem impossible that Japan could catch up with the Western nations very quickly.

During the 1870s the imperial government enacted reform after reform to dismantle the Tokugawa system. The goal was to create a new population of imperial subjects who all shared the same obligations to the state, regardless of their social origins. Laws enforcing the status system were abolished between 1869 and 1871, elementary education was made compulsory in 1872, a military conscription system requiring service of young adult males was promulgated in 1873, and new national land and tax laws replaced the old domain-based tax system in 1873. The final blow to the old order came in 1876, when the government stopped paying stipends to the former samurai class and abolished their privilege of carrying swords. The result was a series of local samurai rebellions, culminating in the Satsuma (or Kagoshima) Rebellion led by Saigō Takamori in 1877. The government’s new conscript army successfully crushed all of the uprisings.

In the 1870s the Meiji government also consolidated and expanded its control over outlying islands. It launched a program to colonize Hokkaidō, asserted control of the Ryukyu; and Bonin islands to the south, and made an agreement with Russia for control of the Kuril Islands to the north.

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2

Emergence of the Modern State

During the 1880s a new emperor-centered state structure took shape. After the Satsuma Rebellion, disgruntled former samurai started a popular rights movement, demanding a national legislature. Meiji leaders were not opposed to constitutional government; indeed, their contacts with the West had convinced them that it would unify and strengthen Japan as well as improve its international standing by conforming to Western ideas of “civilized” government. Thus, in 1881 the emperor declared his intention to grant the country a constitution. In preparation, the government leadership created a strong executive branch run by professional bureaucrats dedicated to the national good rather than to sectional or partisan interests. During the 1880s the government made several steps in this direction. It created a new nobility of five ranks from the former court aristocracy and daimyo, established a cabinet system modeled on that of imperial Germany, created a new privy council of imperial advisers, and instituted a civil service examination system for recruiting high officials.

The constitution, drafted by a small bureaucratic committee working under statesman Itō Hirobumi, was promulgated in 1889 as a “gift of the emperor” to the people. It came into effect the following year. The constitution placed most of the powers of state in the hands of the emperor, who was declared “sacred and inviolable.” It guaranteed the emperor’s subjects certain basic political and religious freedoms “within the limits of the law.” It also established a bicameral (two-chamber) national legislature, the Imperial Diet. The upper chamber, called the House of Peers, was composed of members of the newly created nobility and imperial appointees. The lower chamber, the House of Representatives, was elected by a small percentage of the population—only adult males paying more than 15 yen (Japan’s basic unit of currency) in taxes could vote. While a relatively conservative document, very similar to the constitution of imperial Germany, the Meiji constitution was a remarkable departure from a long tradition of authoritarian politics in Japan. It provided a foundation for the eventual development of representative government.

Nevertheless, for many years a small ruling group made up of the Satsuma and Chōshū leaders continued to monopolize executive power. The emperor, although constitutionally the country’s highest political authority, did not participate in administration. Until the late 1910s, prime ministers and most cabinet members were drawn from the ranks of the Satsuma-Chōshū clique, their protégés, and members of the civil and military bureaucracies. However, political parties gradually grew stronger during this period, eventually winning positions in the cabinet.

In addition to restructuring the government, the Meiji leaders worked diligently to build up a modern economic sector by acquiring new manufacturing technology. In the 1870s the government imported a mechanized silk-reeling mill, cotton-spinning mills, glass and brick factories, cement works, and other modern factories. They also brought in foreign workers and technicians to get the factories started and train Japanese workers. The government hired hundreds of foreign teachers, engineers, and technicians to build up modern infrastructure, such as railroads and telegraph lines, and dispatched hundreds of bright ambitious young men to study science, engineering, medicine, and other technical specialties in the United States and Europe. In the 1880s the government set up a modern banking system.

By the 1890s the beginnings of industrialization were well underway. A railroad network linking the major cities of Honshū had expanded into Kyūshū and Hokkaidō; coal mines were producing fuel needed for new steam-driven factories; the cotton-spinning industry had reduced the country’s dependence on foreign imports; and a domestic shipbuilding industry was developing. Except for the railroad system, however, the government no longer played a direct role either in financing or managing these enterprises. It had sold off its imported factories to private entrepreneurs and had adopted a policy of encouraging private enterprise.

The dramatic changes during the three decades after the Meiji government took power were driven by government initiatives from above, but other classes of society were not simply passive recipients of change. Many former samurai, although stripped of their traditional privileges, made a successful transition to the new society. Highly educated, trained for public service, and imbued with the values of ambition, hard work, and perseverance, they played an important role in many areas, including government, business, science, education, and culture. The same was true of the well-to-do elements in the countryside, who introduced innovations in agriculture, worked to develop local schools, and were active in the movement to establish a national legislature. Even the sons of poor peasant farmers conscripted into the army returned home with new skills, ideas, and habits that they spread to fellow villagers. And by the 1890s, when most school-age children were attending elementary school, Japan’s educational system became a formidable vehicle to promote enthusiasm for change. See Meiji Restoration.

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