Edo Period

V

Instability and Reaction

Tokugawa power grew weaker after the death of Tokugawa Iemitsu in 1651. Later shoguns reacted to changes rather than instigating them, usually attempting to return Japan to early Edo conditions. Iemitsu’s son Ietsuna remained dependent on daimyo advisers, who chose to relax many of the previous restrictions on their fellow daimyo. For example, after 1651 childless daimyo were allowed to nominate heirs without the shogun’s approval. The exercise of this approval had previously been one important means of Tokugawa control. Daimyo also began ignoring shogunal edicts that did not suit them.

Social instability increased during the 18th century. Japan’s limited farmland could not produce enough rice to feed the population, which had grown rapidly in the prosperous early Edo years. Particularly in northern Japan, farmers began growing rice in cooler regions and higher elevations, areas that were not suited to rice cultivation and were prone to delivering poor yields. From 1700 onward the population remained virtually static, as peasants and some samurai practiced birth control and infanticide (the killing of newborn children) to avoid having children they could not feed. Famines took a major toll, especially the famine of 1783 and 1784, which followed the eruption of Mount Asama in central Japan. Volcanic ash choked fields and rivers, ruining nearly all of the crops in many areas. The political impact of these disasters was increased by official Tokugawa Neo-Confucian ideology, which viewed natural catastrophes as warnings sent from the heavens to unjust rulers that their mandate to govern would soon be withdrawn.

Peasant revolts, which had been rare in early Edo times, occurred more often in the 18th century. The peasants did not attempt wide-scale revolution but instead used the threat of rebellion to pressure their daimyo to reduce taxes. The daimyo gave in to this pressure because they feared that they would be dispossessed by the shogunate if their domains showed signs of poor governance or rebellion. Peasant unrest affected the shogunate more directly in 1764, when protests forced the Tokugawa to cancel a pilgrimage to the ancestral shrines at Nikkō.

Some shogunal responses to social change and economic crisis were successful, but others caused further problems. In 1695 Tokugawa Tsunayoshi, the fifth shogun, issued additional currency that temporarily enriched the shogunate but caused widespread inflation. Tokugawa Yoshimune, who became the eighth shogun in 1716, initiated the Kyōhō Reforms, a strict program of bureaucratic and financial reforms that included control of the commercial economy and protection for indebted samurai from prosecution by merchants in shogunal courts. Yoshimune also tried to reduce the effects of economic turmoil on rural life by controlling interest rates on loans to peasants, preventing the splitting of family landholdings, and even putting a suggestion box for complaints and proposals outside of Edo Castle.

---

---

In the 1780s and 1790s shogunal counselors initiated a second conservative reform program, the Kansei Reforms, in response to famines, government corruption, and severe financial distress throughout Japan. Matsudaira Sadanobu, the chief architect of the reforms, incorporated policies similar to Yoshimune’s. These policies reformed shogunal finance and administration, built up food reserves in the countryside, and attempted to return to their villages peasants who had fled to the cities. The Kansei Reforms provided partial and temporary remedies for the worst problems of the era. By the end of the 18th century the Tokugawa regime was on the whole secure and solvent, although it still had not recovered its former preeminence.

VI

Cultural Developments and New Ideologies of the 18th Century

Despite periodic crises and a general sense that the great days of the Genroku era had passed, Edo culture continued to develop during the 18th century. Harunobu pioneered multicolored woodblock printing techniques in the 1760s, sparking the great era of ukiyo-e printmaking. His successors, especially Utamaro and Tōshūsai Sharaku, perfected his innovations in the 1790s. Beginning in the 1760s poet and painter Buson led a movement to return to the purity of Bashō’s style of haiku. After him, Issa brought haiku closer to everyday life through the use of unadorned language.

During this period, the shogunate was unable to control the proliferation of new ideas and ideologies. Scholars from all classes, and especially idle samurai, turned to historical, scientific, philosophical, and literary research. The shogunate had initially enlisted Confucian scholars such as Hayashi Razan to draft the policies for the founding of the bakuhan system, and Razan’s school became Tokugawa state orthodoxy. However, as the shogunal grasp over national affairs loosened, Confucian study broadened, and new schools emerged among daimyo and samurai that challenged the state ideology.

Western ideas and scholarship made inroads into Edo society after 1720, when Tokugawa Yoshimune lifted the ban on importation of foreign books. The Rangaku (Dutch Learning) school studied Western texts and artifacts from the Dutch trading station at Nagasaki, introducing Western medicine and other foreign ideas to Japan. Meanwhile, the Kokugaku (National Learning) school concentrated on Japan’s pre-Tokugawa literary and religious traditions. Kokugaku scholars began a revival of Shinto, a native Japanese religion that originated in ancient times. Kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga brilliantly analyzed the 11th-century national masterpiece The Tale of Genji, by Murasaki Shikibu, and contributed to many other fields of scholarship.

Norinaga was moved by his love of Japanese tradition to exalt Japan above ancient China, praising Japan’s uninterrupted line of emperors believed to be direct descendants of the Shinto sun goddess Amaterasu. Scholar Hirata Atsutane made this growing ideology even more nationalistic and exclusivist, attacking Confucianism and Buddhism and developing a new Shinto cosmology that made Japan, through a divine gift, superior to any other nation. The Mito school, originally a Confucian historical research group, promoted similar patriotic, pro-imperial ideas. Japan’s imperial house, controlled by the Ashikaga from the 14th through the 16th century and by the Tokugawa in the 17th century, was by the end of the 18th century the focus for a national unity capable of challenging the shogunate’s right to govern.

VII

Foreign Encroachment and Domestic Crisis

By the early 19th century Western colonial imperialism was gaining momentum, and Japan’s traditional isolation was increasingly threatened. Russia in particular was expanding into eastern Siberia and the northwest Pacific Ocean. In 1806 Russian adventurers destroyed a Japanese settlement on the far northern island of Sakhalin. Many Japanese people saw this as an omen of things to come.

In the early 19th century Edo Japan experienced renewed stability and growth, with favorable weather and intensive agricultural methods producing plentiful harvests. Edo was by this time the world’s largest city, supported by the country’s flourishing commercial economy. However, in 1833 more crop failures and the Tempō Famine began, ending this prosperous period. When the government failed to provide adequate relief, renegade shogunal officer Ōshio Heiachirō led an uprising in Ōsaka in 1837. About one-fourth of the city was destroyed by fire in two days before the uprising was crushed. Meanwhile, breaches of Japan’s seclusion policy occurred. British, French, and other foreign ships began to appear in Japanese harbors with increasing frequency. In 1837 an American merchant ship attempting to land in Japan was fired upon. In 1841 the government launched the Tempō Reforms, a vigorous effort to restore the traditional society of the early Tokugawa period by improving central administration, taxation, coastal defenses, samurai military training, and morals (in part through censorship of literature). However, many increasingly independent daimyo resented the shogunate’s attempt to reassert control and opposed the reforms, and they were abandoned in 1843.

Although Edo culture continued to develop with the literature of Jippensha Ikku and Ryokan and the art of Hokusai and Hiroshige, the relatively secure society depicted in these works was under increasing strain from foreign threat. Beginning in the 1820s ideologists of the Mito school developed the principle of sonnō jōi (“Revere the emperor, expel the barbarians”). These ideologists called for the protection of the pure Japanese spirit embodied by the emperor from defilement by Christian missionaries, imperialist adventurers, and other Western threats.

Foreign affairs reached a crisis point in 1853, when American naval officer Matthew Calbraith Perry led an expedition into Edo Bay. Perry used the implied threat of his warships to pressure the shogunate into signing a treaty that opened the ports of Shimoda and Hakodate to the United States. The shogunate reluctantly agreed to sign the treaty in 1854. In 1858 the United States successfully negotiated a second 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. By the end of the 1850s Japan had been coerced into full diplomatic and commercial relations with the West.

Outraged pro-imperial nationalists rebelled against the shogunate over the signing of the 1858 treaty, which the emperor at Kyōto had opposed. Shogunal counselor Ii Naosuke fiercely repressed these activists through the Ansei Purge (1858-1860), in which all who opposed Ii were exiled, demoted, or executed. Ii attempted to unite the Tokugawa and imperial families by marrying the reigning shogun to the emperor’s sister, but the plan was never finalized. He was assassinated in Edo in 1860.

Political violence increased as competing factions or lone activists attacked shogunal officials, domain rivals, prominent nationalists, scholars of Western learning, and one another. Violence against the foreigners residing in Japan also occurred. In 1862 British merchant Charles Richardson was murdered when he rode across the path of the daimyo of the Satsuma domain, an action that was taken as a sign of disrespect. In retaliation, British warships shelled the Satsuma capital of Kagoshima, causing extensive damage and convincing all but the most extreme nationalists that Japan must first reform its government and strengthen itself before taking on the Western powers.

Both the shogunate and the daimyo began importing foreign arms and expertise in an effort to build up their military strength. The shogunate established a naval academy in 1855, employing Dutch sailors to train Japanese officers for a new fleet. In a reversal of the traditional ban on travel abroad, the shogunate dispatched missions to the West, first to negotiate terms of the unequal treaties, then in 1865 and 1867 to acquire military knowledge.

The shogunate began searching for alternatives to the failing bakuhan system and sought the favor of the increasingly influential imperial court in an effort to preserve shogunal dominance. But radicals across Japan, predominantly young samurai from poor and rural regions, demanded a full restoration of the emperor’s supremacy. Prominent tozama domains of western Japan, such as Chōshū, Satsuma, and Tosa, became centers of activism. As “outside lords,” these daimyo had always resented Tokugawa rule. In 1862 Kido Takayoshi, along with other pro-imperial Chōshū samurai and sympathetic nobles at the imperial court in Kyōto, persuaded the emperor to order the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan by the middle of 1863. All domains ignored the order except Chōshū, which fired on foreign ships. Moderates from Satsuma and other domains chased the revolutionaries out of Kyōto.

After the Chōshū radicals made an unsuccessful attempt to reenter Kyōto in 1864, a shogunal force backed by imperial mandate was dispatched to Chōshū to subdue them. Chōshū moderates negotiated a settlement for peace, and the shogunate withdrew. By 1865 Chōshū extremists had revolted, negating the settlement and retaking the domain. The shogun ordered another expedition against them in 1866. Chōshū had meanwhile made a secret pact with Satsuma against the Tokugawa, and several other domains refused to assist the shogunate against the extremists. Tokugawa Iemochi’s fatal illness in the fall of 1866 provided a pretext for the outmatched shogunal forces to withdraw. The incident made it clear that the Tokugawa shogunate no longer held military supremacy over daimyo forces. Because the shogunate’s political supremacy over the daimyo had been based from the start on its military superiority, this humiliation fatally weakened the legitimacy of Tokugawa rule.

Although good harvests in 1867 brought some tranquility to the countryside, pro-imperial samurai continued to pressure the shogunate for the restoration of imperial rule. The new shogun, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, and his officials struggled to reform the shogunate, promoting a moderate settlement that would retain some elements of the bakuhan system. As part of the plan, Yoshinobu formally resigned in favor of the emperor in November 1867; this ended the Tokugawa shogunate but preserved Tokugawa landholdings and perpetuated Tokugawa power at the head of a new council of daimyo. Satsuma and Chōshū forces were not satisfied with this arrangement, however, and continued to demand a complete emperor-centered state. Led by Saigō Takamori, Kido Takayoshi, and Okubo Toshimichi, these forces seized the imperial palace in January 1868 and proclaimed a full restoration of imperial rule.

The coup brought to power the young emperor Meiji, who abolished the office of shogun, ordered the Tokugawa family to surrender its ancestral lands, and announced the creation of a new imperial government. The following month, the new imperial army defeated Tokugawa loyalists in a brief battle outside of Kyōto. Sporadic fighting continued in some areas of Japan. Known as the Boshin Civil War, the conflict ended with the surrender of pro-Tokugawa forces in 1869. Edo was surrendered peacefully to its new masters, who renamed the city Tokyo, meaning “eastern capital.” The Meiji Restoration began an era of modernization and Western contact that lasted until 1912.

VIII

Evaluation and Legacy

Although the Meiji authorities persecuted few defenders of the old Edo system, they discredited the Edo period itself as a time of feudal darkness. The Meiji regime claimed to bring the awakening of civilization, enlightenment, and rightful government. In fact, however, the new regime largely kept the feudal order in place: Peasants remained at the bottom of society, shouldering the majority of the tax burden for modernization and military programs, while industrialists enjoyed generous concessions. Despite the pro-imperial energies unleashed in the “restoration,” the imperial house remained a figurehead under the control of a new set of leaders. Meanwhile, advocates of democracy and socialism soon learned that the Meiji rulers were scarcely more tolerant of new and foreign political ideas than the Tokugawa shoguns had been.

Meiji Japan’s remarkably rapid and successful military and industrial modernization, which enabled it to win the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, owed more to the Edo period than Meiji leaders likely would have admitted. The Tokugawa shogunate and daimyo had introduced Japan to Western-style weaponry and military tactics, and the country’s rapid commercial expansion following its opening to the world was based on the advanced and integrated economy nurtured during the Tokugawa peace. Also, Edo intellectual developments produced the nationalist scholars who revived interest in the tradition of direct imperial rule and foresaw the need to fortify Japan against Western colonialism.

Yet Edo heritage also had some negative consequences. The Mito school of the Edo period laid the foundations for the Meiji nationalist ideology that propelled Japan’s own imperialism from its domination of Korea beginning in the 1870s to the end of World War II in 1945. Elements of this fierce nationalism still inform extremist Japanese conservatism. Moreover, the Edo social order created traditions of hierarchy, subordination, and intolerance for deviants or outsiders, issues that Japan continues to struggle with today.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain