A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present
Andrew Gordon
1/1 The Tokugawa Polity
• Tokugawa period 1600-1868
• A time of unprecedented peace and social order under harsh laws and restrictions on social and
geographic mobility
• ‘Tokugawa’ was the family name of Japan’s military rulers
• Officials ruled by the motto: ‘Sesame seeds and peasants are very much alike. The more you squeeze
them, the more you can extract from them.’
• Also a time of flourishing rural production and commerce and lively urban lifestyle with autonomous
international trading ports, ‘an energetic, at times rambunctious, population’
• Route to modernity was not smooth- from 19th c there were ‘grave problems’ like underemployed
warriors suffering identity crisis, and established institutions and ideas seeming inadequate to deal
with new pressures at home. Rulers faced social tensions and protests.
• Absence of warfare post the Ōnin War destroying Kyoto (the ancient capital) and a constancy of
warfare for the following century in the form of samurai men and daimyō
• The 1600s to mid-1800s were completely free of war. The warrior elite retained their place as political
rulers.
• Oda Nobunaga was the first ‘unifier’ after a ruthless campaign of terror to rise to power. He was
assassinated in 1582 having consolidated control over two-thirds of Japan. He was viewed with fear
and awe having fashioned political institutions that his successors used to good effect in sustaining
Tokugawa peace. He encourage relatively autonomous village organization as long as they paid taxes
and developed a bureaucratic program of tax collection. He pioneered the use of survey of agricultural
land and established a sharp class boundary between warriors and farmers.
• Toyotomi Hideyoshi took up the banner as a political strategist pursing a politics of alliance-building.
He successful extended dominion over all of Japan by 1591 by taking hostages from the daimyō to
ensure their loyalty. He left a council of trust lieutenants, regents, who ruled on behalf of his son.
• Tokugawa period was ruled by the family’s military government, bakufu. The first ruler was Ieyasu
who was harsh but a patient tactician. He built up an effective domain government in the 1580s and
90s. In 1600 he destroyed the forces of Hideyoshi’s other regents in the battle Sekigahara giving him
unchallenged hegemony. In 1603 he had the emperor grant him the ancient title of shogun.
• Ieyasu retired and put his son, Hidetada, in the office of shogun who was succeeded by his son
Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun. His rule from 1923 to 1951 was the height of the Tokugawa
dictatorship and he consolidated the institutions that remained in place when Western powers
threatened to colonise Japan in the 1850s.
• These years of neutralizing opposition and eliminating tensions brought Japan to the most stable
political order in its history
• Ieyasu forbade the daimyō from concluding alliances among themselves and dispatched inspectors to
make sure they complied with his instructions. The loyal daimyō were fudai daimyō and the opposing
daimyō were called tozama. He protected his power base by surrounding the Tokugawa house lands
with fudai daimyō and relatives, the shin pan, while placing the tozama daimyō furthest away.
• He reintroduced the pre-Tokugawa practice of ‘alternate attendance’ (sankin kōtai) making the
daimyō ‘attend’ Kyoto in order to monitor them. Iemitsu later regularized the attendance system
requiring all daimyō to maintain residences in Edo. There was also a watchword system looking for
women going out, guns coming in; these were signs of rebellion in the making.
1
,• The residences that the daimyō had to keep at home and at Edo weakened them as they spent much
money maintaining households and funding their grand processions back and forth. They could also
no longer have a hands-on role in local rule.
• Ieyasu continued the policy of economic support for the court raising the Tokugawa family’s legitimacy
by enacting imperial prestige as well as carefully controlling the emperor. He raised the role of shogun
to virtual equal of the emperor.
• Samurais pledged loyalty and offered military service to more powerful daimyō and after the wars of
unification many did not return to supervise their home lands. They took administrative positions
receiving annual salary, ‘stipends’, from daimyō.
• The commoners were divided into subgroups. Iemitsu ordered all commoners to register with a
Buddhist temple and temple’s were ordered to guarantee each person’s religious loyalty preventing
movement of commoners. 80% of the population was farmers. Villages were taxed but held collective
responsibility for managing internal affairs, lead by city elders enforcing laws and collecting taxes.
• Tokugawa social order drew on Chinese Confucian ideas. Social hierarchy was warrior, farmer,
artisan, merchant. The outcast group was called eta living in scattered communities and performing
‘unclean’ tasks like burials and executions.
• In Edo, Yoshiwara district was home to the entertainment quarters of brothels, theaters and
restaurants. Moralistic officials took the occasion of a fire that destroyed the district in 1657 to relocate
Yoshiwara to the far outskirts.
• Temples had to report annually to the bakufu to prevent them growing in strength and challenging
secular authority.
• The Ainu ethnic minority, aboriginal Japanese, were kept on the margins of society but not as much so
as foreigners who were secluded from the ‘closed country’.
• Iemitsu issued edicts restricting interaction of people in Japan with those outside prohibiting overseas
voyaging, export of weapons and practice of Christianity. Some trade was maintained with China
through the Satsuma domain providing intelligence as well as goods.
• Japanese ties to the West were sharply reduced for over two hundred years from 1630s to 1850s, a
critical time in European history- the era of the industrial and bourgeois revolutions and the colonising
of the New World.
• The Tokugawa hosted Korean embassy parties at times of celebration in acts of diplomacy and to
impress the daimyō with the respect shown by foreigners to the Tokugawa particularly during the
expulsion edicts.
1/2 Social and Economic Transformations
Boom
• In the 16th c (before unification), cities in Japan’s islands were growing in size and number . Urban
growth was fuelled by contending military rulers (daimyō) settling their armies of samurai warriors and
service personnel into castle towns.
• In the late 1500s, fortunes of the daimyō waned and only after the Tokugawa regime consolidated its
hold did the urban centres become more stable.
• Alternate attendance promoted urbanisation and economic integration of separate economies, notably
Osaka and Edo. Without this, the domains would've developed as independent small states.
• Travel and residence requirements of the daimyō promoted traffic across domain borders and
interregional trade but drained the coffers (supplies of valuables) of daimyō.
• Edo was the largest urban centre and the regime’s administrative centre.
2
,• The cities were crowded and dirty. Commoner districts in Edo in the 1700s were more densely
populated than residential portions of Tokyo in the late 1900s, one of the world’s most crowded cities.
• Extensive road system with two main roads linking Edo, Kyoto and Osaka- Tōkaidō route along the
sea and Nakasendō trail through the mountains. Networks of inns emerged to lodge travellers and a
publishing industry developed to produce maps and guidebooks. Busy packhorse transport industry.
• Tokugawa society had a particular status order to which everyone must be conscious to adhere to.
• Coastal shipping was more economical than overland hauling, and cargo boat trade flourished too
especially of the daimyō’s taxed rice to be taken to market.
• Merchant houses maintained branches in the capital to build a complex economic system giving funds
to daimyō upon receipt of his tax rice, issuing funds as credit in advance of harvest— creating a rice-
futures market.
• Villages providing raw materials were hardly touched by the government. An entire village was
assessed for taxes and the headman and elders divided the burden accordingly. This meant farmers
could improve their practices and agricultural production and output grew substantially.
• Educated samurai, as well as some priests and farmers (including women) offered classes to country
people meeting at Buddhist temples in villages. Farmers began to write manuals on effective
agricultural techniques from the 17th c.
• The population appears to have nearly doubled in 120 years from the 1600s, 0.8% annual growth.
Stagnation in cities, vitality in rural areas
• 150 years that followed saw simultaneous stagnation and vitality. The largest cities shrunk on the main
island, particularly castle towns. Population growth came to a virtual halt between the 1720s and
1860s. Several famines in the late 1700s and 1830s killed thousands.
• It was not unusual for farming families to abandon or kill unwanted infant children. Some thought this
was a last resort of desperate peasants but it may have been a form of family planning to avoid
starvation by successful farmers.
• Samurai officials viewed famines and infanticides as evidence of the moral failings of the rulers as well
as the ruled. Living costs for city-dwelling daimyō and samurai mounted. They took loans from
merchant houses often struggling to repay them.
• ‘Farmers and trademen have exchanged positions’ (author from Okayama, 1979) and people were
offended at the violation of the natural hierarchy.
• By the 1800s, production ceased to be monopolised by city artisans in a process of proto-
industrialisation of the countryside. There was increased scale of operations and specialised
production networks serving long-range markets deeply embedded into rural society and economy.
• Peasants had few effective means of legally protesting. If a claim was rejected the petitioner faced the
risk of punishment.
• Orthodox ideals of Tokugawa society held that women should be ignorant and in the kitchen stated in
a Chinese-inspired text, The Greater Learning for Females.
• But social practice defied harsh prescriptions as women played crucial productive roles in the
household economy and outside it. Managing farming households, taking in piecework tasks (e.g.
spinning or weaving). Girls from wealthy farm families worked as domestic servants in noble Kyoto
households, those from impoverished homes worked in brothels.
• Men in Tokugawa and early Meiji society played an active role in child care and housework.
• Disparity between rural and urban social climate can be explained in recognition of the uneven
distribution of resources between class and regions and also the limited integration of the Tokugawa
economy into Asia-wide or global trading networks.
3
, • Country places flourished as: they were located near raw materials and water power; close to growing
rural markets and close enough to city markets; sustained by tight public relations among trader and
producer; benefitted from ability to shift between faming and other occupations; free from taxes and
guild restrictions.
• Contrast to Europe in the 16 and 1700s where rural economy grew but urban centres did not
simultaneously decline. Europeans pursued surging foreign trade aggressive adding to urban
employment, allowing food imports and encouraging population growth and urbanisation.
• Japan in 17th and 18th c did export considerable volumes of silk and copper to China through
Nagasaki and silver to Korea. Their growth was inward and rurally focused.
• Tokugawa society was never egalitarian. Villagers were given roles as servants or branch family
members; their poverty was buffered by the patrons’ sense of an obligation to care for their charges in
paternalistic benevolence. This became less reliable in the 1800s causing rise in social protest for the
new type of inequality in the market.
1/3 The Intellectual World of Late Tokugawa
• Symptoms of distress and decline: chronic daimyo and samurai debt, devastating famine, increased
instances of violent protests
• ‘Conservative reforms actually set in motion a chain of events that made a return to the past
impossible’
Ideological foundations of the Tokugawa Regime
• It’s endurance couldn't have solely relied of the coercive power of hegemony and henchman but an
accepted concept of legitimate rule.
• Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had used coercion so nakedly that they had great need to convince people
of the legitimacy of their rule and so sought to ground their authority upon religious as well as secular
symbols and ideals.
• Nobunaga promoted himself as a divine ruler and demanded samurai “venerate” him in exchange for
divine, and military, protection. He claims to be the embodiment of “the realm”.
• Hideyoshi shred this tendency for self-deification, hosting the emperor as an equal at his palace in
Kyoto. The Tokugawa clan continued these programs of personal deification that rivalled sacred
claims of the imperial court.
• Several core ideas concerning the proper political and social order emerged from the
start of the Tokugawa rule: first, that hierarchy is natural and just; second, selfless
service and accepting one’s place within a hierarchical society are great virtues; third,
Tokugawa Ieyasu was the great sage founder, source of all wisdom.
• Suzuki Shōsan was a source of this ideology. He argued that the present life was an occasion to repay
obligations to benefactors (lord, parents). One existed not for one self, but for lord and society. One
served them by observing one’s proper place. The result would be salvation in the next life.
• The more intellectual society were exposed to, and could draw on neo-Confucian ideas
• The heart of neo-Confucian synthesis was in the Hayashi academy (a shogunate university built to
honour Confucius) and focused on the principle of reason, ri, which governed the relations of the
heavenly bodies. It depicted that the ruler stood above, the people at the base. All humans, as well,
had proper relations to each other: father-child, husband-wife, ruler-subject, friend-friend, sibling-
sibling. In Japan specifically, the shogunal ruler was said to stand above the rest of the people. The
emperor, descended from the supreme heavenly body, the sun, delegated power to him. The people—
in the 4 primary statuses of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant—stood below him, with samurai as
aides to ruling power.
4
Andrew Gordon
1/1 The Tokugawa Polity
• Tokugawa period 1600-1868
• A time of unprecedented peace and social order under harsh laws and restrictions on social and
geographic mobility
• ‘Tokugawa’ was the family name of Japan’s military rulers
• Officials ruled by the motto: ‘Sesame seeds and peasants are very much alike. The more you squeeze
them, the more you can extract from them.’
• Also a time of flourishing rural production and commerce and lively urban lifestyle with autonomous
international trading ports, ‘an energetic, at times rambunctious, population’
• Route to modernity was not smooth- from 19th c there were ‘grave problems’ like underemployed
warriors suffering identity crisis, and established institutions and ideas seeming inadequate to deal
with new pressures at home. Rulers faced social tensions and protests.
• Absence of warfare post the Ōnin War destroying Kyoto (the ancient capital) and a constancy of
warfare for the following century in the form of samurai men and daimyō
• The 1600s to mid-1800s were completely free of war. The warrior elite retained their place as political
rulers.
• Oda Nobunaga was the first ‘unifier’ after a ruthless campaign of terror to rise to power. He was
assassinated in 1582 having consolidated control over two-thirds of Japan. He was viewed with fear
and awe having fashioned political institutions that his successors used to good effect in sustaining
Tokugawa peace. He encourage relatively autonomous village organization as long as they paid taxes
and developed a bureaucratic program of tax collection. He pioneered the use of survey of agricultural
land and established a sharp class boundary between warriors and farmers.
• Toyotomi Hideyoshi took up the banner as a political strategist pursing a politics of alliance-building.
He successful extended dominion over all of Japan by 1591 by taking hostages from the daimyō to
ensure their loyalty. He left a council of trust lieutenants, regents, who ruled on behalf of his son.
• Tokugawa period was ruled by the family’s military government, bakufu. The first ruler was Ieyasu
who was harsh but a patient tactician. He built up an effective domain government in the 1580s and
90s. In 1600 he destroyed the forces of Hideyoshi’s other regents in the battle Sekigahara giving him
unchallenged hegemony. In 1603 he had the emperor grant him the ancient title of shogun.
• Ieyasu retired and put his son, Hidetada, in the office of shogun who was succeeded by his son
Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third shogun. His rule from 1923 to 1951 was the height of the Tokugawa
dictatorship and he consolidated the institutions that remained in place when Western powers
threatened to colonise Japan in the 1850s.
• These years of neutralizing opposition and eliminating tensions brought Japan to the most stable
political order in its history
• Ieyasu forbade the daimyō from concluding alliances among themselves and dispatched inspectors to
make sure they complied with his instructions. The loyal daimyō were fudai daimyō and the opposing
daimyō were called tozama. He protected his power base by surrounding the Tokugawa house lands
with fudai daimyō and relatives, the shin pan, while placing the tozama daimyō furthest away.
• He reintroduced the pre-Tokugawa practice of ‘alternate attendance’ (sankin kōtai) making the
daimyō ‘attend’ Kyoto in order to monitor them. Iemitsu later regularized the attendance system
requiring all daimyō to maintain residences in Edo. There was also a watchword system looking for
women going out, guns coming in; these were signs of rebellion in the making.
1
,• The residences that the daimyō had to keep at home and at Edo weakened them as they spent much
money maintaining households and funding their grand processions back and forth. They could also
no longer have a hands-on role in local rule.
• Ieyasu continued the policy of economic support for the court raising the Tokugawa family’s legitimacy
by enacting imperial prestige as well as carefully controlling the emperor. He raised the role of shogun
to virtual equal of the emperor.
• Samurais pledged loyalty and offered military service to more powerful daimyō and after the wars of
unification many did not return to supervise their home lands. They took administrative positions
receiving annual salary, ‘stipends’, from daimyō.
• The commoners were divided into subgroups. Iemitsu ordered all commoners to register with a
Buddhist temple and temple’s were ordered to guarantee each person’s religious loyalty preventing
movement of commoners. 80% of the population was farmers. Villages were taxed but held collective
responsibility for managing internal affairs, lead by city elders enforcing laws and collecting taxes.
• Tokugawa social order drew on Chinese Confucian ideas. Social hierarchy was warrior, farmer,
artisan, merchant. The outcast group was called eta living in scattered communities and performing
‘unclean’ tasks like burials and executions.
• In Edo, Yoshiwara district was home to the entertainment quarters of brothels, theaters and
restaurants. Moralistic officials took the occasion of a fire that destroyed the district in 1657 to relocate
Yoshiwara to the far outskirts.
• Temples had to report annually to the bakufu to prevent them growing in strength and challenging
secular authority.
• The Ainu ethnic minority, aboriginal Japanese, were kept on the margins of society but not as much so
as foreigners who were secluded from the ‘closed country’.
• Iemitsu issued edicts restricting interaction of people in Japan with those outside prohibiting overseas
voyaging, export of weapons and practice of Christianity. Some trade was maintained with China
through the Satsuma domain providing intelligence as well as goods.
• Japanese ties to the West were sharply reduced for over two hundred years from 1630s to 1850s, a
critical time in European history- the era of the industrial and bourgeois revolutions and the colonising
of the New World.
• The Tokugawa hosted Korean embassy parties at times of celebration in acts of diplomacy and to
impress the daimyō with the respect shown by foreigners to the Tokugawa particularly during the
expulsion edicts.
1/2 Social and Economic Transformations
Boom
• In the 16th c (before unification), cities in Japan’s islands were growing in size and number . Urban
growth was fuelled by contending military rulers (daimyō) settling their armies of samurai warriors and
service personnel into castle towns.
• In the late 1500s, fortunes of the daimyō waned and only after the Tokugawa regime consolidated its
hold did the urban centres become more stable.
• Alternate attendance promoted urbanisation and economic integration of separate economies, notably
Osaka and Edo. Without this, the domains would've developed as independent small states.
• Travel and residence requirements of the daimyō promoted traffic across domain borders and
interregional trade but drained the coffers (supplies of valuables) of daimyō.
• Edo was the largest urban centre and the regime’s administrative centre.
2
,• The cities were crowded and dirty. Commoner districts in Edo in the 1700s were more densely
populated than residential portions of Tokyo in the late 1900s, one of the world’s most crowded cities.
• Extensive road system with two main roads linking Edo, Kyoto and Osaka- Tōkaidō route along the
sea and Nakasendō trail through the mountains. Networks of inns emerged to lodge travellers and a
publishing industry developed to produce maps and guidebooks. Busy packhorse transport industry.
• Tokugawa society had a particular status order to which everyone must be conscious to adhere to.
• Coastal shipping was more economical than overland hauling, and cargo boat trade flourished too
especially of the daimyō’s taxed rice to be taken to market.
• Merchant houses maintained branches in the capital to build a complex economic system giving funds
to daimyō upon receipt of his tax rice, issuing funds as credit in advance of harvest— creating a rice-
futures market.
• Villages providing raw materials were hardly touched by the government. An entire village was
assessed for taxes and the headman and elders divided the burden accordingly. This meant farmers
could improve their practices and agricultural production and output grew substantially.
• Educated samurai, as well as some priests and farmers (including women) offered classes to country
people meeting at Buddhist temples in villages. Farmers began to write manuals on effective
agricultural techniques from the 17th c.
• The population appears to have nearly doubled in 120 years from the 1600s, 0.8% annual growth.
Stagnation in cities, vitality in rural areas
• 150 years that followed saw simultaneous stagnation and vitality. The largest cities shrunk on the main
island, particularly castle towns. Population growth came to a virtual halt between the 1720s and
1860s. Several famines in the late 1700s and 1830s killed thousands.
• It was not unusual for farming families to abandon or kill unwanted infant children. Some thought this
was a last resort of desperate peasants but it may have been a form of family planning to avoid
starvation by successful farmers.
• Samurai officials viewed famines and infanticides as evidence of the moral failings of the rulers as well
as the ruled. Living costs for city-dwelling daimyō and samurai mounted. They took loans from
merchant houses often struggling to repay them.
• ‘Farmers and trademen have exchanged positions’ (author from Okayama, 1979) and people were
offended at the violation of the natural hierarchy.
• By the 1800s, production ceased to be monopolised by city artisans in a process of proto-
industrialisation of the countryside. There was increased scale of operations and specialised
production networks serving long-range markets deeply embedded into rural society and economy.
• Peasants had few effective means of legally protesting. If a claim was rejected the petitioner faced the
risk of punishment.
• Orthodox ideals of Tokugawa society held that women should be ignorant and in the kitchen stated in
a Chinese-inspired text, The Greater Learning for Females.
• But social practice defied harsh prescriptions as women played crucial productive roles in the
household economy and outside it. Managing farming households, taking in piecework tasks (e.g.
spinning or weaving). Girls from wealthy farm families worked as domestic servants in noble Kyoto
households, those from impoverished homes worked in brothels.
• Men in Tokugawa and early Meiji society played an active role in child care and housework.
• Disparity between rural and urban social climate can be explained in recognition of the uneven
distribution of resources between class and regions and also the limited integration of the Tokugawa
economy into Asia-wide or global trading networks.
3
, • Country places flourished as: they were located near raw materials and water power; close to growing
rural markets and close enough to city markets; sustained by tight public relations among trader and
producer; benefitted from ability to shift between faming and other occupations; free from taxes and
guild restrictions.
• Contrast to Europe in the 16 and 1700s where rural economy grew but urban centres did not
simultaneously decline. Europeans pursued surging foreign trade aggressive adding to urban
employment, allowing food imports and encouraging population growth and urbanisation.
• Japan in 17th and 18th c did export considerable volumes of silk and copper to China through
Nagasaki and silver to Korea. Their growth was inward and rurally focused.
• Tokugawa society was never egalitarian. Villagers were given roles as servants or branch family
members; their poverty was buffered by the patrons’ sense of an obligation to care for their charges in
paternalistic benevolence. This became less reliable in the 1800s causing rise in social protest for the
new type of inequality in the market.
1/3 The Intellectual World of Late Tokugawa
• Symptoms of distress and decline: chronic daimyo and samurai debt, devastating famine, increased
instances of violent protests
• ‘Conservative reforms actually set in motion a chain of events that made a return to the past
impossible’
Ideological foundations of the Tokugawa Regime
• It’s endurance couldn't have solely relied of the coercive power of hegemony and henchman but an
accepted concept of legitimate rule.
• Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had used coercion so nakedly that they had great need to convince people
of the legitimacy of their rule and so sought to ground their authority upon religious as well as secular
symbols and ideals.
• Nobunaga promoted himself as a divine ruler and demanded samurai “venerate” him in exchange for
divine, and military, protection. He claims to be the embodiment of “the realm”.
• Hideyoshi shred this tendency for self-deification, hosting the emperor as an equal at his palace in
Kyoto. The Tokugawa clan continued these programs of personal deification that rivalled sacred
claims of the imperial court.
• Several core ideas concerning the proper political and social order emerged from the
start of the Tokugawa rule: first, that hierarchy is natural and just; second, selfless
service and accepting one’s place within a hierarchical society are great virtues; third,
Tokugawa Ieyasu was the great sage founder, source of all wisdom.
• Suzuki Shōsan was a source of this ideology. He argued that the present life was an occasion to repay
obligations to benefactors (lord, parents). One existed not for one self, but for lord and society. One
served them by observing one’s proper place. The result would be salvation in the next life.
• The more intellectual society were exposed to, and could draw on neo-Confucian ideas
• The heart of neo-Confucian synthesis was in the Hayashi academy (a shogunate university built to
honour Confucius) and focused on the principle of reason, ri, which governed the relations of the
heavenly bodies. It depicted that the ruler stood above, the people at the base. All humans, as well,
had proper relations to each other: father-child, husband-wife, ruler-subject, friend-friend, sibling-
sibling. In Japan specifically, the shogunal ruler was said to stand above the rest of the people. The
emperor, descended from the supreme heavenly body, the sun, delegated power to him. The people—
in the 4 primary statuses of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant—stood below him, with samurai as
aides to ruling power.
4
