Japan: Its History, Arts, and Literature/Volume 3/Chapter 4
Chapter IV
MIDDLE PERIOD OF THE TOKUGAWA
Nothing is more remarkable in the history of the Tokugawa epoch than the absence of anything like organised rebellion for many generations. Nevertheless at an early period of the epoch there appeared upon the stage a turbulent figure which remained more or less in evidence until modern days. This was the rōnin, or "wave-man," an epithet applied to samurai who, believing themselves charged with a mission to mend the times, refrained from joining the service of any fief, and wandered about, ready to take a part in all adventures that showed a colouring of sentiment. Some of them, originally vassals of feudal houses upon whose ruins the Tokugawa had risen to power, were only obeying the dictates of loyalty when they refused to bow to the Yedo rule. Some had no grievance except their own inability to conquer fortune; and many, swayed by the pure spirit of knight-errantry, passed from place to place for the sole purpose of measuring swords with fencers of repute wherever such might be found. When, in the fourth generation of the Tokugawa, the office of Shōgun fell to a boy of eleven, a number of these "wave-men" imagined that the time had come for a grand coup. They plotted to set Yedo on fire and to attack the castle in the confusion. Happily detection preceded the act. The leaders died by their own hands or under the sword of the executioner, and for a long era no repetition of such enterprises disturbed the public peace. The seventeenth-century rōnin are not to be regarded, however, as the outcome of a transient mood of political unrest. They represented a conviction apparently inherent in the Japanese mind, that every man possesses a natural right to assert his opinion in whatever manner he chooses, provided that he accepts the full consequences of his choice. That is the most emphatic form assumed by Japanese individualism. There is no element of license in the theory: a morally justifiable motive must always exist. But that condition satisfied, a man may demonstrate the sincerity and earnestness of his views by sacrificing his own life or that of another. The motive warrants the method—which may be called the Japanese version of the end justifies the means.
The era (1661–1680) of this fourth Tokugawa Shōgun, Iyetsuna, was remarkable for other things as well as for the lawlessness of the "wave-men." From that time the Tokugawa began to fare as all great families of previous ages had fared: the substance of administrative power passed into the hands of a Minister, its shadow alone remaining to the Shōgun. Sakai Takakiyo was the chief author of this change. Secluded from contact with the outer world, the Shōgun, a man of weak intellect, saw and heard only through the eyes and ears of the ladies of his household. Takakiyo caused an order to be issued forbidding all access to the Court ladies except by ministerial permit. Thenceforth the Shōgun became practically deaf and dumb. He knew nothing of the novel channels into which public opinion was beginning to drift, of the calamities that marked the era, or of the irreverence that his officials displayed towards the Throne. For Yedo having been devastated by conflagrations and the nation afflicted by famine, the ministers of the Shogunate, declaring that these misfortunes were attributable to the Emperor's unworthiness, caused him to abdicate in favour of the heir apparent. They thus practised the democratic principles laid down by Mencius, and not a voice of protest was raised, the feudatories being completely overawed by the might of the Shōgun, and the Court nobles silenced by the munificence of the Yedo administration. The one authoritative act of his life was done by Iyetsuna in the hour of death. Hotta Masatoshi, a loyal minister, went secretly to his side and warned him that a scheme was on foot to transfer the office of Shōgun to an Imperial Prince. Takakiyo had conceived this plot, borrowing a model from the policy of the Hōjō in Kamakura. His ambition was to secure for himself and his descendants the position of Vicegerent. But the insignia of the Shogunate—a Masamune sword and a Kunimitsu dagger—were handed by the dying Shōgun at midnight to Hotta Masatoshi, and when morning broke the conspirators found the dead man's office occupied by his brother, Tsunayoshi.
This is a particularly interesting epoch of Japan's history. It saw the first manifestations of a public opinion destined to culminate in the remarkable radicalism of the nation's nineteenth-century career. The Shōgun's ministers, when they placed upon the Emperor's shoulders responsibility for his subjects' suffering, furnished an unwitting proof of the tendency of the time, for it was from the writings of the Chinese philosophers that they borrowed such an idea. On the other hand, the outrage thus offered to the traditions of imperialism reacted in aid of a revival then commencing, the revival of the Shintō cult. Fate, as usual ironical, placed the Shōgun (Tsunayoshi) himself in the forefront of this movement, though no great perspicacity should have been needed to show him that a cult based on the divinity of the Emperor was irreconcilable with the Tokugawa's pretensions to administrative supremacy. Perhaps, if his appreciation of Shintō had not been prompted by a woman,[1] Tsunayoshi might have showed greater political insight. But on the whole it seems juster to conclude that his love of learning overmastered all considerations of expediency, and made him at the close of the seventeenth century an unconscious contributor to influences which in the middle of the nineteenth were to work the downfall of his house.
But the Shintō revival was by no means as remarkable as a very pronounced development of political philosophy. At the head of the latter movement stood Hotta Masatoshi, by whose bold and timely action the succession to the Shogunate had been preserved in the Tokugawa family. Masatoshi was the first feudal statesman of Japan to enunciate the doctrine that the people are the basis of a nation, and to put it into practice by encouraging agriculture, protecting farmers against fiscal extortion, and endeavouring to propagate the tenets of a high morality among plebeians as well as samurai. Assassination, the common fate of too ardent reformers, terminated his noble career, but did not check the philosophic impulse he represented. It found a still more ardent and radical exponent in Kumazawa Banzan, chief factor of the Okayama fief. This memorable publicist's ethics were that every one in authority had a mission to fulfil, namely, to promote the prosperity and happiness of those over whom he ruled; that the Emperor was the true head of the nation, the Shōgun only his representative; that official attempts to extirpate Christianity were futile, for, if a true creed, it would survive all opposition, and, if false, it would die a natural death; that Buddhism was destined to be a source of national trouble, and that its priests would ultimately become vagrant thieves; and that the samurai were virtually bandits, subsisting on unearned salaries and regarding the Emperor as a mere effigy, the people as dirt.
At the time when these theories were proclaimed by Banzan, any profession of Christianity involved terrible punishment; every unit of the nation had to be inscribed on the nominal roll of some Buddhist temple and to be prepared to bear public testimony to anti-Christian sentiment by trampling upon a picture of the Cross; the Buddhists bathed in the favour of the two Courts; the Shōgun's power overshadowed the whole Empire, and the samurai, of whom Banzan himself was one, had lost nothing of their old prestige nor forfeited anything of their exclusive privileges. Courage to stand in open and flagrant opposition to such conditions savours of fanaticism. But Banzan had nothing of the fanatic. In Okayama where, as chief factor, he wielded large powers, his irrigation works, his conservation of forests, his encouragement of general education, and his suppression of priestly abuses furnished a striking object lesson in the practical application of his doctrines. It does not appear that, for a considerable time at any rate, his philosophy provoked any resentment. He enjoyed the full confidence of his feudal chief, and when he followed the latter to Yedo, every second year, the magnates of the Shōgun's Court took pleasure in listening to his dissertations. But the samurai ultimately roused official prejudice against him, and he had to retire from public life. His theories, however, had taken root. In Mito there arose a school of thinkers who adopted his doctrine as to the proper functions of Imperialism in the administration of State affairs, though they reversed his verdict against Buddhism, their conviction being that the unification of the nation could be best effected by the cooperation of the Buddhist and Shintō creeds.
Mito was the baronial capital of the province of Hitachi, which had been given in fief to a younger son of Iyeyasu. Owari and Kishu were assigned to his other sons, and these three families enjoyed the privilege of furnishing an heir to the Shōgun, should the latter be without direct issue. Mito, therefore, ought to have been a most unlikely place for the conception and propagation of principles subversive of the Shōgun's administrative autocracy. But what happened in Mito at the close of the seventeenth century was a natural result of the trend that Iyeyasu himself had given to public thought by wholesale encouragement of the study of Chinese philosophy. Iyeyasu, as has been shown above, did not possess sufficient knowledge of that philosophy to forecast the effect of its adoption, and similarly his grandson, Kōmon of Mito, swayed by the spirit of pure studentship, discerned nothing of the goal to which the new researches and speculations must lead the literati of his fief. He and they, for the sake of history and without any thought of politics, undertook a retrospect of Japanese annals, and their frank analysis, having been embodied in a book called Dai-Nihon Shi, furnished conclusive proof that the Emperor was the prime source of administrative authority, and that its independent exercise by the Shōgun must be regarded as a usurpation. They did not attempt to give practical effect to their discoveries. The era was essentially academical. But its galaxy of scholars projected into the future a light which burned with growing force in each succeeding generation, and ultimately burst into flames that consumed feudalism and the Shogunate. No such result suggested itself to the men of the time, however. Not until the lapse of several years had furnished a true perspective did it become possible to perceive that all these currents of unwonted thought—the democracy of Masatoshi, the anti-feudalism of Banzan, the Shintō revival of Masayuki and Ansai, the imperialism of Kōmon, the Confucianism of Fujiwara Tōru and Hayashi Doshin—flowed towards a common issue, national unification and the restoration of the governing authority to the Emperor.
The first to appreciate the tendency of these philosophic revolutions was Arai Hakuseki, a minister of the sixth Shōgun, Iyenobu. He proposed to avert the danger by fortifying the autocracy of the Yedo administration. Following his counsels, the Shōgun began to exercise the right of appointing and removing all officials throughout the Empire, and changed the uniforms and titles of his own officials so as to transform the Yedo Court into a replica of that of Kyōtō. He styled himself "King" for the purpose of giving audience to a Korean ambassador, and he made arrangements to receive an Imperial Princess for his consort. These aggressions might have been carried so far as to radically alter the course of Japanese history had not the Shōgun died after three years of rule, had not his successor also died before emerging from childhood, and had not the eighth Shōgun, Yoshimune, read the signs of the times incorrectly. Arai and his almost equally sagacious coadjutor, Mabe Norifusa, were now dismissed from office, and a strictly conservative policy was inaugurated, lasting for thirty years (1716–1745). Yoshimune and his ministers, though not unconscious of the tide of change that was setting strongly throughout the national life, failed to analyse its causes and endeavoured to stem rather than to direct it. They observed unprecedented luxury on the part of merchants and farmers and equally conspicuous poverty among the samurai, and they imagined that the only way to mend this to them incongruous state of things was to enforce a system of strict economy, and to restrain by sumptuary laws the growing extravagance of the inferior classes.
But the sources of the change were beyond the reach of such methods. During the first one hundred and thirty years of Tokugawa rule the samurai, no longer required to lead the frugal life of camp or barracks, and occupying a position midway between the aristocracy and the people, began to live beyond their incomes. They ceased to be able to support retainers, and found difficulty in meeting the pecuniary engagements of every-day existence, so that money acquired new importance in their eyes and they gradually forfeited the respect which their traditional disinterestedness had won for them in the past. At the same time the abuses of feudalism grew more and more conspicuous as the tranquillity of the Empire deepened. A large body of hereditary soldiers, supported from generation to generation at public charges, may find an excuse for existence when war affords an opportunity for their employment, but they become an anommaly and a burden when fighting has passed out of sight and even out of memory. In the middle of the eighteenth century the samurai presented themselves to the people in the light of useless office-holders, who checked the advancement of men of talent, maintained towards the commoner an attitude of pretension based upon obsolete claims, preserved the continuity of their hereditary emoluments by the device of adoption, clamoured constantly for the creation of new sinecures, and losing, under the stress of poverty, their old independence of character, became suppliants for monetary assistance from men whom they still professed to despise, and even went so far as to sell their family names. On the other hand, the agricultural and commercial classes alike acquired new importance. In the case of the former the change was to some extent factitious. A legal veto existed against either the permanent sale of land or its division where the process resulted in an area of less than two and a half acres or a producing capacity of less than ten koku (fifty bushels, approximately). Thus, in order that an estate might be shared with a brother or apportioned among two sons, it must have a superficies of at least five acres, or a producing capacity of one hundred bushels. The result was that, in very many cases, second sons or younger brothers became labourers or tenants, and small land-holders disappearing, a class of "gentleman farmers" came into existence, who lived on their rents and were strangers to physical toil in any shape. Meanwhile the enormous sums disbursed every year in Yedo for the maintenance of the great establishments that the feudal chiefs kept there, enriched the merchants and traders so greatly that their scale of living improved, and, like the land-owners, they indulged freely in the extravagances typical of the time,—tobacco smoking, sake drinking, vermicelli eating, and sugar consuming. The wealthy city-tradesman and the opulent provincial landlord could not fail to acquire an increasing perception of the gulf between the impecunious samurai and themselves. They resented his airs without appreciating his spirit. Excluded from the smallest share in the central administration, they had no sense of national duty, nor did they recognise any public obligation except the payment of taxes, any ethical principle except obedience to parents, or any limit to pleasure-seeking except lack of money. Religious influences were very feeble. Christianity had disappeared, and Buddhism was discredited by the conduct of its priests, who thought more of gratifying the flesh than of saving souls. Houses of ill-fame stood facing the entrances to temples and shrines, and a street in Yedo was frequented solely by the votaries of unnatural vices. The samurai themselves were rapidly drawn into this vortex of self-indulgence. Until the final quarter of the seventeenth century the bushi of the northeastern districts preserved their martial spirit and made comparatively few incursions into the realm of amatory passion, Osaka being then the chief centre of moral intemperance. But the development of the drama which took place at this epoch, quickly familiarised the citizens of Yedo and even its samurai with the southern conception of love. Romance and emotionalism took the place of martial ideas and soldierly stoicism. The strict sumptuary laws of the Tokugawa, while ostensibly observed, were in reality evaded by the use of costly linings for coats and the wearing of silk undergarments, and the lower classes, emerging from their old position of penury and degradation, seemed to be seeking in a sudden access of voluptuous license compensation for long centuries of social ostracism. All these changes were contemporaneous with the remarkable intellectual awakening alluded to above, which culminated in the almost fanatical philosophy of Itô Jinsai, a man of singular magnetism and burning eloquence, who for forty years never ceased to travel through the country, preaching the Analects of Confucius and the Teachings of Mencius as the only true moral guides, and winning disciples in every part of the Empire except the almost inaccessible province of Hida and the islands of Sado and Iki. Almost on the same level of intellectual capacity and power of moving his fellows was Ogyu Sorai, who taught that morality could not have a psychological basis, but must be founded on the practical side of natural and human life. The original ideas of these two students and their fluent speech created a new epoch. Sōrai took for models the poetry of the Tang dynasty and the literature of the Sui and the Kan, and his methods were assisted by men of letters who had immigrated from China, and whose instruction in the sounds of the ideographs had the effect of imparting unprecedented value to rhetoric. Yet these drafts upon China's wealth of philosophy and erudition served rather as grounds for new departures than as models for exact imitation. The tendency of the era was towards originality in everything. History received treatment that might almost be called scientific at the hands of Arai Hakuseki. The emotions and passions of humanity found a great dramatic portrayer in Chikamatsu Monzayemon. Elegance and conciseness of phraseology had an unsurpassed exponent in Matsuo Bashō, the celebrated composer of impressionist stanzas. Keichiu successfully rehabilitated the memory of Japan's ancient age of classic poetry, the age which produced "The Collection of a Thousand Leaves" (Manyoshiu). Kitamura Kigiu performed a similar office for the Heian epoch. Kada Azuma-maro and his great pupil, Kamo Mabuchi, purged the Japanese language of its exotic elements, and revivified popular faith in the divinity of the Throne and in the traditions of Imperial government. In brief, men's thoughts shook off the trammels of convention; material prosperity asserted its superiority over caste distinctions; the nation, freed from the long stress of anarchy and warfare, began to project its intelligence along original lines; domestic literature refused to be ignored in favour of foreign; Japanese ideas found inspiration at home instead of seeking it solely in China; the facts of history marshalled themselves in protest against the arbitrary acts of its makers; the commoner ceased to recognise the social gulf between himself and the samurai, and symptoms of distaste for the old systems and the old usurpations became more and more apparent.
It was to such a tide of change that the Shōgun Yoshimune and his ministers attempted, in the first half of the eighteenth century, to oppose barriers of economic precepts and sumptuary regulations. Arai Hakuseki (1709–1712) had conceived that the only way to save the Shogunate was by a renewed exercise of the despotic forces which had established it, whereas Yoshimune sought safety in retrenchment of expenditures and curtailment of spectacular displays which, though wasteful in his eyes, really conduced to maintain the dignity of the Yedo Court. As between the two policies, that of Arai would probably have served the occasion better, but that of Yoshimune was inspired by clear appreciation of the virtues which alone could make feudalism tolerable. The loyalty and courage of the samurai, his noble contempt for money, his simple habits and frugal life had constituted a moral title to the position he occupied. Yoshimune and the able officials he employed—among whom was the Solon of Japan, the great judge Ooka Tadasuke—sought to bring about a renaissance of these fine qualities by inculcating frugality and exemplifying it in the practice of the Shōgun's Court, on the one hand, and by taking steps to revive the popularity of military exercises, on the other. At the same time, many improvements were effected in the civil and criminal laws; encouragement was given to industry, and, what is even more noteworthy, official vetoes being removed from the study of foreign languages and sciences, the influence of Occidental civilisation began to be felt.
All this was excellent in its way. The nation appreciated it, and history calls the Kyōhō era (1716–1736) an "age of reforms" as distinguished from the Genroku era (1688–1703), an "age of abuses," when the fifth Shōgun Tsunayoshi, abandoning the paths of learning which had originally held his feet, lapsed into a state of debauchery and vice.
The Kyōhō era may almost be considered the prototype of the Meiji epoch, in which modern Japan has been so ably led into the routes of progress. A further analogy between the two epochs is established by the fact that, just as the Emperor's administrative power was restored in Meiji days, so his prerogatives received unusual recognition in 1745, when Yoshimune, desiring to transfer the Shōgun's office to his son, Iyeshige, sought the sanction of the Court in Kyōtō. Such an example of submissiveness had no precedent in the annals of the Tokugawa. It stood at the very antipodes of the policy advocated by Arai Hakuseki, and it should probably be regarded as a practical recognition of the doctrines advanced by the Mito school of annalists. Had the Emperor desired to bring about the fall of the Shogunate, an opportunity undoubtedly presented itself at that juncture. But the Imperial Court had learned to rely on the Tokugawa administration, and no idea of a radical change seems to have been entertained. It is impossible not to admire the spirit of Yoshimune's efforts, though their inefficacy must tend to discredit them in the pages of history.
This retrospect arrives now at the second half of the eighteenth century, and one of the facts that presents itself vividly is the disordered state of the Tokugawa finances. The trouble began in the Genroku era (1688–1703) when the Shōgun Tsunayoshi, while enacting laws of the most stringent character against extravagance of all kinds on the part of the people, set no limit whatever to the indulgence of his own costly caprices, so that the Tokugawa income of some three million koku of rice in kind, and 760,000 riyo in gold, equivalent in all to about four millions sterling, proved inadequate to defray the outlays of the Yedo Court and the administrative expenditures. The financiers of the time saw no better remedy than the issue of debased coins. Hagiwara Shigehide, the minister responsible for the first resort to this device, held singularly drastic views. It was his contention that the copper coins struck at the mint were mere tokens, deriving their value solely from the official stamp they bore, and that they might as well be made of potter's clay as of metal if the former were sufficiently durable. By applying this doctrine tentatively to the gold and silver coins and boldly to the copper, he realised several millions for the replenishment of the treasury. But the evils inseparable from such abuses soon presented themselves: prices of commodities rose, and hoarding became the fashion of the time. Eleven years later (1706) the same method was again employed, and on the accession of Iyenobu to the Shogunate (1709), Shigehide made preparations to issue silver coins containing only twelve per cent of pure metal. Many circumstances combined to augment the economical difficulties of the administration. The state of poverty into which the samurai had fallen, owing to causes already stated, rendered them a menace to the public peace. In Yedo alone, at the close of the seventeenth century, 7,690 military men were almost without means of subsistence, and the authorities felt constrained to come to their aid. Natural calamities contributed to the embarrassment. In the year 1703 an earthquake shook down a large portion of the colossal walls of the castle moats in Yedo. A conflagration followed, in which thirty-seven thousand lives were lost, and a tidal wave destroyed a hundred thousand people in the districts of Sagami, Kazusa, and Awa. In 1708 the mountain Fuji suddenly burst from quiescence into violent eruption, and vast tracts of country were devastated. It was in the year after this last event that the debauched student and slave of superstition, Tsunayoshi, died, bequeathing to his successor a legacy of fanatical laws and financial confusion; and it was then that the genius and wise statecraft of Arai Hakuseki saved the country from being flooded with another issue of coins possessing scarcely any intrinsic value. Six years sufficed to restore the currency to its old standard of purity and to bring prices to their normal level; but when Arai had to surrender his office in 1716, on the accession of the Shōgun Yoshimune, recourse was again had to debased coins, and economical troubles again ensued. Something of these embarrassments must be ascribed to the drain of gold resulting from the country's foreign trade. Japan, in the early days, had little to sell to foreign merchants, but found much to buy from them. The records say that from 1596 to 1638 the exports of precious metals amounted to six million riyo of gold (nine and a half millions sterling), nine million pounds (avoirdupois) of silver, and some three million pounds of copper. These figures represent, in the case of gold, nearly one-half, and in the case of silver almost the whole, of the coins struck at the mint during the same interval. Dutch importers sold as much as three and one fourth million dollars (Mexican) worth of commodities annually to the Japanese at that epoch, and not rarely two hundred Chinese junks might be seen at one time in the harbour of Nagasaki. Yet no attempt was made to impose official restrictions upon the amount of these import transactions, or on the consequent exodus of specie, until the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and not before 1715 were drastic measures adopted to enforce such restrictions. The country's store of precious metals had by that time been greatly reduced, and financiers of mediocre acumen might be excused if debasement of the currency suggested itself as an easy, sufficient, and profitable method of checking the outflow.
Other unwonted phenomena that gave much concern to the Tokugawa rulers in the second half of the eighteenth century were the rapid growth of cities and the turbulence of agriculturists. The former was a natural result of the system inaugurated by Iyeyasu, which, by compelling the feudal magnates to keep establishments in Yedo, caused a multitude of tradesmen to flock to the capital, and thus produced a rapid centralisation of wealth. The Shōgun's ministers saw not only that the scale of living became constantly higher, with a corresponding appreciation of commodities, but also that the vices which flourish wherever men congregate, threatened widespread demoralisation. Various empirical attempts to check the growth of the city proved altogether abortive. Samurai and farmers were forbidden to sell their lands to merchants, vetoes were imposed on the use of costly articles or the wearing of rich apparel, and philosophic doctrines were invoked to discredit the plutocratic tendency of the time. The chief effect of such efforts was to impair the prestige of the Shogunate by their obvious impotency. On the other hand, the heavy expenditures imposed on the feudal chiefs for the maintenance of their magnificent establishments in Yedo, where each of them had urban and suburban residences of palatial dimensions standing in beautiful parks, compelled them to have frequent recourse to the farmers for pecuniary assistance. But the farmers, between whom and the samurai the gulf had gradually grown less as long-continued peace deprived the latter of his uses and as poverty brought him into contempt, were no longer the submissive serfs of former times. Again and again they revolted against the oppressions of the feudatories, and on one occasion a vast concourse of rustics, aggregating two hundred thousand, were with difficulty restrained from marching upon Yedo to present a statement of their grievances to the Shōgun himself. It is true that the ringleaders of these demonstrations were severely punished, death being commonly meted out to them and their families; but they did not perish fruitlessly, for the grievances of their followers generally found redress, and the authority of the feudal chiefs as well as of the Shōgun's government grew steadily more apocryphal whenever the "mat-banner and bamboo spear" of the farmer extorted consideration from the two-sworded samurai.
To these factors working for the fall of feudalism must be added increasing disaffection among the samurai themselves, owing to their virtual loss of caste in the presence of tradesmen who had acquired a new knowledge of the value of wealth, and of land-owners who lived sumptuous lives without any derogatory labour, and owing, above all, to their own penury, which compelled them to seek means of subsistence in manual toil. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, these men were ready to throw themselves into any intrigue. It cannot be supposed that they cared much about theories of government. Yet they took trouble to rouse the Court nobles in Kyōtō to a sense of the evils of divided power, as between the Emperor and the Shōgun, and to expose the national defects of feudalism. They failed to produce any immediately visible effect upon the current of events, but their action unquestionably contributed to the general feeling of unrest and dissatisfaction that was then growing up throughout the country.
It was at this time also that the Yedo Court began to be divided against itself. There was a party of the Shōgun (Iyeharu, 1760–1786), a party of his favourite mistress, a party of the chief minister, a party of the heir apparent, and a party of the Mito family. To trace the lines of this division would be wearisome and useless. Sufficient to say that it was chiefly caused by a departure from the fixed order of succession in choosing an heir, the title of the "Three Families " being set aside in favour of Iyenari, a scion of the Hitotsubashi house.
The ethics of the nation were at their worst in the days (1760–1786) of the Shōgun Iyeharu. Bribery was practised openly and shamelessly. Pauperism prevailed extensively in the chief cities, with its usual accompaniments of theft and incendiarism. Conflagrations became so common in Yedo that the citizens learned to regard them as one of the inevitable ills of daily life. In 1760 one-half of the city was reduced to ashes, and eleven years later a fire, burning for ten days, swept over five districts, killed four hundred persons, and laid waste a space ten miles long and two and a half in width. Several of the great nobles began to assume a defiant mien towards the Shōgun. Men of learning were regarded as interesting curiosities rather than as public benefactors. Society abandoned itself to excesses of all kinds. The queen of the day was the professional danseuse, and even among men skill in dancing and singing constituted the highest title to consideration. The plutocrat took precedence of the bushi. The officials that conducted the administration were corrupt and incompetent. For a moment this evil state of affairs was checked by the shock of natural calamities. In the autumn of 1771 a hurricane swept over the country and destroyed a great part of the crops. In the spring of 1773 a pestilence killed ninety thousand people in four months. In 1782 a volcanic eruption (Mount Asama) buried a number of villages under mud and rocks. In 1783 a famine reduced the people to such extremities that they subsisted on dogs, cats, rats, herbs, roots, and bark. Matsudaira Sadanobu, chief minister of the Shōgun Iyenari (1787–1838), called to power by these catastrophes, introduced drastic reforms, and might have effected a lasting improvement had he not wrongly gauged the tendency of the time. He failed to detect the forces working to produce a reaction against the despotic sway which Chinese literature and Chinese philosophy had exercised almost uninterruptedly since the beginning of the Tokugawa epoch, and he devoted all his energies to an attempt to bring the nation into one ethical fold with Chu, the great Confucian commentator, for pastor. Any procedure, however arbitrary, seemed justifiable in the eyes of this statesman, provided that it conduced to his great aim of unifying national thought. He made it an imprisonable offence to investigate or teach any philosophy save that of the Sung expounder of the Analects. Of course such an attempt to coerce men's intellects strengthened the moral revolt it was intended to check. The study of Japanese literature and Japanese history acquired fresh popularity. It has been already shown that this study owed its inception to the great Mitsukuni (Kōmon), feudal chief of Mito, under whose patronage a hundred-volume history, Dai-Nihon-shi, was compiled in the second half of the seventeenth century. A still profounder scholar, Motoori Norinaga, wore the mantle of Mitsukuni in the second half of the eighteenth century, and threw all his intellectual strength into the cause of a revival of whatever was purely Japanese, whether of language, of literature, of religion, or of tradition. Strange to say, the Shōgun and his chief minister, although they sought so earnestly to popularise Confucianism as expounded by Chu, ultimately tolerated the Japanese revival and even encouraged it, opening an academy for its advocates, and themselves taking a share in the investigations. They did not see that Japanese history was a story of perpetual usurpations on the part of rival clans, of encroachments upon the prerogatives of the sovereign and thefts of his authority, of the culture and dignity of the Court nobles despite their many faults, and of the neglected right of the Emperor to exercise administrative power. An incident of the time furnished an object lesson in these principles. The Emperor (Kōkaku), desiring to give a certain title to his father, sent an envoy to Yedo to consult the Shōgun. But it happened just then that the Shōgun contemplated giving a similar title to his own father. The proposal from the Kyōtō Court was regarded as a deliberate scheme, and when the Emperor's envoys pressed it, they were actually punished by the Shōgun. Voices were now raised loudly denouncing the arbitrariness of the Tokugawa. They did not as yet become audible in influential quarters, but they nevertheless indicated the growth of a sentiment fatal to the permanence of the Yedo administration.
It will be easily understood that although the revival of pure Japanese literature, of the Japanese religious cult and of the ethics connected with it, was in effect a rebellion against the despotic sway of Chinese authority, the latter had in fact prepared the route to the goal indicated by the former. For whereas Confucianism taught that a ruler's title is valid only so long as his administration conduces to the welfare of the ruled, Shintō showed the people whither they should turn for relief from the incompetent and injurious sway of the Shōguns. Thus, though the two stood nominally opposed to each other, both had the same political tendency.
At this epoch a new factor of disturbance appeared upon the scene: the Russians began to push southward from Kamchatka. There was nothing like deliberate aggression on a large scale, but only a gradual movement with occasional incidents of violence and trespass. So insignificant indeed, were these evidences of foreign enterprise, that sixteen years passed before the officials in Yedo obtained intelligence of what was going on in the north, and they then persuaded themselves that rumour had greatly distorted the facts. But in truth this resurrection of the problem of foreign intercourse opened the last chapter of the history of Japanese feudalism.
- ↑ See Appendix, note 25.
Note 25.—His consort was the daughter of an eminent advocate of Shintō and through her this influence made itself felt in the Yedo Court circle.