though Japanese feudalism on the whole was a little later and, perhaps because of the relative isolation of Japan from external pressures, evolved a trifle more slowly. The late fifteenth century saw a stage in Japanese feudalism that perhaps corresponds most closely to European feudalism of the twelfth century, which is usually cited as the high point of feudalism in the West. Moreover, Japan, because of the almost total isolation it imposed on itself in the early seventeenth century, was able to preserve a basically feudal political structure into the nineteenth century, long after Europe had abandoned the system. As a result, the latter part of Japan’s feudal experience took place at a technological level that was far higher than that of feudal Europe. It is not surprising, therefore, that this late phase of Japanese feudalism revealed possibilities for the efficient centralization of power through feudalism which could not even be guessed at from the European experience.
As can be readily seen even from this brief presentation, Japanese and European feudalism were by no means identical. The differences in detail were many and sometimes significant. Nonetheless, Japanese feudalism remains a striking and most revealing parallel to the feudal experience of the West.
As has been mentioned, the first important conclusion we can draw from our consideration of Japanese feudalism, particularly in its setting in Asian history as a whole, is the obvious fact that feudalism, far from being a common human experience and an inevitable step in human progress, is a most unusual phenomenon. Clearly the Western assumption that classic or slave-state cultures must inevitably give way to a feudal stage in development is nonsense. This happened only at the two geographic extremes of the Old World, and the bulk of humanity went through no such historical experience. It is absurd to insist egocentrically that most of the world somehow fell out of step with history at this point. We should instead search for those factors peculiar to Europe and Japan which might account for the unusual historical development in these two areas.
If we look at our problem first from the Japanese rather than the European point of view, we may gain some new insights as to why feudalism arose at all. The Japanese between the seventh and the ninth centuries had managed to modernize their hitherto relatively primitive land by borrowing much of the higher culture of the Chinese, including a highly centralized bureaucratic political mechanism and a complicated tax and land-owning system. The relative success of the Japanese in this bold attempt is on the whole more surprising than their ultimate failure to maintain these highly centralized political and economic institutions. Their failure grew out of their
