Description
Hello for this assignment I need to engage in a discussion about Chapter 8 of my book. Here are the instructions
Teamaster must evaluate the week’s reading, movie, and documentary . Your team should select features that you found particularly interesting and engaging to talk about. Do not try to cover the whole reading, information on all documents, film or documentary in one thread. Choosing a clear focus will help you host an effective Tea Meeting because you must do more than merely describe what you saw and read about; you must get your classmates to engage analytically with the content, bringing the discussion to a deeper level.
Research: Please make sure to lookup any related information that is worth
adding, whether it reinforces or contests the readings’ position what matters is
your justification for its inclusion.
Add background history of the documents you are analyzing, the director of the
films and authors of readings background, and any other information that will
enhance the discussions.Hello for this assignment I need to engage in a discussion about Chapter 3 of my book. Here are the instructions
Readings and Links
Read: from Japan: History and Culture from Classical to Cool
Chapter 8: Embracing the West (209-243)
Analyze documents: from Modern Japan: A History in Documents
Chapter 4: Turning Outward: 1890-1912
https://fiu-flvc.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery…
•
After doing the readings and when assigned movies and documents, please join the conversation with the TeaMasters!
Remember we are all learning from one another, expand on the conversation, provide facts and links 🙂
Do not summarize readings here, the idea is to analyze them by discussing them.
**NOTE: when discussing documentaries, and movies look for elements that confirm or expand on the themes from the readings rather than merely pointing out the plot.**
More than just thinking about the plot, you need to look at every detail so that you can compare how characters dress, do elders and youth dress alike?
Consider the architecture, how are spaces designed, what spaces are occupied by whom?
Is there a difference between genders, authorities, young/elders or do they all occupy the same place? Who gets up first at the table, who serves?
Are characters taking turns to speak, which lines does each say, who has the last word, etc?
& finally… what does it all mean?
How do your observations relate to the content of the course
We do need to Make 3 replies so I will send some responses because we have to further analyze their response.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
ES from
ory
PAG
hist
Modern Japan
A History in Documents
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ES from
ory
PAG
hist
Modern Japan
A History in Documents
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James L.Huffman
3
ES from
ory
PAG
hist
To Grace and Simon
General Editors
Sarah Deutsch
Associate Professor of History
University of Arizona
3
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto
Copyright © 2004 by James L. Huffman.
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Huffman, James L., 1941–
Modern Japan: a history in documents / James L. Huffman.
p. cm. — (Pages from history)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-514742-1 (alk. paper)
1. Japan—History—1868– 2. Japan—History—Tokugawa period,
1600-1868. I. Title. II. Series.
DS881.9.H85 2004
952.025—dc22
2004008185
Printed in the United States of America
On acid-free paper
Carol K. Karlsen
Professor of History
University of Michigan
Robert G. Moeller
Professor of History
University of California, Irvine
Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom
Associate Professor of History
Indiana University
Board of Advisors
Steven Goldberg
Social Studies Supervisor
New Rochelle, N.Y. Public Schools
John Pyne
Social Studies Supervisor
West Milford, N.J. Public Schools
Cover: The main shopping street of Shinjuku,
Tokyo, Japan. Copyright © Cheryl Conlon.
Frontispiece: At the beginning of the twentieth
century, crowds took to the streets frequently in
Japan’s cities: for festivals, to demonstrate for
lower streetcar fares, to celebrate military triumphs.
Here, residents of Yokohama celebrate with flags,
lanterns, and banners in the aftermath of Japan’s
1905 victory in the Russo-Japanese War.
Title page: The feminist poet and essayist
Yosano Akiko sits for a formal photo in 1915
with her husband, the less-famous writer Yosano
Tekkan, and their children.
Contents
6
8
11
WHAT IS A DOCUMENT?
HOW TO READ A DOCUMENT
INTRODUCTION
17
20
28
37
42
THE SHOGUN’S REALM
Closing the Country
A Feudal Regime
Life Under the Tokugawa
The Shogunate Under
Challenge
47
THE OLD ORDER TOPPLES:
1853–68
Japan’s Sense of the World
Perry’s Arrival
A Land in Transition
Symbols of Change
Tumultuous Times
Demise of a Domain Lord
Chapter One
Chapter Seven
159
161
170
176
THE REEMERGENCE: 1945–70
An Occupied Land
The Return to Normal Life
The Reemergence
185
JAPAN AS A WORLD POWER:
AFTER 1970
Surmounting Crises
Awash in Capital
As the Century Ended
Chapter Eight
187
195
201
Chapter Two: Picture Essay
49
50
51
52
54
55
Chapter Three
57
59
67
74
CONFRONTING THE MODERN
WORLD: 1868–89
Envisioning a New World
Creating a New System
A New Society
Chapter Four
81
83
87
98
TURNING OUTWARD: 1890–1912
Rising Nationalism
An Expansionist Turn
A Modern, Urban Society
107
109
121
IMPERIAL DEMOCRACY: 1912–30
The Energy of Modernity
Reining in Diversity
131
133
147
THE DARK ERA: 1930–45
The Militarist Turn
War
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
212
214
216
219
220
TIMELINE
FURTHER READING AND
WEBSITES
TEXT CREDITS
PICTURE CREDITS
INDEX
6
MODERN JAPAN
Pick up this page from previous book
What Is a Document?
T
o the historian, a document is,
quite simply, any sort of historical evidence. It is a primary
source, the raw material of history. A document may be more than the
expected government paperwork, such as a
treaty or passport. It is also a letter, diary,
will, grocery list, newspaper article, recipe,
memoir, oral history, school yearbook, map,
chart, architectural plan, poster, musical
score, play script, novel, political cartoon,
painting, photograph––even an object.
Using primary sources allows us not
just to read about history, but to read history itself. It allows us to immerse ourselves
in the look and feel of an era gone by, to
understand its people and their language,
whether verbal or visual. And it allows us
to take an active, hands-on role in (re)constructing history.
Using primary sources requires us to
use our powers of detection to ferret out
the relevant facts and to draw conclusions
from them; just as Agatha Christie uses the
scores in a bridge game to determine the
identity of a murderer, the historian uses
facts from a variety of sources––some, perhaps, seemingly inconsequential––to build
a historical case.
The poet W. H. Auden wrote that history was the study of questions. Primary
sources force us to ask questions—and
then, by answering them, to construct a
narrative or an argument that makes sense
to us. Moreover, as we draw on the many
sources from “the dust-bin of history,” we
can endow that narrative with character,
personality, and texture—all the elements
that make history so endlessly intriguing.
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Cartoon
This political cartoon addresses the issue of church and
state. It illustrates the Supreme Court’s role in balancing
the demands of the 1st Amendment of the Constitution and
the desires of the religious population.
Illustration
Illustrations from
children’s books,
such as this
alphabet from the
New England
Primer, tell us
how children were
educated, and
also what the
religious and
moral values of
the time were.
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WHAT IS A DOCUMENT?
7
Pick up this page from previous book
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Treaty
Map
A 1788 British map of
India shows the region prior
to British colonization, an
indication of the kingdoms
and provinces whose ethnic
divisions would resurface
later in India’s history.
A government document such as this
1805 treaty can reveal not only the
details of government policy, but
information about the people who
signed it. Here, the Indians’ names
were written in English transliteration by U.S. officials; the Indians
added pictographs to the right of
their names.
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Literature
The first written version of the Old English epic Beowulf,
from the late 10th century, is physical evidence of the transition from oral to written history. Charred by fire, it is
also a physical record of the wear and tear of history.
8
How to Read a Document
T
his book aims to bring us close to
the people who actually lived out
Japan’s modern era, through their letters, speeches, documents, cartoons,
statistical charts, and maps. To understand
those people, however, we must treat these
documents as a detective would, looking for
clues about what they really mean. We need
to ask ourselves constant questions as we read
what people in the past have written:
Is this accurate? In the first chapter of this
book, a Portuguese merchant named Alvares
describes Japanese “kings” of the late 1500s; history
tells us, however, that Japan had no kings then.
Why did Alvares make this mistake? Does his error
make the document useless? If not, what does it tell
us? Errors themselves often give us insights into the
writer’s world and worldview.
What are the writer’s biases? All people are
biased, but we must ask what the bias was and how
it affected the source. When the nineteenth-century
traveler Kume Kunitake described Christian scriptures as “delirious ravings,” was he telling us more
about Christianity or more about Japanese understandings of religion? Since we want to know how
people saw the world, biased materials often give us
as much insight as balanced materials do.
What is the context? When we hear the journalist Kiryū Yūyū decry the army’s “reckless actions”
in 1936 (Chapter 6), we must ask what was happening in Japan then. Does his diatribe suggest that
people were free to criticize their government, or
simply that a few brave men risked prison for the
right to speak up?
What lies beneath a document’s surface? An
important trend among historians is the use of literary and visual materials, because they often tell
us more than their composers intended. It is not
enough to ask if the facts are accurate, however;
we must ask what clues they reveal about life at the
time. Omissions can tell us much about a writer’s
way of seeing the world.
The British historian E. H. Carr said that a fact
resembles an empty sack, which the historian must
fill with meaning. So too with documents. They
will not yield much insight unless the reader asks
the right questions. Read carelessly, documents may
mislead, confuse, or hold the full picture back from
us. Examined carefully, they bring the past to life.
MODERN JAPAN
Brackets
In translated materials, the translator often has to include words or ideas
not found in the original text, so that the meaning will be clear to the
English-speaking reader. Such materials normally are placed in brackets.
Tone
Tone may be as important as actual words in helping us understand a document. Kume’s balanced tone here gives us immediate clues about the kind
of man he was and the purpose of the writing. The fact that he sees behavioral differences as signs of variant cultures rather than as indications that
Americans were just barbaric suggests to the reader that Kume was well
educated and a careful observer. The tone also may be our first clue to the
fact that he was on an official mission and that Japanese were quite open to
cultural relativity.
Subconscious Values
Certain phrases tell the reader that the writer may have had values that
even he himself (and his fellow countrymen) did not fully understand. Few
people today would think of American men as having been servants of their
wives in the nineteenth century. Yet that is what Kume thought when he
saw American men holding chairs for women and carrying their things in
public. His statement should prompt the reader to ask what Japanese values
led to such an assessment. Even if Kume’s evaluation of American values
was wrong, it helps us understand Japan’s own values then.
Unintended or Suggestive Information
Although Kume is describing American practices in this journal entry, his
obvious surprise makes it clear that the gender-related behaviors he
observed were not common in Japan. The careful reader would use Kume’s
material as a stimulus to further research, and might learn that in the 1870s
Japanese women indeed did avoid going out publicly with their husbands,
and that Japanese of both genders would have found it not only unusual
but morally offensive for men to treat women deferentially in public.
Concrete Details
Even if an observer’s interpretation of a situation is wrong, the document
still may yield a rich, concrete picture of the setting. This entry makes it
clear that when Kume visited the United States, men were restrained in
their behavior when women were present but “lax” when by themselves.
People also ate by lamplight, rode in carriages, wore shoes, and used chairs
(an uncommon practice in Japan then). And Kume obviously saw (or heard
about) instances of husbands being punished by their wives when they had
acted offensively.
Photos
Photos may not provide the concrete facts of an era, but they help us
understand the human values that undergirded those facts. The photo here,
taken by a professional photographer in 1876, shows Sakai Denpatsu,
Kyoto’s first governor, just before a new law took effect requiring samurai
to give up their swords and cut their hair. Careful readers may be impressed
by Sakai’s eagerness to retain a record of the traditional samurai dignity and
garb, but they also will note how even he blended Japanese and Western
elements: old Japanese kimono, sword, and shoes alongside a Western-style
chair, the traditional hairstyle carefully combed to be recorded by a newfangled camera.
HOW TO READ A DOCUMENT
9
Journal of Kume Kunitake on 1872 Visit to the United States
From the time our group boarded ship at Yokohama, [we found ourselves]
in a realm of completely alien customs. What is appropriate deportment
for us seems to attract their curiosity, and what is proper behavior for
them is strange to us. . . . What we found most strange in their behavior
was the relations between men and women.
With respect to relations between husbands and wives, it is the practice in Japan that the wife serves her husband’s parents and that children
serve their parents, but in America the husband follows the ”Way of
Serving His Wife.” The [American husband] lights the lamps, prepares
food at the table, presents shoes to his wife, brushes the dust off [her]
clothes, helps her up and down the stairs, offers her his chair, and carries
her things when she goes out. If the wife becomes a little angry, the husband is quick to offer affection and show respect, bowing and scraping to
beg her forgiveness. But if she does not accept his apologies, he may find
himself turned out of the house and denied meals.
When riding in the same ship or carriage, men stand up and offer
their seats to the women, who accept with no hesitation at all. When
women take their places sitting down, the men all crowd around them to
show their respect. Men are restrained in their behavior when together
[with women] at the same gathering. . . . It is only when the women
retire that the men begin to become lax in their behavior. . . .
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11
Introduction
J
The thirty-seven-foot-high bronze
statue of Buddha at Kamakura,
built in the 1200s, not long after
the warrior class had taken power
in Japan, illustrates not only how
wealthy the new samurai leaders
were but how deeply they valued
both art and religion. The nineteenth-century Westerners’ eagerness to be photographed on the
Buddha’s lap showed both the
statue’s height and the visitors’
lack of respect for Buddhism.
apan already possessed an ancient civilization when the first
Western visitors, a group of shipwrecked Portuguese sailors,
stumbled onto the coast of southern Tanegashima island in 1542.
Though a young country in comparison with its neighbor
China, this archipelago nation had been ruled at least nominally by
emperors for more than a thousand years and had boasted a welldeveloped, community-based culture for a full two millennia. The
Japanese people were as highly educated as any on the globe, and the
country’s literary and art worlds were sophisticated. It was little wonder that the first European arrivals called the Japanese the “best race
yet discovered.” Japanese culture was, after all, well in advance of that
of Europe.
Until the eighth century, Japan’s central regions were ruled directly by the imperial Yamato family, a clan said to have descended from
the sun goddess and to have ruled these divinely created islands since
660 BCE, when the first emperor, Jimmu, came down from the heavens.
The family’s rule had peaked in the eighth century at Nara, a capital
city of 200,000 people where taste and elegance vied with intricate
law codes, adapted from China, to make Japan a model of progress. A
fifty-three-foot statue of Buddha, dedicated in 752 CE and covered in
15,000 pounds of gold, showcased the new importance of Buddhism,
as well as the ruling family’s wealth. Although the emperors lost much
of their political power to a noble family named Fujiwara after the capital moved north to Kyoto (then called Heian) to get away from Nara’s
meddling Buddhist influence at the end of the century, the emphasis
on taste and elegance remained. During the 400 peaceful years in
which Heian dominated Japanese life, a group of women produced
brilliant works of literature, including what has been called the world’s
first novel, the Tale of Genji, while men vied for esteem by showing off
their learning, and everyone competed to be the best dressed and the
most elegant calligraphers.
The mood turned darker near the end of the 1100s, when a warrior family named Minamoto took control of the country by military
12
MODERN JAPAN
force and moved the administrative capital 300 miles east, to the
remote region of Kamakura. For the next four centuries, the sword
would dominate political life, first in the hands of powerful clans
named Hōjō and Ashikaga who controlled Japan from the capital,
and later under the power of regional lords, called daimyō, who
largely ignored the central government and ruled from feudal
castle towns. Even during this period, however, the emperors continued to sit on their thrones, powerless but important as high
priestly symbols of Japan’s link to the heavens. And while the
fighting sometimes was brutal, the samurai, or warrior class, nurtured education and the arts as vigorously as the nobles of Heian
had. In the 1400s and 1500s, drawing inspiration from the Zen
sect of Buddhism, samurai produced some of history’s most unusual and sophisticated art forms: rock gardens, flower arranging, ink
paintings, and the tea ceremony. One of the most popular stories
of the age was that of Atsumori, a young warrior slain by an enemy
soldier who cried profusely while beheading him; when Atsumori’s body was examined, he was found to be carrying a flute
alongside his sword. It was thus a combination of martial vigor and
cultural sophistication that set the stage for Japan’s modern era.
One of the distinctive features of Japan’s ancient history is its
complex interactions with the rest of Asia. Living less than a hundred miles off the continent, the Japanese drew endlessly on the
culture and institutions of China, adapting its religions, writing system, law codes, and cultural tastes—even while vigorously maintaining their own distinct values and styles. When one of Japan’s
earliest leaders, the regent Shōtoku Taishi, sent a study mission to
China in 607 CE, he made it clear that his people were eager to
learn from China, but he also revealed their self-confidence by
giving the embassy this charge: “From the sovereign of the land of
the rising sun to the sovereign of the land of the setting sun.” The
Chinese emperor, offended, refused to assist the mission’s members.
That same tension—between a thirst to understand foreign
institutions and a determination to assert and preserve native traditions—continued to shape the whole of Japan’s modern era,
propelling dynamic change at times, inviting calamity at others.
During the early modern centuries when the Tokugawa family
ruled (1600 –1868), the country shut itself off from the rest of the
world, fearful that trade and Christianity would undermine the
Tokugawa’s hold on power. Once the West reentered, in the mid1800s, the newness of foreign technology and the military threat
INTRODUCTION
13
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of imperialism triggered an explosion, a rush to modernize that
caused urban residents to gasp: “Old things pass away between a
night and a morning.” The clash between national values and
Westernization also triggered Japan’s march down the road of
imperialism. When leaders became convinced late in the nineteenth century that Japan’s culture and independence could be
preserved only by showing the country’s strength militarily, they
began wars with China and Russia, winning both, and secured
their own colonies in Taiwan and Korea. The patriotism stimulated by those victories turned into aggressive nationalism in the
1930s, fueling Japan’s disastrous participation in World War II.
Japan’s World War II defeat in 1945 brought more than mere
humiliation and devastation. It also assured the country’s renewal,
with even greater force, and heightened the tension between
embracing foreign influences and nurturing native traditions. For at
least two generations after the war, the country engaged the rest of
the world almost as intensely as it had in the late 1800s, and even
more successfully. It was the United States rather than China that
fueled Japan’s internationalism this time, with the Americans providing a government structure and constitution during the postwar
Like the British Isles on the western
fringe of the Eurasian land mass, the
Japanese archipelago is dwarfed geographically by continental neighbors
such as China, Russia, and India.
In the modern era, however, it used its
location and astute policies to emerge
as Asia’s most powerful nation.
14
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Kawabata Yasunari, Japan’s first Nobel Prize winner
in literature (1968), illustrated in his works the postwar
tension between international influences and domestic
traditions. He knew Western literature well and wrote
about such modern topics as decay and death, yet used
the literary styles of classical Japan. A traditionalist
who wore the kimono, he loved the game of go, a complicated board game somewhat like chess.
MODERN JAPAN
occupation (1945–52), then helping to build Japan’s economy in
the 1950s through everything from military procurements to trade
and defense alliances.
By the late 1960s, Japan had become its own engine, using a
combination of energy, hard work, efficient institutions, and
effective education to develop the world’s second-largest economy. By the 1980s, it was arguably the richest country on earth,
giving out more foreign aid than any other nation and planting its
businesses around the globe. The well-tailored Japanese businessman became a common sight at the best hotels of every city in the
world. After the economy went into a tailspin in the 1990s, however, Japan’s international profile dimmed. Japan seemed to turn
inward once more, as the passage of decades made World War II
an increasingly vague memory. The dynamism of its cultural life
never died out; nor did its reputation as one of the world’s most
educated, safest, best-working societies. It continued to be one of
the world’s largest economies and to work quietly as an agent of
change in Asia. But as several times before, the islands began to
focus more heavily on domestic issues. Several generations of
fierce engagement with the outside world were followed, at the
turn of the twenty-first century, by an inward turn.
Finding primary sources to study Japan’s last 1,500 years never
has been a problem. For reasons that historians have not fully figured out, writing came late to the Japanese islands; their culture
was well developed long before they began adapting China’s
written script to fit their own spoken language in the early fifth
century. Once that process began, however, the Japanese took
fervently to writing and record keeping. They compiled their
first major poetry anthology, the Man’yōshū, “Collection of Ten
Thousand Leaves,” in the mid-700s, a few decades after they had
published a monumental seventeen-volume set of legal and administrative codes. And in the 760s, the empress ordered a million
copies of Buddhist incantations to be printed and distributed
throughout the country. From that point on, the Japanese wrote
with a passion, right down to the modern age: keeping diaries,
publishing sermons and stories, composing histories, recording
farming methods, and carrying on the kinds of public conversations possible only through the written word.
When a 1760 law insisted that since “books had long been
published, no more are necessary,” the officials were, more than
anything, admitting the impossibility of stemming the flow of private writing. Indeed, one of the distinctive characteristics of
Japanese writing is the fact that so much of it was private in
INTRODUCTION
15
nature. As early as the 1000s, much of the best writing was done
by women courtiers, people without the credentials (or right) to
use the Chinese script used in official documents. By the onset of
the modern era in the early 1800s, when government control was
particularly stringent, private scholars were issuing forth discussions of every aspect of national life, while dissidents were using
cunning of every sort—including highly commercial, hard-tosuppress “newspapers” called broadsides—to get their ideas into
the public arena. Once the daily newspaper press took root in the
1870s, that process gathered steam, and by the early 1900s Japan
had a mass press, reflecting the views of an expanding public with
as much energy and controversy as could be found anywhere in
Europe or the United States. Even in the highly censored days of
the 1930s and World War II, private speeches and publications
continued to make a wide range of views available to those courageous enough to seek them out.
The point of all this is that historians seeking to know Japan’s
past, particularly in the modern era, will be hindered more by an
abundance of sources than by a lack of them. No matter what the
segment of society—mountain villagers, political radicals, schoolteachers, fishermen’s wives, athletes, rural philosophers, prostitutes, rebel farmers, city office workers—it is well represented in
the collected, preserved writings of Japan. Irokawa Daikichi, one
of Japan’s best-known contemporary historians, has spent a career
trying to hear the voice of what he calls “grass-roots culture” and
he has found it, not just in the essays of “‘learned men’ among the
common people” but in pamphlets, records, written appeals,
newspaper reports, and court documents by and about the “inarticulate masses.” The Japanese are educated; they are opinionated;
they are writers; they are record keepers. The historian’s job—and
it is not an easy one, the abundance of sources notwithstanding—
is to find those records, to interpret them, and to develop as complete a picture of Japan’s past as possible.
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Japanese at all levels of society delight in calligraphy
and are eager to show off their skills at it. One of the
most popular slogans for calligraphers in the late 1940s,
particularly among schoolchildren, was heiwa kokka
kensetsu, “building a nation of peace” (top). Twelveyear-old crown prince Akihito, who became emperor in
1989, reproduced the slogan on New Year’s Day 1946.
In a more recent example (bottom), a calligraphy student
writes a modern version of an old Japanese saying.
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17
Chapter One
The Shogun’s
Realm
W
The viciousness of the fighting during
the Tokugawa forces’ attack on
Toyotomi castle in Osaka in 1615
was captured by the artist Kuroda
Nagamasa. Although the gun had
been introduced to Japan by then,
Tokugawa warriors still
primarily used swords and pikes.
hen the Boston journalist Edward H. House arrived in
Tokyo in the summer of 1870, he proclaimed himself
surprised by what he found: a people struggling with
massive social changes yet gracious to the many foreigners who were pressuring Japan to make these changes, orderly and
law abiding even in a time of political tumult. “The climate is lovely,”
he wrote to his New York editor; “the people (natives, I mean) are
kind; hospitable, and courteous to a degree which more than justifies
all that has been said in their praise; . . . the scenery inexhaustibly
attractive, and the cost of living is light.” It was not the first time
Westerners had been impressed by Japan. The initial European visitors, nearly three centuries earlier, had found the Japanese people
handsome, intelligent, orderly, and gracious. Some even commented
on how quickly they adapted, then surpassed, the Westerners in skills
as varied as making bread and turning a profit at trade.
One reason the visitors were impressed lay in the ages-old ability
of the Japanese to structure their surroundings and institutions so that
a large segment of the populace enjoyed the “good” life. Though
plagued as much by strife as other peoples, the Japanese elites had
focused for a millennium on education and harmony as keys to civilization. Another reason, by House’s time, lay in the specific political
and social structures of the Tokugawa era (1600–1868), which had
given the country two and a half centuries of peace by emphasizing
loyalty and learning, while providing enough money and freedom to
spawn vibrant cities, alive with commerce and trade, up and down the
islands. It was this time that laid the foundations for Japan’s modern era.
One of the remarkable features of life under Tokugawa rule was its
peaceful nature. For four centuries prior to consolidation of control by
18
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This depiction of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who
took power in 1600, was sketched in the
formal style typical of portraits of powerful men of the seventeenth century, with
the subject dressed in heavy court robes
and sitting, unsmiling, on a dais. He
had himself named shogun in 1603.
MODERN JAPAN
family head Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1600, the country had been at war, held together loosely in the
better times by national overlords who called
themselves “shoguns,” and ruled during less stable
periods by as many as 250 regional lords known
as daimyō, “great names.” By the late fifteenth century, fighting had laid waste to the capital city of
Kyoto, turning both the shogun and the emperor
into figureheads and plunging Japan into a feudal
era in which competing members of the military
class ruled relatively small domains from massive
defensive castles. After Ieyasu had consolidated
his victory by leveling the castle of chief rival
Toyotomi in 1615, the country remained at peace
for 250 years. There were peasant uprisings—during the famine-plagued period of 1833–37, for
example, when the annual frosts came as early as August. But these
uprisings were local and isolated, no threat to Japan as a whole.
At the base of the stability was a sophisticated, well-run
administration, grounded in a unique system called bakuhan in
Japanese and “centralized feudalism” in English. In this system, the
Tokugawa rulers adopted a Neo-Confucian philosophy from
China that demanded loyalty to parents and rulers and allowed
the daimyō to retain control of their own domains (to the extent of
collecting taxes and maintaining local armies). But the Tokugawa
held onto absolute allegiance through a set of regulations that
kept the lords in the capital city of Edo (today’s Tokyo) half the
time. They also adopted an elaborate legal system that kept people satisfied yet controlled. And they barred most foreigners from
coming to the country and Japanese from leaving, thus making
sure their opponents got neither money nor ideas from abroad.
The ruling samurai class, focused on maintaining status and privilege, eventually grew stagnant.
Although this system was tightly controlled, it provided
enough flexibility and opportunity to make the Tokugawa years
energetic. Merchant firms flourished, as sake, or rice wine, brewers and soy sauce manufacturers with names like Mitsui and
Kikkoman moved into ever wider fields of operations, founding
silk spinning and cotton weaving factories, establishing rice
exchanges, and even managing the shogun’s finances. By the early
nineteenth century, many of them had become financial giants,
making loans to cash-strapped rulers and accumulating wealth
THE SHOGUN’S REALM
19
that made Japan’s towns and cities prosper. One result of the economic vitality was the appearance of schools in every region: public academies in the capital of each domain (now called a han), private institutions run by leading scholars, and more than 10,000
popular schools—many of them taught and operated by
women—run out of homes, shops, or even temples. As the
Tokugawa era moved into its last half-century, literacy rates had
risen as high as those in England, and a healthy intellectual life
supported a large array of thought systems: national learning that
focused on the uniqueness of Japan’s past, study of the West called
“Dutch learning” (so-called because the only Westerners allowed
in Japan were from the Netherlands), and Neo-Confucianism,
which emphasized character development, public service, and
loyalty to a benevolent state, as well as a more practical approach
to Japan’s contemporary problems.
The most dramatic evidence of Tokugawa vitality came in the
urban areas, where merchant wealth undergirded entertainment
centers that were as lively as they were lowbrow. Every city had a
geisha quarter, presided over by female entertainers who danced,
sang, and made conversation with male visitors. These centers
produced some of the most interesting arts of Japanese history.
Japan’s first prominent woodblock artist
was Moronobu Hishikawa, a native of
The kabuki theater, for example, provided plays that were known
Chiba, on Edo Bay, who illustrated
for both intricate plots and dramatic staging, such as temple
nearly 150 books on everything from
kimono patterns and puppet plays to life
bells falling on worshipers and samurai disguised as women.
in the cities’ entertainment quarters. He
Novelists spun tales of love and moneymaking that sold into
was well known for his po
