In the first days of the eleventh month of the first year of Genroku—late November 1688—people walking in the clean and orderly streets of the Japanese city of Kanazawa occasionally were accosted by beggars dressed as lepers. Noticing that the beggars did not in fact have the missing fingers, ears, and noses of lepers and remembering what time of year it was, the stroller might give the beggar some money and receive in return a charm that would ward off the fearful disease.
The Japanese cycle of the year offered up great events for everyone: New Year, the Girls’ Festival, the Boys’ Festival, the summer Star Festival, and the Festival in Honor of Ancestors. In a society carefully and thoroughly divided into occupational and status groups, it was fitting that many of these groups also had their own separate festivals. The smiths had theirs on the eighth of the tenth month, and the merchants held theirs twelve days later, decorating their shops, offering discounts, giving small presents to regular customers. Beggars were another status group, with their own headmen recognized by the government; in 1688 they were upset by the number of people begging who were not part of their recognized groups. In fact, there were two separate groups of recognized beggars, and the sham lepers of the beggars’ festival were not from the main group but from a smaller, separate group, tenaciously independent, with their own living area behind the Shinmei shrine, called the monoyoshi, “beggars who bring good fortune.” In addition to begging they produced sandals and rain clogs for sale and cared for lepers. On auspicious days throughout the year they assembled outside prosperous households and showered the residents with blessings and good sayings if they got some food or money but insulted them if nothing was forthcoming.
In their carefully controlled and sanctioned discourtesies, their sham confrontations with real horrors, the public rituals of the “beggars who bring good fortune” were typical of the kinds of ceremonial outlets and expressions that have helped make life bearable amid the exacting social roles and carefully modulated expressions of emotion in Japanese society. Kanazawa itself was in many ways an excellent example of what was happening to Japan in the seventeenth century. In 1688, with about one hundred thousand residents, it was one of the twenty largest cities in the world. Like most Japanese cities, it was relatively new, standing where there had been only a small settlement until the 1540s. The oldest stone walls of the castle that dominated the city, seat of the Maeda family of daimyo (territorial lords), were less than a hundred years old.
The beginnings of the new Japan of the seventeenth century, which many historians now see as the direct ancestor of the sophisticated, productive, and highly organized Japan of the 1990s, can be most easily traced to the efforts of daimyo to build for themselves coherent structures of military power, political control, and economic activity from the 1550s on. Several superdaimyo attempted to put together alliances under their own hegemony that would control all Japan; finally, in the early 1600s, one of them, Tokugawa Ieyasu, succeeded. He and his heirs ruled as shogun (generalissimo), nominally appointed by passive, ceremonial emperors, until 1868. Daimyo allied with them, and even some of their defeated opponents, were placed in charge of substantial province-size pieces of the country, with wide autonomy in their internal administration and no taxes from these areas to the Tokugawa. Their loyalty was assured by the military predominance of the Tokugawa and their most loyal allies and by the requirement that daimyo leave their families as hostages in the shogunal capital at Edo (modern Tokyo, itself a new urban creation of the seventeenth century) and reside there themselves in alternate years. The Maeda had never sought hegemony for themselves but had astutely built up their power as energetic allies of the most promising contender. They were rewarded by the Tokugawa with successive grants that added up to the largest non-Tokugawa domain in Japan, reliably dominating a wealthy area valuable to any contender for power but not really a strategic key to the country, across the mountains from Edo and the other main cities, near the west coast of the main island.
The daimyo had worked energetically from the late 1500s on to devise political institutions that would strengthen their control of people and resources within their territories. They compiled registers of residents, their landholdings, and their tax obligations. The previously fluid distinction between samurai (warriors) and commoners was turned into a fixed hereditary one, and commoners were forbidden to carry weapons. Samurai, the hardest element to control, were subjected to harsh regulatory codes and were forced to move to the castle towns of their lords and live on stipends drawn from the daimyo’s unified land revenue. Unique among the arms-bearing elites of the early modern world, samurai had no conflict of interest between their tax-collecting and landholding functions, no independent economic-base from which they could challenge their lords. It is no accident that the disciplined and loyal salarymen of modern Japan look back on the samurai with fascination and respect.
Merchants and craftsmen, especially those most vital for warfare, were given monopoly marketing privileges and grants of land for workshops and warehouses in order to induce them to settle under one daimyo rather than under his rival. More peaceful crafts and commerce also were encouraged, as were land reclamation and agricultural improvements that could improve the daimyo’s tax base. In the unsettled years just before and after 1600 all this was done to strengthen the daimyo’s fighting capacity, and down into the 1630s there were enough worries about the stability of the new order that every lord wanted to keep his defenses as strong as possible. As the Tokugawa peace continued and solidified, the habits of thorough control and constant efforts to maximize the wealth and power of the daimyo’s realm became engrained. The system of hostage residence in Edo turned out to be a huge drain on daimyo funds, reinforcing the search for new sources of revenue. The disciplined samurai showed themselves to be as effective in maintaining an orderly and efficient administration as they had been in killing enemies of their lord.
The results, by 1688, included a good many new houses and other signs of prosperity in the countryside. In the growing cities, all residential land was assigned by the daimyo’s local governors, all people were organized into mutual security groups, all residential areas had watchmen and locked gates at night, and there was a great bustle of trade and crafts production. Most singularly, in a world of war and dangerous city streets, Kanazawa and other Japanese cities, administered by men brought up on tales of reckless personal courage and constantly practicing their skills with the world’s finest swords, were the safest in the world of 1688. Japan had not seen open warfare in more than seventy years.
A final singularity: The two beggar groups were hereditary outcast groups. There were other such groups that engaged in “unclean” occupations like tanning hides. But all spoke the same language and were of the same race and culture. Japan was effectively closed to foreigners from 1640 on. In Edo, Kyoto, or Osaka, an occasional Dutch or Korean embassy could be seen. But not in Kanazawa, which may have been the biggest city in the world of 1688 with no foreigners at all. There had not been any for decades, and there would be none for at least 170 years to come.
Keeping order in Edo was a much more daunting task than it was for the lords of Kanazawa. Edo also was a new city. In the 1590s Tokugawa Ieyasu, allied with Hideyoshi, the supreme military leader of that decade, conquered the rich plain around what we now call Tokyo Bay. He began to build a castle on a new site, overlooking a small fishing village named Edo. After he had consolidated his grip on all Japan, he made Edo the seat of his bakufu, “tent government,” his headquarters as shogun, supreme military dictator. The shoguns were formally appointed by the emperors, who descended in unbroken lineage from the sun-goddess. The emperors resided in the ancient capital of Kyoto and were well treated and generously supported by the Tokugawa but had no power. The Tokugawa shoguns promulgated general codes of conduct for all daimyo and their subordinate samurai and sent occasional spies or inspectors to the realms of the daimyo, but generally allowed them to make policy and to administer their realms as they saw fit. However, all daimyo served at the pleasure of the shoguns, who might move them to new realms or dismiss them entirely. The difficulty with the latter course was that it left their loyal samurai masterless, and masterless samurai—rônin, “wave men”—were easily drawn into crime, subversion, or rebellion.
By 1688 the process of consolidating Tokugawa supremacy had been through a period of quiescence and had revived somewhat. The bakufu had become a substantial bureaucracy of samurai, administering the large domains that the shoguns held directly and keeping close watch over the rest. A key instrument of control was the system that required daimyo to leave family members in Edo at all times and to spend every other year residing there in person. The shape of the city reflected its complex structure of power. In its center was the enormous Edo Castle (since 1868 the Imperial Palace), behind great stone walls and multiple moats, where the shogun and his household lived. Nearby were the mansions of the major daimyo who had been early allies of the Tokugawa and who occupied the highest offices in the bakufu. Then there was a zone of the more modest residences of the Tokugawa retainers called housemen and bannermen. Still farther away were the estates of the “outer” daimyo, who had not been so close to the early Tokugawa or had even actively opposed it; they did not have access to official posts in the bakufu. Their Edo estates were parts of their own realms; within their walls they administered their own house law, not Tokugawa law. There were many residences and shops within the imposing precincts of Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, which also enjoyed a large measure of administrative autonomy. The commoner quarters too were broken up by walls and gates. The imposing wooden gates, still such a notable feature of temples and other survivals of traditional architecture, might serve as a master metaphor for a society of rapid growth, aesthetic refinement, and thorough control.
In 1688 Edo was one of the largest cities in the world, with a population of more than nine hundred thousand. Commoners, the vast majority of that population, were under the jurisdiction of two magistrates. Each month one of them was on duty, receiving instructions from his superiors at the castle, registering petitions, and hearing lawsuits; the other kept busy behind closed doors resolving cases that had come to him the month before. The magistrates controlled a small force of constables and patrolmen, fewer than three hundred for the whole city. There also was a large hierarchy of nonsamurai local elders, reaching from the three hereditary city leaders down through the neighborhood chiefs to the common citizens. These last were organized into groups of five families, which kept in touch with the neighborhood chiefs and were jointly responsible for the conduct of all their members. Each residential quarter, whether commoner or samurai, was responsible for night patrols to prevent crime and watch for fires. Each maintained and manned its own gatehouse and guardhouse. Edo had more than nine hundred such guardhouses. Beijing had household registration systems; Amsterdam and Istanbul, we shall see, had night patrols; no other metropolis of 1688 had Edo’s full range and rigor of methods of control.
The rulers of Edo wanted everyone in his or her proper place, ranked and registered. But the city grew and changed all the time. Shops edged into streets. Seasonal warehouses became permanent. Along with the threat to public order, uncontrolled building increased the danger of fire in a city almost entirely built of wood. In 1657 fires had swept across large parts of the city, destroying the central structures in Edo Castle and, by official estimate, 160 daimyo estates, 350 shrines and temples, 750 residential areas of bannermen and housemen, and 50,000 merchant and artisan homes. In order to lessen the danger of another such fire, the authorities laid out several new residential quarters that reduced crowding in the existing ones and designated some burned-out areas as firebreaks, not to be rebuilt. One firebreak area was Edobashi, Edo Bridge, created by landfill in the early seventeenth century, a prosperous merchant quarter until 1657. (Its big riverfront lumberyards must have made especially spectacular fires.) Residents allowed to rebuild in a part of Edobashi were required to maintain guards and patrols to keep people out of the firebreak area. This was a heavy financial burden, and the residents sought to offset it by leasing plots in the firebreak area to seasonal merchants, such as the sellers of the pine branches and bamboo cuttings favored for New Year decorations. Soon there were teahouses, used-book dealers, fortune-tellers, and many more. But they were allowed to put up only modest stalls, with no living quarters attached, so they could be quickly broken down and hauled away in case of fire or if the shogun was going to pass by on the river. By 1688 shipping agents and fish wholesalers were nearby, pressing for access to choice riverside sites in the firebreak. The reurbanization of Edobashi went much further in the eighteenth century.
Edo was a great city of consumers, but not a center of fine craft production compared with the old capital of Kyoto and its mercantile neighbor Osaka. Literary and cultural trends tended to start in Kyoto and Osaka and then reach Edo in vulgarized forms. The result was that Edo was at least the equal of London or Paris as a center of pleasure seeking and the quest for social respectability through conspicuous consumption.
The daimyo spent great sums on performances within their estates of No dance dramas, refined, ceremonious, subtle, piercing in their portrayal of the human condition. They also built magnificent landscaped gardens, such as the famous Kôrakuen built by Tokugawa Mitsukuni, daimyo of Mito, head of one of the highest-ranking branch houses of the shogunal family, patron of Confucian studies. He had been assisted in the design of the garden by an erudite Ming Loyalist refugee from China who had brought Chinese classical learning in its full development to Mitsukuni’s academic and publishing projects, and whose very presence in Japan suggested to some Japanese that men of loyalty and integrity no longer were at home in China but still were honored in Japan.
That was all very well for the earnest, the refined, and the culturally pretentious. But Edo swarmed with samurai—Tokugawa housemen and bannermen and retainers of the daimyo—with time on their hands and with literate commoners with various degrees of newfound wealth. (The lumber merchants were among the richest.) For them there was plenty of entertainment of broader appeal. Prostitution was legal in one quarter, the Yoshiwara, which was supposedly off limits to samurai. But everyone jostled in its narrow streets, ogled the cheaper girls, and told stories about the famous refined and reclusive beauties, usually kept by high-ranking samurai or rich commoners. Books were on sale of wonderful black-and-white prints depicting all kinds of amorous escapades, the lively lines of the moving bodies setting off the geometrical patterns of furnishings and clothing. They were called shunga, “spring pictures,” and they owed something to phallic/fertility elements in Japanese religion. Some claimed to be books of instruction for sexual beginners. But they might well have alarmed as well as aroused the uninitiated, breaking completely from the elegance of line of the rest of the print to show a towering bushy tool aiming at an equally exaggerated bushy cleft.
There were kabuki playhouses in at least three districts of the city; the first listing and ranking of kabuki actors that has come down to us is from 1687. Kabuki performances were as great spectacles as Nô, and much more plot-driven. Despite plots that often told a noble tale from Japanese history, the kabuki theaters could not shake, perhaps did not want to shake, an air of decadence and sensuality. Earlier in the century the women who had acted in them had had a bawdy reputation. After women were banned from the stage, female roles were taken by young men, many of whom attracted the homosexual attentions of the wealthy and powerful. In Edo in the 1680s kabuki plays that presented contemporary political dramas, with all the names changed but clearly recognized, were very popular, and a few plays that portrayed the suicide of lovers who could not marry because of class differences were beginning to appear.
Fully equal to the kabuki as an art form in Edo was the jôruri puppet theater. Chikamatsu Monzaemon, not yet at the height of his fame but already a powerful and successful playwright, wrote for both, and some of his greatest work was for the jôruri. The puppets were about three feet tall, beautifully designed and articulated. Their manipulators frequently were visible; the artificiality of the figures and the magnificence of their costumes and the patterns they formed were essential to the experience. The chanter of the text was the key expressive artist. The most popular jôruri producer of the day was Yamamoto Tosa-no-jô, who was criticized by the more refined for his disconnected plots, uninspired language, and frequent inclusion of brothel scenes.
The shogun who presided in Edo Castle in 1688 was Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. He was called the Dog Shogun, and many stories were told of his torrent of edicts forbidding cruelty to dogs and other animals and his savage punishment of violators. It was speculated that he had been under the influence of a Buddhist monk opposed on religious principle to the killing of living things or that since he had been born in the Year of the Dog, he felt a special obligation to protect dogs. There is no question that the people of Edo were aware in 1688 that their lord was especially concerned about “compassion to animals”; one collection of bakufu documents records nine edicts on the subject in 1687 and one in 1688. But later stories of his bizarre actions owe much to the hostility of high-ranking bakufu bureaucrat families to his use of personal favorites in government.
jôruri puppets, their handlers, and the chanter
Tsunayoshi’s attention to domestic animals seems to have begun in 1686 with new rules on the registering of dogs and their owners. Several edicts in 1687 elaborated on this policy. Others forbade the abandonment or turning loose of sick horses. One order exiled a daimyo whose cook had drowned some kittens. Although we should riot discount the regular references in these edicts to “compassion toward animals,” we also can begin to see the importance of these policies for order and public safety in the great city. Dogs, many of them large breeds trained for hunting or guarding, were breaking loose and terrorizing the ordinary people in their flimsy houses and open shops, while sick horses wandering crowded streets posed a clear threat to public health and safety.
Moreover, these policies were part of a larger effort by Tsunayoshi to tame and civilize the samurai. He was the first shogun who had no high degree of interest or training in warfare. He was a serious student of Confucianism who in the 1690s gave a series of lectures on the Yi Jing. In 1684 he cracked down on gangs of housemen and rônin who were causing trouble in Edo and two years later did the same to gangs of commoners. “Compassion toward animals” was part of the milder, more civilized ethic he was trying to promote. People who were cruel to animals often treated people the same way. The samurai saw that they couldn’t mistreat even dogs, much less commoners.
Tsunayoshi pursued these policies until his death in 1709. Students of Tokugawa Japan sometimes have a hard time putting together the bizarre tales of the Dog Shogun with other images of that time. The year 1688 was the first of a new “year period,” designated Genroku, which has become a byword among historians for the emergence of an urban, consumer-oriented culture, of the arts of peace. But peace, luxury, and lectures about compassion could go only so far. In 1701, in Edo Castle, a daimyo drew his sword on a rude bakufu official. He was ordered to commit suicide. Two years later forty-seven of his samurai, now rônin, broke into the Edo mansion of the official who had provoked their lord, killed him, and in their turn were condemned to commit suicide. But the tale of the loyalty of the forty-seven rônin was widely retold and helped preserve the spirit of the samurai through the long centuries of peace.
In 1688 Nagasaki, at the upper end of a long, narrow bay on the western side of the southern island of Kyushu, had been at the vortex of Japan’s extraordinary relations with the outside world for more than a hundred years. From the 1540s on, Portuguese traders had begun to probe for trading opportunities, soon followed by Saint Francis Xavier, who found in the Japanese a sense of honor and a capacity for single-minded warriorlike commitment that appealed to him both as a Jesuit and as a Spanish hidalgo. In the political and cultural turmoil of Japan in the late 1500s, lords of competitive domains were eager to attract the trade of the Portuguese to their own ports and found that it was easier to do so if they were hospitable to the Jesuits.
Some Japanese of all classes found in the religion preached by the missionaries a set of coherent and disciplined responses to the moral and intellectual disorder of their times. By 1580 there were more than one hundred thousand Christian converts in Japan. In that year a daimyo granted Nagasaki to the Society of Jesus as a feudal fief. But only seven years later the rising superdaimyo Hideyoshi had grown worried by the danger of Christianity as an advance guard for Portuguese and Spanish power and attempted to expel all the missionaries. From 1612 on, under the Tokugawa shoguns, laws against missionary activity and the practice of Christianity by Japanese grew steadily more severe. In 1622 and 1623 almost one hundred missionaries and converts were executed, most by crucifixion, in Nagasaki and in Edo. Other Japanese Christians chose to emigrate; they did much of the work on the facade of the grand Church of São Paulo in Macao, drew the concern of the Spanish in Manila, formed a royal bodyguard in Ayutthaya, and even settled in Batavia. Many Christians in Japan remained steadfast in the face of brutal tortures. In the late 1630s everything came to a head around Nagasaki. Nearby, at Shimabara, Christian peasants rose in rebellion and were crushed. The shogunate concluded that the Portuguese were irremediably involved with the missionaries, expelled them, and executed almost every man of an embassy sent to plead for reconsideration.
The Dutch, who had been trading at Hirado farther north on the coast of Kyushu, were transferred to Nagasaki and confined to Deshima, an artificial island built for just this purpose. The Chinese also were limited to trade at Nagasaki but not so tightly confined. Foreign trade in Japanese ships, which sometimes had been carried on by Japanese Christians and which often led to contacts with Christians abroad, had been more and more tightly regulated in the 1630s and was now strictly prohibited. The consequences of this voluntary withdrawal were immense; a maritime Asia with an active Japanese presence in 1688 would have been profoundly different from the actual situation.
Nagasaki thus became by far the most important window on the world for a political elite that was terribly conscious of the dangers of involvement with that world. Nagasaki was under direct control of delegates of the Tokugawa shoguns, not part of any daimyo’s domain. The shogunate rejected a few appeals from Ming resistance regimes for assistance against the Qing conquerors and kept abreast of the developments in China by systematically questioning the captains of every arriving Chinese junk. A few Chinese settled in Japan and became bilingual and bicultural interpreters. Nagasaki had two fine Chinese Buddhist temples. Chinese sailors sought the pleasures of the port, especially the beautiful women with their unbound feet. The Dutch had to send an embassy every year to pay homage to the shogun in Edo, but otherwise they were largely confined to Deshima, their artificial island. Prostitutes came there to serve them. Interpreters learned their language. Japanese artists have left us a few vivid pictures of their strange dress, the weird colors of their hair, their uncouth manners, and their little orchestras of Asian slaves.
In the decades that followed the expulsion of the Portuguese and the confinement of the Dutch and the Chinese to Nagasaki, the shogunate continued to be concerned with the possibility of some revival of Christian or other maritime threats to Japanese security. It also sought to get under control the fluctuations in supplies of copper, silver, and gold, all produced in Japan, that resulted from their export. In the 1670s they recognized that efforts simply to prohibit the export of one metal or another were hard to enforce and instituted a more comprehensive system of tightly controlled bloc trade, with all prices set by the Nagasaki officials. No other political system in the world of 1688 engaged in such thorough monitoring and effective control of its foreign trade; Japan, internally a collection of pacified but well-organized and competitive ministates, faced the external world as a single highly unified polity, just as Japan has done so often, in war and in peace, in modern times.
Following Shi Lang’s conquest of Taiwan in 1683, the Qing rulers legalized maritime trade from Fujian and Guangdong ports at the beginning of 1685, in time for ship captains to make their spring voyages to Japan. By the end of the year eighty-five junks, more than three times a typical annual figure for the previous decades, had reached Japan. The rush brought reminders of all the reasons why Japan was wary of foreign contact. A Portuguese ship arrived from Macao, bearing fifteen shipwrecked Japanese; the Portuguese were kept under strict guard and sent away as soon as possible with orders never to return. A Chinese ship brought a Chinese book that was found to contain information about Roman Catholicism; the Chinese responsible were executed, and their ship and goods burned. The Qing conquerors of Taiwan sent two officials to Nagasaki, probably to look for former opponents who had not yet surrendered. The bakufu sent special commissioners to Nagasaki to question them and order them to leave, with a warning that the Qing never should send officials to Japan again. The Dutch noted signs that the Japanese feared that the huge number of trading junks could provide cover for a surprise Qing attack on Japan.
In 1685, as the tide of Chinese imports rose, the bakufu and the Nagasaki officials kept these security concerns in the background and took more direct action to control the size of the trade, ordering that Dutch imports be limited to the value of three hundred thousand ounces of silver annually and Chinese to six hundred thousand. In January 1686 Japanese officials ordered the junks remaining in Nagasaki Harbor to leave before the Lunar New Year. They did but remained nearby, attempting to evade the restrictions by smuggling. Some Japanese smugglers were caught and executed. Some of the ships that had been ordered to leave came back in again after the New Year and were allowed to trade under the quota for 1686. In the spring and summer of 1686, 112 junks arrived at Nagasaki. Some with small cargoes were allowed to sell everything; those with larger cargoes, valued up to one hundred thousand silver ounces each, were allowed to sell only goods worth a maximum of twenty-five thousand ounces. Thus these restrictions still allowed large numbers of junks to come, sell some goods legally in Nagasaki, and then withdraw to outer waters and smuggle the rest.
The rush to trade with Japan continued to grow, with 136 junks in 1687 and a staggering 192 in 1688. The smuggling continued, as did the executions of Japanese engaged in it. On August 9, 1688, the Nagasaki authorities announced that of the 165 Chinese junks already in harbor, only 120 would be allowed to break bulk and participate in the sale of goods up to the six hundred thousand ounces’ total limit; the rest of the junks, and presumably those that arrived after this, would have to leave at once with their hatches still sealed. In September it was announced that henceforth only 70 junks per year would be allowed to trade, a specific number from each home port or region: 10 from Jiangnan, 12 from Ningbo, 13 from Fuzhou, 6 from Canton, and so on. Moreover, a walled residential compound was to be constructed for the Chinese, somewhat like the famous Deshima of the Dutch but, to judge from a surviving bird’s-eye image, less completely isolated from the rest of the city. The compound was completed, and the Chinese moved into it in 1689. They were not allowed out in the city, and their cargoes were taken from them and stored elsewhere. These were of course measures to enforce strictly the 1685 quantitative limits, but we may also see in them efforts to deal with the threat to Japanese security (or at least tranquillity) presented by the arrival of so many foreign ships and sailors. The quantitative limits on imports apparently had been set to enable the Japanese to balance imports with exports other than gold and silver, and they were largely successful in preventing exports of precious metals. The struggle to repress the smuggling trade went on for many years. The only effective solution was the encouragement of Japanese “import substitution” industries, especially in silk. The quotas governing the Chinese trade fell even lower in the eighteenth century.