Tokugawa Japan1600-1800

January 17, 2013

Review • What did the Chosŏn and Qing

governments have in common?

• Were the Manchu Chinese?

• Which countries were tributary partners of Qing China? (What role did the Ryūkyūs play?)

• What was the relationship between China and Tibet?

• Why did the population grow so quickly in the first couple of centuries of the Qing?

Society in Manchu China

• Some hereditary positions--bondservants, bannermen and members of the Chinese Army of the Green Standard

• Dual administration: at higher levels of government, bannermen were placed alongside Chinese officials of the same rank

• Chinese officials had to pass the Confucian civil service exam.

• Bondservants were used to offset the power of Confucian officials.

• The Confucian patriarchy was reinforced, and Chinese (not Manchu) women still bound their feet.

Ritual and Power•A centralized bureaucratic government.

Not feudal at all•The many ritual stances of the Manchu:•Confucian rulers when dealing with the

Han Chinese: selected officials according to the Confucian civil service exams, patronized Chinese culture.

•Khans to their Manchu-Mongolian subjects•Bodhisattvas to the Tibetans•Also, they tamed their own shamans.

Before Tokugawa•The Ashikaga shoguns, and their

Muromachi shogunate, no longer exercised much authority after the Ōnin War of 1467-77.

•Daimyos (feudal lords) began acting like kings of their domains, Buddhists began forming armed communities, and merchants established independent cities.

•Yet the economy grew. •And the Japanese now had muskets in

addition to swords, necessitating bigger castles and hastening unification of Japan.

The Tokugawa come to Power• The three unifiers:

Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (invaded Korea), and Tokugawa Ieyasu.

• Ieyasu established a shogunate in 1600• What’s a shogunate? A military

government in which the leader is officially the emperor’s chief military officer. The emperor continued to reign, but the shogun wielded the greatest power.

• However, at the local level, the daimyo enjoyed a lot of autonomy.

Ending the fighting•Took swords away from the peasants•pulled samurai off the land, living

villages to govern themselves (Ebrey, p. 280)

•froze the social order (Ebrey, 279-80)•outlawed muskets•Crushed independent religious

organizations (Buddhist and Catholic)

Comparing Qing and Korea to the Tokugawa

•had a decentralized rather than centralized government

•ruled by warriors instead of scholars: No civil service exams

•ruling class pulled off the land•had a distinctive urban culture•relatively isolated from the rest of

the world•primogeniture was widely practiced.

What’s a Han?• a Japanese fiefdom. The holder of a fief exercises all

rights over that land and rules over the people on it. In return, he owes military service to his immediate superior. A fief resembles a modern country in that it is one solid piece of land under the administrative authority of one governing authority, though the ruler of a fief is not technically autonomous since he is under the overall authority of his own immediate superior. (The lord of a fiefdom and the samurai loyal to him are sometimes described in samurai movies as constituting a “clan,” even though they are not necessarily related.)

The Baku-han system

•Tokugawa house controlled more land than any other.

•Domains rearranged to strengthen Tokugawa control

•Daimyo required to spend half their time in Edo (sankin kotai)

•Religions placed under strict control.•Strict limits on foreign trade

Tokugawa “feudalism”

• layered government. (loyalty is to one’s immediate superior)

Decentralized government in which a ruler commands loyalty from local elites, who in turn command loyalty from those beneath them. Under a feudal government, the ruler does not exercise direct authority over most of his kingdom. Rather, all authority (executive, military, and judicial) is exercised by local leaders, who in turn have military, financial, and ritual obligations to their immediate superior. Feudalism usually requires a land-based economy, a sharp gap in military technology between the fully equipped warrior and the rest of society, and a weakened but still somewhat visible central government framework. Also, it usually is built on personal ties of loyalty between a leader and his followers.

Economic and Social Change

• Population size stabilized by mid 18th-century

• (See how Japan did that: Ebrey, pp. 283-4)• Merchants grew wealthier, and more

independent, yet they didn’t challenge the samurai.

• Samurai became bureaucrats (Ebrey, p 281)• Some peasants became farmers ---growing

for the market rather than subsistence.• cities grew much larger.

Women in Tokugawa Japan

Japanese women did not bind their feet, nor were they secluded in their homes. They had to move into their husband’s home after marriage. They also lost inheritance rights. These are changes from Japan 4 centuries earlier Husbands could divorce wives, but wives could not initiate a divorce (except by fleeing to a temple) .Wives of rich or powerful men had to accept concubines into their household.

Women in China and Korea

• Only in China did women bind their feet. Koreans, like the Japanese, didn’t do that.

• In all three countries, men could have concubines but most women could only have one sexual partner.

• There was no formal education for women in any of those countries. Nevertheless, some women became literate in all three countries.

• Korea and Japan, imitating China, moved toward a more patrilineal and patriarchal model of the family.

The growth of urban culture

• Geisha --female entertainers• Kabuki --popular drama• Bunraku --puppet theatre• Ukiyo-e --woodblock paintings• Haiku -- 17-syllable poems• Fiction ---popular vernacular novels• See Ebrey, pp. 287-88

haiku by Bashō

• An ancient pond

A frog jumps inThe sound of water.

• The summer grasses

of brave soldiers’ dreamsThe aftermath

http://thegreenleaf.co.uk/hp/basho/00Bashohaiku.htm

Culture and Society

•Urban Tokugawa men sometimes crossed status lines to join cultural clubs, in which they participated in poetry writing, performing puppet plays, singing kabuki songs, performing tea ceremonies, etc.

•This created a more cohesive society, one that worked against the division of society along hereditary status lines.

Japan and its Neighbours

• What was the relationship of Japan to China? Did it pay tribute? How did it obtain goods from China? (Ebrey, p. 281)

• Japan was allowed a trading post on Korea’s southeast coast. Korean envoys visited Japan, and corresponded via Tsushima, an island between Japan and Korea.

• The Dutch were allowed a trading post in Nagasaki harbour (Deshima Island)

• Except for the Dutch, Europeans were barred from Tokugawa Japan

Religion in Tokugawa Japan

• Shinto--primarily a worship of local deities

• Buddhism -- used and controlled by the state, although it was divided into many different denomination (Zen, Pure Land, True Word, Nichiren--a unique Japanese form of Buddhism)

• Neo-Confucianism (p. 292) -appealed to some samurai because of its emphasis on loyalty and on self-discipline. However, Japan was not as Confucian as China, Korea, and Vietnam (No civil service exam)

Tokugawa thought

• Neo-Confucianism was a favourite ideology of many samurai, and the official ideology in government schools because it subordinated the individual to the group.

• However, it was not applied to actual politics, except in the case of a few who asked why the shogun ruled instead of the emperor.

• Confucian ethics grew in popularity among the merchant classes (Shingaku)

• There was also a nativist reaction against Neo-Confucianism called “National Learning” (Kokugaku) which promoted Shinto ideas over Neo-Confucianism.