years, although a gradual decline in Tokugawa power set in after the mid-eighteenth century. The very nature of Japanese society was in their favor, for the existing class system was a weapon in their hands that required only to be maintained and reinforced in its application. It was only a fairly small number of Japanese who were unaffected by this rigid division into classes: on the one hand were the courtiers and priests, doctors and some intellectuals, and on the other the outcasts, a motley crew performing a variety of lowly tasks. Everyone apart from these exceptions was either a warrior, a farmer, a craftsman, or a merchant.
In this tight class system there was an equally rigid hierarchy, with the warrior class (samurai) at the top; the samurai enjoyed privileges, such as the right to wear two swords, but also had obligations and were expected to lead sober lives and set a good example to the rest. Next came the farmers (the bulk of the population), placed in this position because on them depended the livelihood, in the form of rice, of the warrior class. The honor was dubious, for severe restrictions were put on their liberty, lest they should leave their farms; their lot was usually a miserable one, compounded of hard work and poverty for most of them. Craftsmen came next, and merchants or traders last. Merchants were despised because it was considered that they produced nothing and were activated solely by the desire to amass wealth; indeed, this they proceeded to do, and the culture of the latter part of the period was mainly their creation, and the growth of their power a leading factor in the decline of the old class system.
Because these classes were so clearly divided, and had quite different ways of living, it will be best to treat them separately, describing the conditions and daily life of each in turn.
2
The Samurai
The population of Japan is estimated at having been slightly under 30 million for most of the Tokugawa period, remaining remarkably static for this length of time. There were probably fewer than two million who were samurai, the highest of the four classes into which the people of Japan were divided. The word samurai implies “servant” and is strictly applicable only to retainers, but the custom arose of applying it to the whole warrior class, who were in any case all liegemen, direct or indirect, of the Shogun himself, the apex of the pyramid.
Membership of the class was hereditary, and included many whose ancestors in earlier times had been farmers, ready to take up arms to fight in local armies. Others had belonged to clans with great estates in the regions distant from the capital, themselves descendants or supplanters of still earlier landholders under the Emperor when he really ruled Japan. Some samurai families had originally been closely connected with the Emperor, who, embarrassed by the financial burden of too numerous descendants, had reduced several groups of his dependants to the rank of ordinary noble in the tenth century, giving them land and so freeing himself from further responsibility. One of these groups had been the Minamoto clan, which increased its land-holdings by predatory means, and which rose to become rulers of Japan in the thirteenth century: the Tokugawa family, which had long held a small domain in Mikawa province, east of Nagoya, before moving to Edo, itself claimed descent from these earlier Shoguns.
During the early sixteenth century there had been considerable mobility between the classes, especially between farmers and warriors, but Hideyoshi endeavored to stabilize society, and decreed in 1586 that samurai could not become townsmen, and that a farmer could not leave his land. The rigidity of the class system so characteristic of the ensuing centuries really dates from this time, and in the next year farmers had to give up their weapons, in an operation known as “Hideyoshi’s sword-hunt”; henceforward samurai alone had the right to carry a sword. A sword in this context is a long sword; a shorter sword was also worn, and the first recognition point for distinguishing a samurai, either in illustrations, or probably even at the time in the flesh, is the sight of two sword-handles protruding from the girdle on the left-hand side, where the right hand could come across and draw either (10). Townsfolk were allowed to carry a short sword for protection. Farmers had to content themselves with their agricultural implements, as peasants have always had to the world over. Occasionally individuals or groups of non-samurai performed a special service and were granted the privilege of wearing “the large and the small” as the swords were called.
(10) (a). Samurai in street. A samurai, wearing his two swords, walks by a seaweed shop, followed by an attendant, who carries a package wrapped in the traditional silk cloth (furoshiki). The men on the left are slicing up dried seaweed, which was eaten with rice. Over the shop is its noren (see p. 103) with the shop sign (repeated on the drawers at the back and on the boxes in the street), and the name of the shop, Nakajima-ya. The chief clerk is writing up the ledger.
The warrior class included everyone with the right to wear two swords from the Shogun down, through the great lords in their domains and senior officials in Edo, to minor officials and foot soldiers. They all received incomes according to their station, and the machinery for distributing these incomes was a fundamental part of the organization of society. Income was calculated not in money but in rice. The two main groups involved were the warriors themselves, as recipients, and the farmers, as suppliers.
(10) (b). Samurai at the poulterer’s. A samurai is leaving the shop, and is replacing in his girdle his large sword, removed to allow him to sit comfortably while conducting his business with the shopkeeper, who is obsequiously seeing him off the premises. Outside the shop, the samurai’s servant, his kimono tucked into the back of his girdle, waits patiently for his master.
Land was measured not so much by area, as by the estimate of the amount of rice it would produce in a year. The unit of rice used for this purpose was the koku, which is equivalent to about five bushels, and would, in fact, feed one person for a year; at the beginning of the seventeenth century surveys indicated that the annual national production was about 25 million koku. This was distributed by the Shogun, after keeping about one-fifth of it for his own use, among the lords of the domains—that is to say, land producing this amount was allocated either to the directly held territories, or to the lords, a small amount being granted to the Emperor. The highest allocation was to the “outside” lords of Kaga, who had their castle in Kanazawa near the north coast: they received 1,300,000 koku. Shimazu, of Satsuma (in Kyūshū), had 730,000, and altogether there were, at the beginning of the period, some 270 lords with 10,000 koku or over. These lords were the daimyō, the great landholders; and just as the Shogun kept some for himself and distributed the rest, so did the daimyō, keeping some of his income for himself and his family and allotting the rest to his vassals in sub-fiefs. The superior vassals had areas of land placed under their control; inferior ones received a stipend measured in koku, without land. Lower-ranking persons received rice or rice equivalent incomes.
Incomes expressed in koku referred to the productivity of the land, and the lord had to see to it that he obtained the rice from the farmers, or, to be more precise, that his officials got it from the village headman, who got it from the farmer. The farmer was allowed to keep a proportion of the crop, sometimes six-tenths, but often less; in practice, the recipient took what he was entitled to, leaving the farmer the rest, which would depend upon his harvest. Sometimes the lord, especially if he had only a small allocation, ran out of resources before the harvest was in, and had to squeeze his farmers to pay early, leaving them to make what shifts they could to meet his demands.
It has to be realized that incomes were not normally linked to the job that the recipient was doing, except in the sense that the income fitted a man for his position rather than the other way round. To serve as an official to a lord was part of feudal obligation, and a vassal should not expect to be paid especially for something that it was his duty to do. In the eighteenth
