Beginning in the early 1700s, chronic debt and a belief that the regime faced a moral as well as a fiscal crisis sparked the first of several official drives to reform. Each was shorter than the previous round. None had enduring impact. The eighth shogun, Yoshi
mune, in office from 1716 to 1745, presided over the first of these campaigns, called the Kyo¯ho¯ reforms (after the reign name of the emperor at the time). From 1767 to 1786, the shogunal advisor Tanuma Okitsugu initiated a number of unorthodox eco
nomic reforms intended to expand government income. His profligate habits gave conservative opponents an opening to attack him. He was forced from office in dis
grace. His nemesis and successor as chief shogunal advisor was Matsudaira Sadanobu.
He launched the Kansei reforms (1787–93). These aimed to stabilize consumer rice prices, cut government costs, and increase revenues. The final reform, of the Tempo¯
era (1841–43), had similar objectives. Although the bakufu’s measures were ineffec
tive, reformers enjoyed some success in a few domains.
Two different approaches characterized these reforming endeavors. One might be called “hardline Confucianism.” This was the spirit of Yoshimune’s reforms of the early 1700s and Matsudaira’s brief efforts toward the end of the century. In addition to praising austerity, railing against luxury, and cutting government costs, they sought to shore up the status system by a policy of moral persuasion. Samurai were told both to study harder and to commit themselves anew to the martial arts. Matsudaira prom
ised that those who proved their talent and diligence would be promoted to responsible posts even if they were lower-ranked samurai. He also tried to eliminate unorthodox ideas with an order in the 1790s that reaffirmed Zhu Xi Confucianism as the official philosophy of the bakufu. This edict also put in place stricter censorship, including a ban on pornography. It implemented a system of annual examinations at the shogunal academy responsible for training top officials. In theory, this opened the door to men of talent within the bakufu. In practice, the exams remained heavily biased against samurai of humble origin.8
In contrast, the program of Tanuma Okitsugu, who preceded Matsudaira in the bakufu from 1777 to 1786, and some of the subsequent Tempo era reforms of the 1830s, sought to encourage or exploit change. The spirit here is comparable to what historians of Europe refer to as mercantilism, or policies by which the state promotes economic development to bolster its power. Like Matsudaira, Tanuma promoted efforts of farmers to reclaim land, which would expand the tax base. He went further than his predecessor, however. He promoted bakufu cooperation with merchants with the goal of licensing or taxing their operations. He supported trade with China, hoping to export finished goods in exchange for silver. He also encouraged science and trans
lations of Western books.
The hardline effort to return to a golden past was ideologically attractive but not feasible. The converse attempt to accept and profit from change was practical, but it was ideologically suspect and hard to justify. The Tokugawa rulers lacked the unity or will to pursue such a course. Some of the outer domains proved more flexible. This left them in a good position to contend for power in the mid-nineteenth century crisis.
Calls for drastic reform were not limited to rulers and their advisors. Even in the
early 1700s, the spread of commerce and education fostered increasing ties between literate merchants and samurai in cities and an upper crust of literate and prosperous farmers in the country. This rural upper class had begun to develop an interest in political and economic matters reaching beyond the village boundaries.
These families were the patrons of temple-based schools in the countryside. In some cases they sent children to official domain academies that were mainly intended for samurai. Once educated, these farmers—including a minority of women as well as men—would correspond with teachers and writers in the cities concerning cultural matters. They exchanged and evaluated Chinese poetry. They discussed ancient Jap
anese literature or Confucian philosophy. They sent their children to be servants at court families in Kyoto or at merchant houses in Osaka or Edo.
In a number of regions, such educated farmers became followers of a group of intellectuals who formed the School of National Learning. One pioneer of this schol
arly tradition was Motoori Norinaga (1730–1801). He was reacting in part to the extreme worship of Chinese thought in the work of men like Ogyu¯ Sorai. He and his followers shared Sorai’s reliance on ancient texts. Like Sorai, they used these texts on behalf of contemporary critiques and calls for reform. But Norinaga asserted that Japanese people should seek knowledge in their native genius, and not in alien Chinese sources.
Norinaga’s search for a pure Japanese culture led him back to the earliest Japanese literature, including historical chronicles (the Kojiki, 712 c.e.) and prose fiction (the Tale of Genji, eleventh century). He found in these works what he glorified as core values of the Japanese people: a sympathetic, emotional understanding of others and the intuitive ability to distinguish good and evil without complex rationalization. He exalted Shinto as a tradition of thought that posited a gradual continuum from humans to gods. The latter inhabited a mysterious realm only just beyond human reach, not radically transcendent. The emperor, in such a vision, was a crucial being who me
diated between the realms of spirit and humans.
The network of National Learning scholars and rural adherents expanded signif
icantly in the early nineteenth century. Norinaga’s own work did not address politics explicitly, but his followers, in particular Hirata Atsutane (1776–1842), politicized his ideas in the early 1800s. They articulated ideals of loyalty to “Japan” that went beyond the narrower loyalty to a daimyo¯and his domain, which made up the primary political identity for most people in the Tokugawa era. Most inhabitants of Japan, that is, considered their domain to be their “country.” The word kuni, in fact, which in modern times came to refer to a national unit (Japan), was applied to the domains of the Tokugawa era. Hirata’s ideas looked beyond domain loyalty to a sort of nationalism that characterized the responses of people to the Western powers in decades to come.
The network of registered Hirata disciples numbered 3,745 after his death in the 1850s.9 Many of these, in turn, stood as teachers and promoters of National Learning doctrine to others.
Hirata exalted Japan as the land of the Shinto gods. He elevated Japan to a superior place in the international order. He and his followers viewed external and internal signs of distress as evidence that the current rulers were failing their obligations to gods, emperor, and people. The supporters of National Learning did not lead the attack
that overthrew the Tokugawa. But they formed part of a climate of opinion that made great upheaval and change—on behalf of a national entity that transcended the To
kugawa system—more likely and easier to achieve.
One of the most profound and directly consequential critiques of the status quo came from scholars of the Mito domain, home to a potential rival branch of the ruling Tokugawa line. The most important of these was Aizawa Yasushi (1782–1863), an advisor to the Mito daimyo¯and the author of an incendiary text called the New Theses (Shinron). This work mixed an explicitly anti-Western message with an implicitly anti
bakufu critique. Written in 1825, Aizawa’s text was secretly copied and circulated among dissident samurai in the 1840s and 1850s.
The New Theses condemned the weakness of the ruling elite. Daimyo¯ and their top aides were said to be living in dissolute luxury. They had failed to prepare for the unprecedented foreign threat of Western ships, whose visits were increasing year by year. The bakufu was condemned for keeping other domains weak to ensure its own hegemony, thereby weakening the whole of Japan against outsiders. The populace was said to be gullible and disloyal. As Aizawa was fond of writing, the commoners were
“stupid.” He was terrified that Christian missionaries would easily be able to convert the masses and destroy Japan’s essence as the land of the gods.
Aizawa wanted the rulers to recruit men of talent. He wanted them to reemphasize morality for the people and serve as moral exemplars. These were relatively ordinary proposals for a Tokugawa reformer. Aizawa also called for greater centralized power to meet the common threat. The New Theses put forward this advice to enable the Tokugawa to strengthen themselves and the entire realm. Despite this intent, the call for greater reverence for the emperor and dramatic domestic reform to deal with the foreign threat was potentially subversive to the Tokugawa.
Knowledge produced in the West was called “Dutch learning” because the Dutch traders in Nagasaki were its primary source. It was another source of potentially transforming ideas. The bakufu forbade the import of “Christian books” beginning in the 1640s, but books on practical topics such as surgery or navigation were allowed, and a small flow of Western books, as well as Chinese translations, arrived in Japan over the following decades.10 This prohibition was relaxed in 1720. A modest tradition of Dutch-language scholarship of the West took root, primarily in Nagasaki. Its prac
titioners looked into Western natural science, medicine, and botany in particular and compiled a dictionary and maps. This remained a disinterested academic study until the 1840s, when the so-called Dutch scholars turned to study of military technology.
National Learning, the reformism of the Mito school, and Dutch-mediated West
ern learning appealed primarily to subelites of the rural upper crust and to educated samurai of middle to lower ranks. Its appeals were most powerful on the margins of the Tokugawa order, in the countryside, in outer and collateral domains with tradi
tionally tense relations with the shogunate, or in far southern Nagasaki.
One other potentially subversive strand of thought was nurtured among poorer peasants. It was expressed in the increased instances of rebellion mentioned in the previous chapter and in powerful new religious movements. Several newly founded popular religions of late Tokugawa times each won thousands of believers. These include the Kurozumi (1814), Tenri (1838), and Konko¯ (1857) religions, among others.
Each was founded by a man or a woman who experienced a divine revelation or a
miraculous cure. They drew diversely on Shinto or Buddhist elements. These religions gained support from masses of peasants who had come to expect that a great change was imminent. Such a change would “rectify the world” (yonaoshi) to a proper state of equality and prosperity for all. Some religions counseled patient waiting for the moment of renewal, but adherents might also be stirred to act to hasten the day of salvation in this world. The authorities viewed these groups with much anxiety.
In addition, the rural villagers of Tokugawa Japan cut loose in several astonishing moments of mass pilgrimage. These were called okage-mairi or Ise-mairi, after the Ise Shrine that was the destination of many of the pilgrims. Such events erupted at roughly sixty-year intervals through the Tokugawa period. They intensified sharply in the last two iterations. Observers reported in 1771 that about two million peasants packed their bags and took to the road to Ise. At the same time, reports circulated of objects such as Shinto shrine amulets—small good luck charms—floating down from the sky. This was repeated in 1830 on an even more extraordinary scale. Roughly five million people (in a country of perhaps thirty million) took to the road and visited Ise over a span of about four months. They jostled, sang, shouted, begged, and some
times stole from and fought with each other all the way to the shrine. Mass pilgrimage was not in itself a revolutionary act, but it did heighten widespread expectations of change.
In sum, one thread running through the work of many Tokugawa thinkers and critics by the early 1800s was a widespread sense that the times were disjointed. Things were not as they should be. Action was needed to set them right. Setting things right generally meant returning to an idealized golden age of early Tokugawa times. Even Aizawa Yasushi intended his work to help the bakufu regenerate itself. But only slightly below the surface, many were drawn to the idea that an entity and interest larger than the bakufu, centered on the emperor, should be the focus of reform. In a dramatically new context created by Japan’s humiliating, coerced entry into a Western- dominated world order in the 1850s, these calls for action mixed with the discontent and frustrated ambitions of many people. This proved to be a potent, increasingly nationalistic brew, in which reforming ideas had revolutionary consequences.
4
The Overthrow of the Tokugawa
In the decades around 1800, whalers, merchant ships, and gunboats from Europe and the United States appeared in Japanese waters with alarming frequency, pressing their claims with increasing persistence. They were powerful symbols and emissaries of the capitalist and nationalist revolutions that were just then transforming Euro-American societies and reaching beyond to transform the world. In Japan they turned a chronic low-grade crisis into an acute, revolutionary situation. For decades, the superintendents of the Tokugawa order had been somehow muddling through. Shogun and daimyo¯
managed to handle the combined pressures of social discontent among peasants and samurai and fiscal crisis in their own treasuries. Into this mix came heretofore un
known foreign power—military, economic, and cultural—raising unprecedented de
mands for a new sort of international relationship. Suddenly the Tokugawa bakufu’s very legitimacy was called into question.
Even so, for some time it appeared that the Tokugawa system might bend without breaking. By the mid-1860s the bakufu had moved to remodel the military, adjust the balance between domain and shogunal power, and import new technology. Foreign diplomats divided their bets. The British were officially neutral, but their chief rep
resentative maintained unofficial ties with the insurgent outer domains, and some of their merchants offered direct support. The French backed the Tokugawa reformers seeking to superintend the process of integrating Japan into the Western diplomatic and economic order.
By hedging their bets the British turned out to be smarter gamblers. In the end, the Tokugawa rulers had too much of an investment in the old order. Rulers of outer domains were often cautious, as well, and they sometimes suppressed the rebels in their domains. But at critical moments they supported the initiatives of new actors, lower on the social scale. These were the “men of action,” self-styled heroes hoisting a banner to “honor the emperor and expel the barbarians.” They forced the Tokugawa from power and then launched one of the great revolutions of modern history.