The neo-Confucian synthesis represented the world of nature and of humans as seam
less and orderly. In fact, numerous Japanese people of the Tokugawa era, including Confucian scholars themselves, understood their world as a complex place. The pieces did not always fit together; human desires and political loyalties might oppose ortho
dox notions of the proper society. As they explored these contradictions, an expanding body of participants invigorated and diversified the intellectual and cultural life, both in cities and in the countryside, among commoners and the samurai elite. Debate began in the 1660s, just as neo-Confucian teachings were being validated with bakufu pa
tronage. The debate continued for nearly two hundred years. A wide variety of indi
viduals and schools argued over the proper interpretation of Confucianism. Those working within the Confucian tradition also faced challenges from scholars drawing on entirely different schools of thought.
The school of Ancient Learning (Kogaku) was perhaps the most significant chal
lenge to neo-Confucian thought from within the tradition of scholarship that sought to interpret Confucius for the present era. A series of great scholars elaborated the Ancient Learning ideas. The most famous was Ogyu¯ Sorai (1666–1728). The school derived its name from the insistence that proper knowledge rested on unmediated understanding of the ancient texts of Confucius himself. They argued that neo- Confucian interpretations of Zhu Xi, or his followers in Korea, China, or Japan, had failed to understand the true meaning of old words. This position is rather ironic. Zhu Xi’s own point of departure in the 1100s was also a call to ignore intervening inter
pretations and return directly to the ancient Confucian texts.
Sorai revered Confucius and the ancient Chinese kings who built political insti
tutions upon Confucian ideas. He stressed that the samurai needed to model their behavior on the ancient Confucian rulers by cultivating virtue and devotion to duty.
He asked them to model present-day institutions on the ancient systems as well. At the same time, Sorai recognized that the “way,” or the political-ethical order, of the early kings was something they themselves had created by virtue of their high intel
ligence and insight. It was not directly imposed by divine sources. This implicitly opened the way for rulers in later ages, such as Tokugawa Japan, to make appropriate adjustments, provided they based these on proper understanding of ancient texts, rit
uals, and institutions.
At issue for Sorai, his contemporaries, and their successors was the problem of how to justify creative political action and institutional innovation. Society was man
ifestly changing before their eyes, but it was supposed to be rooted in ancient ideas and practices. Sorai was committed to the support of a timeless and changeless “way”
that originated in ancient China. As a shogunal advisor in the early 1700s, some of his policy proposals called on the bakufu to adopt ancient Chinese tax systems or bureaucracies. But he was also enough of a realist to argue that rulers of his own time should take some innovative steps such as allowing peasants to buy and sell land.2
By the early 1700s, merchants joined samurai scholars such as Sorai in the active study and critique of both ancient texts and the contemporary world. In Osaka and its environs, in particular, a number of academies emerged under commoner patronage.
The most important, given official status by the Tokugawa rulers, was called the Kai
tokudo¯ Merchant Academy. Recent study of the Kaitokudo¯ scholars has changed the longstanding view among historians that the Tokugawa merchant class accepted a subordinate place in a Confucian status order and made no claim to a political role.
The Kaitokudo¯scholars in fact argued that politics and economics were inseparable.
They placed samurai and merchants in functionally equivalent roles; the former were to run the bureaucratic administration, while the latter managed economic affairs that were of importance to the entire society.
To be sure, the Kaitokudo¯ intellectuals did not challenge the samurai’s right to rule. One cannot make a simple analogy between Tokugawa merchant thinking and that of the European urban bourgeoisie that began to oppose aristocratic power in the eighteenth century. But these Tokugawa era teachings did emphasize the interdepend
ence and relative equality of virtue and public function between merchants and bu
reaucrats. Such notions formed an important part of a cultural world that lived on into later times, when country and city merchants alike became captains of industry ded
icated to enriching the nation as well as themselves.3
Part of the cultural ferment of Tokugawa times played out not only among strait
laced samurai-scholars, or in equally sober academies supported by merchants, but also in the entertainment quarters of the great cities, especially Osaka and Edo. Here, theaters and book shops stood beside teahouses and brothels. Here, samurai mixed with commoners in the audience of puppet and Kabuki plays. The scripts of these plays drew on scandalous gossip and flamboyant crimes to address profound themes of the conflicts between duty and desire, between public law and private loyalty.
The Tokugawa era cities were home to flourishing prose fiction, poetry, and pic
torial arts that celebrated the lives of commoners and rogues and gently challenged the high-minded moralists of established order. Ihara Saikaku, for example, wrote popular fiction that poked fun at religion, at merchants and their greed, and at human desires. His works focused on people at the bottom of society and made heroes and heroines of them. In “The Woman Who Loved Love” he offers a wicked parody of the search for religious truth by telling the story of a courtesan’s search for the ideal lover. The final episode has the courtesan standing at a temple, gazing at one hundred figures of the Buddha, each one reminding her of a former lover. Another Edo writer with a different sort of critical sensibility was the poet Matsuo Basho¯ (1644–1694).
His elegant haiku celebrated the natural world and a vanishing past. Resident in the great city, his work nostalgically appreciated the quiet countryside to which he peri
odically escaped.
anoldpond . . . furuike ya a frog leaps in, kawazu tobikomu the sound of water mizu no oto4
An unprecedent market for literature and art also sustained the Tokugawa cultural product perhaps best known outside Japan today, the woodblock print, or ukiyo-e. The term literally translates as “pictures of the floating world.” The term “floating world”
referred to the ephemeral entertainments of the world of brothels and theaters. As woodblock art began to flourish in the middle of the Tokugawa era, prints of famous courtesans and star Kabuki actors were produced in huge numbers. The painters them
Woodblock landscape prints became very popular and sophisticated in the late Edo era. This view of “Evening Snow at Uchikawa” is by the renowned print artist Hiroshige, from 1835 or 1836.
Courtesy of Keio University.
selves became luminaries of the cultural scene. Later print artists also turned to the genre of the landscape. They produced many celebrated works that paralleled in pic
torial form Basho¯’s exploration of the countryside. Prints were also frequently inte
grated with text; one inspiration for the twentieth century comic book (manga) was probably the printmaking of the Tokugawa era.
Two theatrical traditions emerged at the heart of urban cultural life: the Kabuki and the bunraku puppet theater. The former began as a means by which prostitutes, male and female, drew crowds who might be enticed to purchase sexual services as well. Performances were often held in outdoor theaters in dry riverbeds, alongside carnival entertainments such as bear and tiger acts or sumo wrestling. In 1629, the bakufu banned female actors from the Kabuki in an effort to suppress prostitution.
Ironically, the Kabuki survived. Some say it improved as a result. It certainly became more distinctive. The brilliant performances of female impersonators (the onna-gata) came to be the defining highlight of the Kabuki theater. Here in the theater of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one finds an early example of the postmodern idea that gender identity is not fixed in a person’s physical body, but is the changeable result of performance.
The bunraku puppet theater was a second great innovation of Edo era culture.
Its “performers” were puppets of roughly two-thirds life size. Up to three men ma
nipulated each puppet. A highly skilled singer-actor chanted the several parts and the narration, backed by musical accompanists. The puppet theater was attractive to
writers since they had no uppity actors to deal with, and the literary qualities of the plays were developed beautifully. The greatest bunraku playwright was Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653–1725). His works were noteworthy for treating the tragic lives of common people, including scandalous contemporary events such as domestic murders.
Chikamatsu brilliantly captured the tensions within Tokugawa thought and society.
His works often explore conflict between duty or obligation, on one hand, and human feeling on the other (giri versus ninjo¯). Love Suicide at Sonezaki, based loosely on a real story, tells of a paper seller who falls hopelessly in love with a prostitute. His relatives criticize him and his business fails. He pawns his wife’s kimono to buy out his lover’s contract. With his wife and family ready to disown him, he and his lover, torn by guilt as well as desire, run away to commit suicide. In the end, duty destroys desire, but the audience is left to wish it had not.
Chikamatsu explored a similarly conflicted outcome with more immediate polit
ical implications in The Tale of the 47 Ro¯nin (ro¯nin were samurai without a daimyo¯
or master to serve). Chikamatsu wrote a puppet theater version of the story in 1706.
In the 1740s, a Kabuki version was written, called Chu¯shingura, and this became the most frequently staged play of the Tokugawa era (it continues to be a hugely popu
lar subject of cinema and stage in modern Japan). The puppet and Kabuki scripts thinly disguised their origin in an actual incident of 1703 by relocating the events several centuries earlier. The story celebrates the loyalty of samurai warriors whose master was disgraced and executed at the hands of a political enemy. To avenge this act, they break the law by attacking and killing the nemesis of their former master.
As with the domestic tale of the Sonezaki suicide, the violation of law and order is ultimately punished. The forty-seven retainers are required by the authorities to take their own lives as the price of their successful pursuit of personal revenge. But these loyalists are heroes in death, both in the actual event and in the play, which exposed a crucial tension in the Tokugawa political world: To whom was ultimate loyalty owed?
Playwrights and actors explored these tensions to the delight of large audiences.
Tokugawa political advisors and scholars sought to contain these cultural forms and to resolve the problems they explored. The entertainment quarters themselves were bounded by walls and physically isolated on the edges of town. Samurai were told not to enter their gates. The bakufu and domains enacted what are called “sumptuary laws” to keep social behavior in line with hereditary status. These orders restricted the dress permitted to samurai of various ranks and to merchants and other common
ers. They prescribed who could be carried around town in palanquin chairs. They limited building size in accord with status and rank. Laws even regulated eating and drinking habits, forbidding to farmers the unspeakable luxury of tea. Peasants were to content themselves with hot water.
The fact that many of these injunctions were continually reissued is strong evi
dence that many people ignored them. To this extent, the bakufu dictatorship had a limited reach. Nonetheless, the laws set a sober tone, and the tensions of this era have echoes in recent times. As in many societies, a moralistic tendency to condemn lux
urious living and glorify austerity persists to the present day in Japanese cultural life
and public policy. Yet, another side to popular culture celebrates the accumulation of wealth and the stylish consumption of abundant goods.
The authorities also placed limits on subject matter appropriate for Kabuki, and they regulated the times and numbers of performances. This was part of a broader effort to contain the tensions of the Tokugawa order. Ogyu¯ Sorai’s opinion to the shogun on how to deal with the vendetta of the forty-seven ro¯nin addressed the tension between the virtue of loyalty to a particular lord and the value of order to society as a whole. He acknowledged that their deed was righteous. It was sparked by a proper sense of shame—a determination “to keep oneself free from any taint.” Even so, he concluded that laws for the entire country must be upheld, and the men must be punished. An “act of violence without official permission” was intolerable. If “general principles are impaired by special exceptions, there will no longer be any respect for the law in this country.”5
Other tensions were ultimately impossible to contain. One was the conflict be
tween merit and heredity. A Confucian ruler was qualified for his status by merit. In China, merit was cultivated by study and confirmed by an examination. Examinations had been used in Japan in earlier centuries, but in the Tokugawa era the samurai faced no such tests. They had a hereditary claim to rank and to income. Official appoint
ments were roughly pegged to these birthrights. For much of the Tokugawa era, people made little effort to reconcile the contradiction between meritocratic principle and hereditary practice. Scholars and rulers alike preached the importance in principle of recruiting the wise and the strong to domain and bakufu offices. Yet hereditary rank and family income continued to be the most important influence on a samurai’s career path in practice.
As the perception deepened in the 1700s that society faced a crisis, complaints increased about the failure of rulers to appoint “men of talent” to high office. The term “a daimyo¯’s skill” became an insult. Numerous thinkers in the 1700s and 1800s—
what one historian calls “merit reformers”—called on rulers to regenerate the system by appointing men of talent. Their stated goal was to preserve and strengthen the existing regime. But their critiques clearly implied that to deny men of talent indefi
nitely would threaten the legitimacy and survival of the ruler.6
A second ultimately subversive tension centered on the relationship of the emperor to the shogun. On one hand, the Tokugawa rulers closely watched and supervised court life. They used shrines such as that at Nikko¯ as well as foreign diplomacy to symbolically assert a more or less independent source of legitimacy. But the emperor in theory had appointed Ieyasu and his successors as shogun. Across the Tokugawa centuries, aspiring political actors outside the Tokugawa ruling circle, and some on the edges of it, sustained the idea that Tokugawa authority was delegated and condi
tional. The Mito domain, for example, was a branch of the Tokugawa house. It was potentially eligible to supply an heir to the shogun should the direct line fail. Its daimyo¯ of the late 1600s, Mitsukuni, would don court robes every New Year’s morning and bow toward Kyoto. He would tell his vassals, “My Lord is the emperor. The present shogun is the head of my family.”7 Given such opinions, it was virtually inevitable that in a moment of great crisis those who lost faith in the Tokugawa rulers would look to the emperor to support their insurgent acts.