For any political order to endure as long as the Tokugawa system did, it cannot rely solely on the coercive power of hegemon and henchmen. Authority has to be grounded in an accepted concept of legitimate rule. Like all aspiring rulers, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi faced this ideological dilemma. They faced it, however, with a particular intensity. Because they had used coercion so nakedly, they had greater than usual need to convince people of the legitimacy of their rule. Both of these men, as well as Tokugawa Ieyasu, sought to ground their authority upon religious as well as secular symbols and ideals.
Nobunaga promoted himself as a divine ruler even as he went to war against popular religious sects and killed tens of thousands. He demanded that samurai “ven
erate” him. In exchange he offered not only military but also divine protection.
He asserted that the service rendered in this life would benefit a loyal vassal in the next life. He issued proclamations demanding worship of him for those wishing to gain wealth and happiness. He also came to present himself as the embodiment of
“the realm” (tenka in Japanese, literally “under heaven”). Unlike earlier military he
gemons, he rejected a shogunal position because this would have placed him sym
bolically subordinate to the emperor as recipient of imperial confirmation. He had vassals use the phrase “for the tenka, for Nobunaga” in their pledges of loyalty. He thus identified himself with the realm, which was itself defined in terms of being all under heaven. He claimed sovereignty in a way that was similar to, but pre
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dated, Louis XIV of France, with his famous declaration that “I am the state” (“l’e´tat, c’est moi”).
Hideyoshi shared this tendency for self-deification. He hosted the emperor as an equal at his palace in Kyoto. His consort was made equal in status to the emperor’s mother. The status of his son was made that of the emperor’s son. He also presented the Korean invasions as sacred national campaigns, replete with ceremonies at a Shinto shine. Although the Shinto religious tradition sees blood as a source of grave pollution, Hideyoshi sponsored a “blood festival” in his own honor. In death he ar
ranged for construction of a shrine to himself, as Great August Deity, with nation
wide branches.
The Tokugawa clan continued these programs of personal deification that rivaled the sacred claims of the imperial court. Ieyasu controlled and dictated even the petty behavior of the court families, and he received foreign embassies in their presence.
Iemitsu, for his part, in 1634 made a grand procession to the emperor’s home city of Kyoto with 309,000 men.
Tokugawa Ieyasu also built the grand shrine at Nikko¯. In the twentieth century this has become one of Japan’s premier tourist sights, but Ieyasu was not seeking tourist yen or dollars. He sought self-deification in the overstated, baroque tradition of his immediate predecessors. He knew of Nobunaga’s glorious Azuchi Castle, de
stroyed shortly after Nobunaga’s death, and he consciously sought to wipe out and replace Hideyoshi’s shrine network. He specified that he was to be buried at Nikko¯.
In a symbolic move of posthumous politics this shrine was located at the same dis
tance from his Edo castle as the Grand Imperial Shrine at Ise was from the imperial palace in Kyoto. He claimed for himself the posthumous name of “Great Incarnation, Shining Over the East.” The phrase invoked both the Buddhist concept of reincarna
tion and the Shinto image of brilliant light. He also made himself into an Asia-wide, even universal, god: In Iemitsu’s time Korean embassies paid their respects at Nikko¯, as did official delegates from the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands, and even the Dutch. In location, in ritual use, and in nomenclature, Iemitsu was seeking to displace Ise as the premier sacred political symbol in the land. In 1645 he elevated the Nikko¯ Shrine to the level of a gu¯, the same term used for Ise. Imperial messengers were forced to pay respects at Nikko¯, not vice versa.
While the Tokugawa bolstered their claim to rule by seeking to symbolically de
ify the persons of the rulers, they also anchored their legitimacy in philosophical claims of religious and secular traditions. From diverse sources in the first century of Tokugawa rule, there emerged broad agreement on several core ideas concerning the proper political and social order. First, hierarchy is natural and just. Second, selfless service and accepting one’s place within a hierarchical society are great virtues.
Third, Tokugawa Ieyasu was the great sage founder, source of all wisdom. The order he created was said to be rooted in the order of the cosmos.
A complicated mixture of Buddhist, Shinto, and neo-Confucian elements under
lay this ideological synthesis. A samurai-turned-Zen priest named Suzuki Sho¯san (1579–1655) was one source of this ideology. He argued that the present life was an occasion to repay obligations to benefactors (lord, parents). One existed not for one
self, but for lord and society. One served them by observing one’s proper place. Su
zuki enjoined commoners to follow their “calling” through motivated performance of
their daily work. The result, he taught, would be salvation in the next life. A Shinto cleric named Yamazaki Ansai (1618–82) searched the Shinto tradition for a “Japanese way” of thought to explain the world he knew. He used numerology to argue for a parallel or correspondence between teachings of the ancient Japanese gods and the Chinese sages, and from this he built an argument in favor of the Way of the Tokugawa.1
Finally, numerous thinkers, in an increasingly diverse and contentious intellectual world by the end of the 1600s, drew on neo-Confucian ideas to educate rulers and ruled on the character of the just political order. Since medieval times, the neo- Confucian ideas of Zhu Xi, stressing the importance of direct reading of ancient Con
fucian texts, had been studied in Japan primarily by Buddhist monks. An important new academy in Edo began to change this. It was founded by Fujiwara Seika and his follower Hayashi Razan. These men convinced the bakufu to support their endeavors in the form of an officially favored think tank. In 1630 the bakufu provided funds for their buildings, centered on a “Sages Hall” to honor Confucius that opened in 1633.
In 1670, the Hayashi academy was officially recognized as a shogunate university. As secular scholars, the Hayashi came into conflict with Ieyasu and Iemitsu’s Buddhist advisors. They disapproved of promoting Confucian learning beyond their monaster
ies. The Hayashi scholars succeeded in challenging the intellectual primacy of mon
asteries, but from the outset they faced challenges themselves from rival secular scholars and academies. In this process, much scholarship in Japan was brought into a secular realm in which the students were not only samurai but also well-to-do com
moners. The Hayashi scholars and their rivals stressed the practical value of knowl
edge as they mobilized Confucian ideas to support the state.
At the heart of the neo-Confucian synthesis developed by these thinkers was the principle of reason, or ri. This immutable natural law was said to be the basis of all learning and conduct. It permeated the physical universe and the social world of humans as well; thus laws of nature and laws of society had the same meta
physical basis. Chinese and Japanese neo-Confucianists both counseled the active
“investigation of things” of the physical and social world to discover the role of principle in it. Observation was said to confirm that ri governed the relations of the heavenly bodies. It placed earth at the base, the sun above, and the stars in motion around both. Similarly, the ruler stood above, the people at the base. All humans, as well, had proper relations to each other: father-child, husband-wife, ruler-subject, friend-friend, sibling-sibling. In Japan specifically, the shogunal ruler was said to stand above the rest of the people. The emperor, descended from the supreme heav
enly body, the sun, delegated power to him. The people—in the four primary stat
uses of samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant—stood below him, with samurai as aides to ruling power. Early in the Tokugawa era, this order of things was literally and figuratively enshrined as the sacred creation of the sage Ieyasu. The first goal of all Tokugawa reformers—even those from opposed philosophical traditions—was to sustain it.