The Political Process of Tokugawa-era Japan, in 2000 words

The Tokugawa house established itself as the hegemonic military power in Japan in 1600, and it formally received the title of feudal monarch (sei-i tai-shōgun) from the (essentially powerless) emperor in 1603. The authority of the Tokugawa rested, first, on its ruling by far the single largest domain, representing about a quarter of Japan’s agricultural productive capacity in the seventeenth century and, second, on the formal subordination of all other lords to it as vassals. The around 270 magnate lords held their domains as fiefs and were subject to the monarchy’s regulations, which focused on lords’ military capacity, their relations with each other, and the management of their personal households. Nonetheless, in practice the monarchy intervened relatively little in the lords’ rule of their domains. The Tokugawa periodically exercised the right to demand service from the lords—during the long period in which there was no need for military mobilization, this was primarily for various construction projects—but the monarchy did not tax the lords’ subjects directly.

The magnate lords—and the feudal monarchy in the territories it directly ruled—had the power to make and enforce laws and to impose and collect taxes in their domains. For this purpose, each domain had its own administrative and coercive apparatus, staffed by the lord’s hereditary vassal samurai. As late as the sixteenth century, the samurai had been a genuine class of self-equipped knights, holding fiefs from their lords and owing military service in return. However, over the course of the solidification of the Tokugawa-era political order, by the latter half of the seventeenth century the samurai had largely been converted into urban rentiers and civil officials. They lived in the capitals of their lords, and the vast majority received a fixed share of domain tax revenues rather than directly managing their own fiefs. There was a steep hierarchy of income and status among the samurai, with more powerful or prestigious offices restricted to men of a specific wealth and status level. Moreover, the number of samurai attached to each lord was fixed in line with the large armies of the late sixteenth century, and so there were far more candidates than positions in the domain administrations, leaving a large number of men in the relatively lower ranks of the samurai unemployed. Nonetheless, the samurai as a whole were clearly marked off from the population of commoners, who were excluded from service in domain administrations and military forces.

A side effect of pulling the samurai off the land into the castle-towns was that villages (and urban communities) were granted a great deal of day-to-day autonomy as long as they broadly followed the rulers' laws and (for villages) paid their taxes. This situation had the surface appearance of homogeneous peasant population clearly demarcated from a "warrior" stratum who lived by extracting the peasantry's surplus. In reality, the demarcation of the samurai from the "peasantry" in the 16th and 17th centuries left a stratum of small-scale landlords, who had been borderline "warriors" in the preceding era, in the villages. These gentry were formally "peasants," and they were effectively de-militarized by the solidification of the new political order, but they typically lived off the labor of tenants and dependent servants, in some cases retained certain symbolic privileges otherwise restricted to samurai (such as having a surname or carrying a sword), and were nearly universally named as village officials by the domain administrations. Their position was ambiguous, since on the one hand they were responsible for the collection and payment of taxes, which were assessed by the state on the village as a whole, and for ensuring that the peasants obeyed the lords' laws. They could be--and often were--punished by the lords for failure to do these things. Yet, they also paid taxes, and the domain administrations provided them with little in the way of resources to coerce the peasantry. Thus, at the same time as they were the bottom rung of the exploitative apparatus--and themselves exploiters of peasant labor--they both shared interests with the rest of the peasantry and were forced to bow to some extent to the will of the village community and to act as its representatives against the lords.

The fundamental purpose of these political institutions, which are typically known as the bakuhan system (referring to the combination of feudal monarchy = bakufu and domains = han), was to eliminate the tendencies towards destructive conflict within the ruling class that had characterized the centuries preceding the "unification" of the end of the 16th century. By establishing clearly the lines of authority and the distinct powers of different levels within the elite, the ruling class as a whole would be able to focus on living the good life on resources extracted from the productive classes, especially the peasantry. Indeed, on this criteria, it worked incredibly well, providing over two centuries without any serious, armed conflict within the class of lords.

Yet, it was not exempt from the crisis dynamics of a pre-capitalist social formation. For the first century or so, until the early 18th century, both the Japanese economy and the revenues of the ruling class grew comfortably. This was accomplished by an expanding area of arable land, filled by a growing population, paying proportionately increasing taxes. By the early 18th century, however, the availability of additional land for agricultural expansion had been mostly used up. The lords and their vassals, however, found it difficult to curtail their spending to match the newly constrained fiscal situation, and as a result debt (especially to the merchants who handled the transport and sale of tax-rice) expanded throughout the ruling class and some lords began the practice (that would become nearly universal) of cutting into the revenues of their vassals to fill holes in their own budgets.

The response of the lordly class, exemplified by the shogunate's "kyoho reforms" of the 1720s-30s, was to attempt to increase tax revenue, to constrain spending, and to hold down prices for consumer goods and luxuries both by fiat and by restricting commoner consumption. The results of these policies were mixed in the short run, but in the medium to long-term they could not be maintained and had deep unintended consequences. The increase in taxation came just as the reduced availability of new land was encouraging the fragmentation of land-holdings and reducing the margin of subsistence among the peasantry. In this context, protest against higher taxes could only be expected. Indeed, these protests were often led by the wealthy stratum of landowning gentry who were recognized as local village authorities by the domain administrations, since they too paid taxes to the lords.

However, the higher taxes had another, invidious effect on the peasantry. Through the early eighteenth century, the official policy of the shogunate and the magnate lords' domains was usually to encourage the establishment of peasants on independent, household-based subsistence plots in favor of the large gentry estates worked by dependent labor that had been common in the preceding period. This policy never removed inequality within the peasantry, but it did have visible consequences in the distribution of landownership. Yet, the imperative to increase tax revenue came into contradiction with this policy, since the lords' fiscal administrations lacked the capacity to specifically target higher taxes at the wealthiest rural residents--not least because this same gentry stratum typically controlled the distribution and collection of taxes within the villages as officials who simultaneously functioned as the conduit for lords' orders to peasants and represented the peasant communities to the lords. At best, tax increases would be distributed proportionately to landholdings--even though peasants with holdings barely sufficient to support their families in good years could much less afford to pay more--and often (if the recurrent complaints made by poor peasants are believed) the gentry foisted a disproportionate share of the tax burden on their poorer neighbors. Either way, the result was that the poorer and less lucky among the peasantry increasingly found themselves unable to pay their taxes in relatively poor years. In such a situation--unless it was bad enough that the entire village could be mobilized to demand a temporary reducing in the tax burden--the peasants' only option was to ask one their villages' wealthier families to fill the gap with a loan. These loans were typically secured by a fraction of the borrowers' landholdings. But, the interest on such a loan only made the peasants' situation that much more precarious, and it was quite common for such mortgaged land to become the property of the lender and the borrower a rent-paying tenant on his own land. The shogunate and the magnate lords' domains issued orders prohibiting such transactions and the concentration of land that resulted, but they were unwilling or unable to enforce them. The shogunate's prohibition on foreclosure was rescinded two years after it was issued. The lords would not challenge the position of the gentry, who they had in effect deputized to maintain rural order.

The second unintended consequences of the early-18th century "reforms" was that increasing competition for reduced lordly demand increased the impetus for the merchants and artisans of the great cities to seek out cheaper sources of raw materials or regionally produced goods in rural areas. Often, this entailed naming members of the gentry as purchasing agents, thereby linking these wealthy landholders into the Japan-wide commercial network that had grown up to fulfill the lordly demand that the bakuhan system concentrated in the various magnate lords' castle-towns and, above all, Edo. Over time, however, these gentry, even as landlordship and usury remained their primary (and most stable) sources of income, increasingly sought to break out of the subordinate position in which the urban merchants sought to keep them. These rural merchants accomplished this by developing their own expanded commercial networks, increasing the number of buyers with which they dealt or cutting out the middlemen to sell directly to the retailers of Edo, and by promoting proto-industrial by-employments like spinning and weaving among the peasantry. Since the peasants could accept lower wages precisely because they worked in handicrafts only as a side-line to agriculture, gentry proto-industrialists found they could easily undercut the established urban merchants and artisans.

The competition between the established merchants and the provincial and rural upstarts came to represent a signal fiscal opportunity for the lordly class. In return for assistance in assuring relatively open access to the consumer demand concentrated in Edo, rural merchants could be induced to pay back some of their profits to their lords. Conversely, the established merchants of Osaka and Edo would likewise be willing to pay the shogunate for protection of their privileged position in Japan's commercial network. However, these two fiscal strategies were contradictory: if individual domains were going to promote their own producers and merchants, that would have to come at the expense of the established merchants and producers. If the shogunate was to enforce the privileges of the merchants of Osaka, that would entail effectively restricting the activity of merchants and producers in the various domains. This contradiction was the root of the political conflict that accompanied the ascendancy of the shogunate official Tanuma Okitsugu in the latter half of the 18th century and ultimately led to his replacement by Matsudaira Sadanobu. Tanuma sought to assert the shogunate's primacy in fiscal and economic policy; the opposition of the magnate lords ultimately brought him down. Sadanobu's "Kansei reforms" adopted elements from and claimed the mantle of his grandfather the Shogun Yoshimune's Kyoho reforms, but to describe his policy as simply a "conservative reaction" is to miss the point of the conflicts within the ruling class. He removed Tanuma's commercial policies, but he himself as lord implemented policies to promote rural commerce in his own domain and did nothing to prevent other lords' doing the same. He wrote down samurai debt, but he also for the first time organized a merchant-financed and -administered emergency fund for the city of Edo.

From the end of the 18th century onwards, then, the various domains were given a largely free hand to experiment with commercial and economic policies in order to buttress their precarious fiscal positions. In order to formulate and administer these plans, the domains increasingly began to promote relatively low-ranking members of their vassal bands into positions of authority. For the first time since the formative period of the era, something like social mobility among the samurai became possible again, but in addition the trend of experimental commercial policies promoted an expansion of horizontal ties among the middle and lower strata samurai across domains. This arose directly from the orientation of the new policies to the national commercial network but also from the increasing circulation of students studying outside their domains and experts brought in to try to establish some new industry. The middle- and lower-ranked samurai who were appointed as reformists to influential offices were promoted because of their "ability," and this above all meant education, and the academic world of the latter half of the Tokugawa era cut across the boundaries of domain and vassal band.

In addition, what was new about the new commercial policies was not so much that they tried to draw fiscal benefits from cash crops and handicrafts; various domains had been doing that since the beginning of the era if not before. Instead, as an overall tendency, they entailed an even closer relation of cooperation between the domain administrations and the gentry. It was the latter who typically coordinated the introduction of new crops or industries in their localities, who administered programs for inspection or financial support, and, after all, who frequently were the merchants whose activity the domains were trying to encourage. If the lordly class had shied away from challenging the gentry in the first half of the 18th century, from the end of that century onwards they transformed and strengthened their alliance with that stratum. On paper, most domains still officially prohibited the alienation of peasants' lands and many discouraged (or even prohibited) peasants from cultivating crops other than rice or doing non-agricultural work, but in their actual practice they had broadly adapted to the new semi-commercialized economy.

All, however, was not well in the domains. For one thing, the basic problems of small holdings, a heavy tax burden, and debt leading to tenancy continued to plague the peasantry. If anything, the reconstituted alliance between the lords and the gentry only made matters worse, and increasingly, instead of being led in relatively formalized protests against taxes by village officials (i.e. the gentry), peasants attacked not just the domain administrations but also the merchants and landlords who exploited them in debt and tenancy. It is possible to discern especially in the 19th century a growing sense of unease at the threat of popular unrest throughout the elite, including not just samurai officials and intellectuals but also the gentry.

In addition, the fiscal situation of the domains was in many cases improved but far from good. The practice of "borrowing" from samurai stipends remained nearly universal, and periods of relatively healthy revenues and constrained expenses were typically followed by reversions to laxity and burgeoning debt. Politically, the possibility for promotion among relatively low-ranked vassals gave rise to the formation of factions that competed for office. Since appointment to office still depended ultimately on the arbitrary will of the lord, what the different factions competed for was his favor. Since, moreover, the tendency to appoint less elite vassals to office only modified but did not replace the entrenched influence of the lord's highest-ranked vassals--who of course had a vested interest in minimizing disruption to the status quo--their discontent with the policies of a particular clique in office was often sufficient to win its ouster and replacement by competitors. The result was a pattern of periodic reshuffling of the domain administrations, preventing the consistent implementation of reform programs (especially when those reforms challenged the interests of highest-ranked vassals).