Another point from Taming the Samurai. Ikegami repeats an oft-made observation that an important contrast between Japanese and European feudalism is that in Europe, the reciprocal rights and duties of lords and vassals came to be formalized and, ultimately, enforced in legal institutions that often retained some independence from the the crown.
Vassalage is, in principle, an exchange: the vassal contributes manpower or other resources to the political and military projects of the liege-lord, and submits to the latter's command in the field and authority more generally, and in return the vassal shares in the benefits of the liege-lord's concentrated political and military power. These benefits can include the guarantee of the vassal's current territory and its defense against external threats and internal rebellion as well as the acquisition of additional territory (or other resources) as spoils of war or as reward for service. The key question raised by this sort of relationship is about the balance of power: to what extent does the vassal need to submit to the arbitrary authority of the liege-lord, which is closely tied to the question of how secure, in practice, is the vassal's independent control of territory, manpower, and material resources. The ultimate check on both sides is violence: the threat against a problematic vassal is forcible removal and replacement following capture, expulsion, or death, while a dissatisfied vassal can threaten to attack the liege-lord, or even ally with other vassals or even the lord's foreign enemies.
What's distinctive about European feudalism was the extent to which the balance of power between (specifically) the nobility and the monarchies solidified into a set of traditional laws, enforced by institutions representing the privileged "estates" of the realm. In some cases (notably England and in Eastern Europe), there were even "charters" that the nobility extracted from the crown, enumerating their specific legal rights. No such formalized rights existed for the vassal samurai of medieval, let alone Tokugawa-era Japan.
There's an argument sometimes made that these formalized rights and the institutions built up around them were the first seeds of the "rule of law" and "representative (or constitutional) government" in Europe. There is a certain plausibility to this: these were ways in which the rulers were constrained by fixed rules and a segment of a ruler's subjects claimed the right to influence elements of state policy, notably taxation. It is even possible to identify specific continuities: e.g. in the extension of elements of the magna carta to the entire population and the institutional development of parliament in England, the birth of a sovereign national assembly out of the calling of the Estates General in France in 1789.
But overall, I'm dubious. The key question, as I see it, is this: to what extent did this process of formalization actually modify the relations between monarchy and nobility? Accusations against individual nobles leading to imprisonment, exile, or execution, and rebellion by segments of the nobility remained recurrent events through at least the 17th c in France--and they were ended not by the guarantee of noble rights (these were indeed undercut by the creation of ever new royal offices) but instead by their increased subordination to the crown. Indeed, as is often the case with traditional limits on rulers' authority, there were often loopholes. Take the requirement that any royal decree, in order to become law, needed to be "registered" by the parlements, which were composed of the judicial officials of a particular region. This would seem to put a clear constraint on the "legality" of royal actions, and yet, the king could compel the parlements to accept the "legality" of his decrees if only he showed up in person. (Even so, in the 16th and 17th centuries, as well as in the run-up to the Revolution, it occasionally became necessary to arrest or exile uncooperative parlementaires.)
The point, is that looking at European history prior to the revolutions--in England in the 17th centuries and in France, with repercussions across the continent, after 1789--despite an elaborate array of legal and representative institutions, the ultimate arbiter of political disputes was force majeur, and this "ultimate" level was never all that far away.
The flipside is that although Japanese vassals--the samurai--had in principle no legal rights, they were not without leverage. During the medieval period, they could and did defect from one liege to another. Even when this was impossible in the Tokugawa era, lords could be constrained by the traditional hierarchy of the vassal band, by the general tenor of opinion within it, and in some cases even by the shogunate (the overlord of the lords) to which dissatisfied factions of samurai could appeal in the name of protecting "traditional practices."
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