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).
