Mifune took a minute to lift his eyes from the list he had been compiling under the dim
candlelight for only the Gods knew how many hours.
The task of calculating the taxes each settlement had to pay was one he had joyously accepted,
but that huge amount of work had begun to break his spirit by now.
His mind raced back to the tumultuous years of the Civil War.
It was a dangerous time, yes, but only in battle did he ever feel alive.
Now, only tatami-made target dummies tasted his sword’s edge.
While reminiscing about the past, an idea popped into his mind.
Why not just use last year’s data, left over by the previous administration?
Who cares if a bunch of peasants pay a koku more or less?
So he thought and went to look for the old books.
As the Sengoku Jidai, the age of civil war, was coming to an end, the strong social forces
that were shaping Japanese society and the decisions of powerful men like Tokugawa Ieyasu
would give rise to a new social order.
Join us today as we take a look at Edo Japan’s social order and the bakuhan system.
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The social pyramid Strictly speaking, the stratified and feudal
society of the Edo period was not an entirely new thing.
Social castes had existed as early as a millennia earlier when the Taika reforms of Emperor
Kotoku in 645 brought about the ritsuryo system in an effort to imitate Tang China’s administration.
Through the long feudalization process, the passage of time, and the influence of new
philosophical movements like Neo-Confucianism, those classes eventually evolved to the rigid
four-class order of the Edo era, the shi-nō-kō-shō, that is, the warriors, the farmers, the artisans
and the merchants.
However, this system did not include all of the population, for example, Buddhist monks
and Shinto priests existed outside of this hierarchy.
Thus, before we talk about the four classes, we will look at three groups that didn’t
belong in this social structure.
The other classes Nominally, at the top of the pyramid of Japanese
society stands the Emperor and the Imperial family.
Just below him are the other aristocratic families, the kuge, whose lineage could be
traced to the early centuries of the Yamato state.
These two groups, while being the most prestigious, had long been reduced to mere figureheads
with little to almost no political influence.
True power belonged to the samurai class and the leader of the military estate, the Shogun.
This would not change until the last days of the Tokugawa bakufu, when power was reinstated
to the Emperor.
While the Imperial Court and the Shogun’s family existed above the caste system, the
third group existed far, far beneath it.
These were the eta, the untouchables, the pariahs of society that technically existed
outside social hierarchy and were often regarded as sub-human.
Their position, below even the bottom of the societal pyramid, came from their professions,
which by Buddhist standards were considered unclean.
Eta dealt with the corpses of either animals or people.
Butchers, tanners, undertakers, prison guards and others were included in the undesirables
who were forced to live outside the villages or, at best, at the very edges.
Eta could not participate in the governing of the community, and were often batched with
beggars and sometimes even criminals.
Despite their essential work, their lives were harsh, and they had little to no rights.
They could not enter the homes of non-Etas or wear headwear or any footwear besides straw
sandals, among other restrictions.
Most depressing is that criminal acts against them were not considered crimes for the law
did not view them as humans.
Their status hardly improved when the Meiji government abolished the shogunate’s class
system in 1871.
The social stigma of centuries could not just be wiped off overnight, and the Japanese society
treated them with hostility and contempt.
Discrimination against them persisted well into the 20th century.
Peasants Having now covered the people who existed
outside standard social hierarchy, let us now jump into the four main castes, starting
with the peasants.
What might surprise many of our viewers is that peasants sat at the top of the commoner
classes due to the Confucian influences Japan had received from China.
According to Confucian doctrine, peasants were held in high regard since they produced
the most valuable goods, such as food.
This made them more valuable than merchants who produced nothing but merely exchanged
goods produced by others and were thus placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy.
Peasants during the Edo period lived most of their lives in their villages.
Seldom did they travel outside, and when they did, it was done mostly for pilgrimages, and
even then, only when special permission was granted.
Peasant lived their lives and cultivated their own land in the family-owned style.
For most farmers, it wasn’t much, but it was an honest job.
Of course, families with more plots of land were wealthier and could exert more influence
over village politics, but they were still confined to their social class, as the rigid
social system did not allow movement between classes.
If landed, the peasants were, of course, subject to a land tax, called nengu, as well as corvee
labour.
Under the so-called murauke system, taxes were not paid individually but instead collectively
as a village.
Taxes were paid not in coin, but in rice, and the tax that every village paid was decided
through annual land surveys that determined how much rice a village could grow.
Later, this system was adjusted to a fixed rate of the land’s estimated produce.
If you think the peasants could circumnavigate this by not farming rice, the bakufu had another
system for lands where rice could not grow, where rice would be bought with money earned
by selling other crops.
However, as land surveys became increasingly rare and the tax rate became fixed, villages
began finding ways to make profits not subject to taxation, such as through land reclamation.
The person responsible for the collection of tax money was usually the village elder,
who was elected among the peasants.
Because the nengu was a collective tax, that meant that richer households shouldered the
burden of those less fortunate.
Those who could not make ends meet solely by cultivating land would take on some side
jobs to compensate.
It was not uncommon for peasants to undertake jobs that traditionally would fall under artisanal
categories, such as smiths, sawyers, basket weavers, or even take to moving goods between
settlements like merchants.
Craftsmen and Merchants Despite these side hustles, peasants could
not, of course, be classified as artisans, merchants and entertainers who lived in towns
like the samurai, albeit in their respective quarters.
Outcast districts and pleasure quarters tended to be on the outskirts of the town, while
the best land was reserved for the houses of the warriors.
Thus, the merchants and artisans were the lower classes of the shi-nō-kō-shō, but
what they lacked in prestige and status, they made up with wealth.
Naturally, it’s wrong to assume that every single merchant was well-off, but because
the bakufu had little interest in their activities, many traders were able to accumulate vast
fortunes that rivalled even the wealthiest samurai.
The only problem was that, strictly speaking, they were not allowed to show off their economic
affluence.
But exceptions did exist.
The richest among the merchant class, and some peasants, for that matter, held such
economic power that they were treated as samurai.
Some of them were even allowed to wear the daisho, the two swords that served as the
mark of the warrior class, or adopt a last name in the Samurai fashion.
Such was the success of the merchants that during the shogunate’s later years, when
the bakufu’s economic power declined, many samurai and even daimyo found themselves indebted
to merchants and loan sharks, and measures were taken by the Shoguns to curb their riches.
Bushi Forming around 7 to 10% of the total population,
the samurai were the privileged class of Feudal Japan.
Unlike their Sengoku predecessors, the samurai of the Edo era no longer lived in the villages
with the peasants they were supposed to rule over and protect.
Much thanks to Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s policies, which were continued by the Tokugawa Shogunate,
the samurai were forced to relocate to the castle towns and, in the process, lost their
ancestral fiefs, though exceptions did exist.
This migration, which aimed at better controlling the warrior caste, affected early modern Japanese
society deeply.
For one, the chasm between the samurai and the peasants deepened.
Status differences existed in the past, of course, but because they lived in close proximity,
the two classes were bonded together.
The samurai helped with the cultivation of land and protected the village, they shared
the troubles and the joys of the village.
Now, their position was completely separated from that of the peasants.
In essence, the peasantry lost an ally that, at times, had stood between them and tyrannical
lords.
However, the relationship between the two classes was not the only one that changed.
So did the relationship between the samurai and his master, the daimyo.
In the past, due to their economic independence and the spirit of the civil war era, most
samurai saw eye to eye with their masters, and there was a relationship of mutual respect
between them.
However, the loss of land deprived the samurai of their own source of income, and they were
now paid stipends by their lords.
Therefore, they were completely dependent upon the daimyo they served, and his death
or, more likely, the loss of his status as lord threatened to leave them in an impoverished
state without even a home to return to.
This constant sword of Damocles hanging over the Samurai was made worse by the unbendable
social order of the Edo era.
The law that froze the classes in their place was actually instituted by Toyotomi Hideyoshi
towards the end of the Azuchi-Momoyama period.
He himself had risen from humble peasant footsoldier to nobility and was pulling the ladder up
to prevent anyone from following him.
But the same law that prohibited the rise of the lower classes also kept the warriors
in place, meaning a destitute samurai couldn’t legally just become a peasant or merchant
to get out of his debt.
Granted, this fate was not predetermined, and some ronin did involve themselves with
crafting, trading or farming activities while others turned to arts or teaching swordsmanship.
But it wasn’t only the masterless samurai that saw their professional lives turning
upside down.
The Edo period was characteristically peaceful, so the warrior class of Japan had to pick
up the pen more often than the sword.
In lieu of having wars to fight, many samurai took up administrative positions like tax
collectors and clerks, neglecting their training as soldiers.
This system covered most of Japan at that time, with a few notable exceptions such as
the Tosa domain on the island of Shikoku or the southernmost lands of Kyushu, which belonged
to the ancient Shimazu clan, who were given free rein in their lands, as an appeasement
attempt from the Edo bakufu.
In hindsight, that was probably a grave mistake as the Shimazu became incredibly powerful,
and both clans would actually play a prominent role in the restoration of Imperial authority
in the mid-19th century.
The Bakuhan system It was also the Shimazu accepting Tokugawa’s
hegemony in 1602 that allowed Ieyasu to be recognized by the Emperor as Shogun.
His hold over the land would not solidify until the Osaka summer campaign, when Hideyoshi’s
son and successor, Hideyori, was defeated and forced to commit seppuku.
Ieyasu, who had already passed the mantle of the Shogun to his son Hidetada, died the
following year.
But during his reign as both Shogun and Ogosho, retired Shogun, he set up the foundations
of a strong regime for his descendants to inherit.
Ieyasu and his immediate successors, Hidetada and Iemitsu, designed an administrative system
that emphasized central control and stability.
As we have seen, the samurai in their majority were stripped of their lands, and consequently,
so were the daimyo of various provinces.
Those who were lucky were moved to wealthier estates, while those who had failed or offended
the bakufu in various ways, such as by making unauthorized marriage alliances or failing
to produce an heir, were either reallocated to provinces with lower income or lost their
title and status altogether.
Such was the new world order after the unification of Japan.
The Shogun giveth and Shogun taketh away.
Fundamental for the Shogunate to remain in power was the distinction between the fudai
and the tozama daimyo.
Originally, the fudai, or “house” daimyo, consisted of those who had aligned themselves
with the Tokugawa clan before the battle of Sekigahara.
They were famous clans in their own right that had served Ieyasu for decades, like Honda,
Ii, Sakai and the Sakakibara.
On the other hand, the tozama, or outside daimyo, consisted of clans who had stayed
neutral or had opposed the Tokugawa.
In Ieyasu’s time, there were only 13 fudai daimyos and 28 tozama, though these numbers
would change during each Shogun’s reign due to confiscations or promotions.
Because they were more trustworthy, the fudai daimyos were usually given fiefs in strategic
positions across the land to help maintain order and quell any insurrections.
They were also given the highest-ranking positions in the shogunate’s administration.
In contrast the tozama daimyo were mostly excluded from government positions, but some
of them also ruled over the largest and wealthiest domains, albeit ones far away from the central
province of Kanto and any important roads.
They, too, came from great clans like the Mori, Date, Shimazu and the Maeda, but they
and their descendants were never fully trusted by the Shoguns.
Besides these two categories of Daimyo, there was a third one, the shinpan, spin-off houses
of the Tokugawa that were related to the main branch by blood.
Three of these lines were even allowed to use the Tokugawa last name and would provide
a Shogun should the main line fail to produce an heir.
But even those relatives that styled themselves as Matsudaira wielded considerable unofficial
power and were granted fertile fiefs.
Of course, the lion’s share of the land belonged to the Shogun.
His direct holdings, mainly located in the Kanto and Tokai areas, accounted for a sixth
of the farmable land.
If we add to that the lands of his bannermen, then it surpassed a quarter of arable land.
Whether they were fudai or tozama, the bakufu would not leave the daimyo to their own devices.
We have already mentioned that marriages had to be government-approved to avoid the creation
of large power blocs.
In addition, daimyo were restricted to one castle per province, and even then, they had
to acquire permission to repair or expand it.
They were also limited as to the number of men they were required to upkeep, a number
that was determined by the koku of the domain.
However, the most effective way by which the shogunate controlled the daimyo and squashed
any thought of revolt was the sankin-kotai, the alternative attendance requirement.
By law, the various daimyo were required to have a residence in Edo, where their wives,
children and a number of retainers and servants lived.
The daimyo would spend one or, in some cases, half a year in Edo, then move to his home
province to take care of business there.
While away, his wife and children remained in Edo, effectively as hostages of the Shogunate.
With this practice, the Shogun was always able to keep a close eye on the daimyo, but
this system of alternate attendance also had the probably unintended side effect of draining
considerable amounts of the daimyo’s treasury.
Maintaining a second residence, which had to live up to a standard of luxury since it
belonged to a lord, was rather expensive.
For those who lived far from Edo, there were also the added costs of travelling.
Such were the expenditures the daimyo had to go through to support this lifestyle, which
caused many of them to fall deeply into debt.
But while the Shogunate used various tools to ensure the daimyo's discipline and loyalty,
it also granted them several freedoms in how they could administer their own regions.
Outro The Shogunate’s bureaucratic system went,
of course, way deeper than the daimyo-Shogun relationship we have described, both on the
highest levels of the Shogun’s closest advisors and on the lower local level administrations
that included magistrates, inspectors, pages and numerous other officials.
And like every other complicated bureaucratic system, the passage of time corroded it as
routine settled and officials performed their duties less efficiently, leading naturally
to its collapse.
But this is a story for another time and another video.
More videos on the administration and economic life of various civilizations are on the way.
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