Though Chinese influence was profound, it was refracted through and shaped by Japan’s own experience and traditions. Japanese Confucianism differed markedly in various respects from Chinese Confucianism. While the latter explicitly included benevolence amongst its core values, the Japanese instead laid much greater emphasis on loyalty, a difference that was to become more pronounced with the passage of time. Loyalty, together with filial piety and a duty to one’s seniors — based on authority, blood and age — were amongst the key defining characteristics of the hierarchical relationships that informed Japanese culture. [130] China and Japan were both ruled by an imperial family; there were, however, two crucial differences between them. First, in China a dynasty could be removed and the mandate of heaven withdrawn: there have been thirty-six dynasties in Chinese history. In contrast, the Japanese imperial family was regarded as sacred: the same family has occupied the imperial seat throughout its 1,700-year recorded history. Second, while a Chinese dynasty enjoyed absolute power, the Japanese imperial family did not. For only a third of its history has the Japanese imperial family ruled in both name and reality. For much of Japan’s history, there has been dual or even triple government, with the emperor, in practice at least, obliged to share power. [131] The most typical form was dual government, with political power effectively controlled either by shoguns (the military chiefs), or by prime ministers or chief advisors backed by military power. The price of eternity, in other words, has been a greatly diminished political role. During the Tokugawa era (1603–1867), real political power was exercised by the military in the person of the shogun. The emperor enjoyed little more than symbolic and ceremonial significance, although formally the shogun remained answerable to him. Ruth Benedict, in her classic study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, makes the interesting observation that ‘Japan’s conception of her Emperor is one that is found over and over among the islands of the Pacific. He is the Sacred Chief who may or may not take part in administration. In some Pacific Islands he did and in some he delegated his authority. But always his person was sacred.’ [132] To understand Japan we need to see it in its Pacific as well as East Asian context.
The Tokugawa era, the 250-year period prior to the Meiji Restoration, saw the creation of a highly centralized and formalized feudal system. [133] Beneath the imperial family and the lords (daimyo), society was organized into four levels in such strict hierarchy that it possessed a caste-like quality: these were the warriors (samurai), the farmers, the artisans and the merchants respectively. One should also, strictly speaking, include the burakumin, Japan’s outcasts or untouchables — descended from those who worked in occupations associated with death, such as undertakers, buriers of the executed, skinners of dead animals — who were regarded and treated as invisible, just as they still are today, the exception (along with those of Chinese and Korean ancestry) to the social inclusivity described earlier. [134] One’s rank was determined by inheritance and set in stone. The head of every family was required to post on his doorway his class position and the details of his hereditary status. His birthright determined the clothes he could wear, the foods he could buy and the type of house he could live in. The daimyo took a portion of his farmers’ rice every year and out of that, apart from catering for his own needs, he paid his samurai. The samurai possessed no land: their formal function was to defend the daimyo, his land and property. They were the only members of society allowed to carry a sword and enjoyed wide and arbitrary power over the lower classes. During the Tokugawa era the daimyo were answerable to the shogun, who, in turn, was, at least formally, accountable to the emperor in his seclusion in Kyoto. Unlike Chinese Confucianism, which valued educational excellence above all (the mandarins being products of a highly competitive examination system), the Japanese, in giving pre-eminence to the samurai, and indeed the shogunate, extolled martial qualities. [135] During the Tokugawa period, China was, in effect, a civilian Confucian country and Japan a military Confucian country.
Not long after the Tokugawa family began their shogunate at the beginning of the seventeenth century, they closed Japan off to the outside world and suppressed Christianity, rejecting foreign influences in favour of Japanese customs and religious traditions. No European ships were allowed to use Japanese ports, with the exception of the Dutch, who were permitted to use the small island of Deshima in Nagasaki. The Japanese were forbidden from sailing in larger boats — it became an offence to build or operate a boat over a certain size — thereby bringing to an end extensive trading activity along the Japanese coast. The reasons appear to have been a desire to limit the activities of merchants together with a fear of outside influences, and especially the import of European firearms, which it was believed might serve to destabilize the delicate balance of power between the various provinces and the shogun. [136] Notwithstanding this retreat into autarchy, the Tokugawa era saw many dynamic changes. Japan became an increasingly unified community, standardizing its language, engendering similar ways of thinking and behaving between different provinces, and evolving a common set of rules and customs. As a result, the conditions for the emergence of a modern nation-state began to take shape. Castle towns were built along a newly constructed road network which served to further unify the country, with these towns at the centre of what became a vibrant trade. By the end of the Tokugawa period, Edo, as Tokyo was then known, was as big as London, with a population of more than a million, while Osaka, Kyoto, Nagoya and Kanazawa also had sizeable populations. As we saw in Chapter 2, Japan ’s economy in 1800 compared favourably with that of north-west Europe although it suffered from the same intensifying resource constraints as Europe and China. Japan, like China, moreover, could not look to any colonies as a source of relief, though food and fertilizer from long-distance fishing expeditions, and the import of commodity-intensive products from its more sparsely populated regions, provided Japan with rather greater amelioration than was the case with China. On the eve of the Meiji Restoration in 1868, Japan possessed many of the preconditions for economic take-off apart, that is, from a government committed to that goal.
[130] Ibid., pp. 35-6, 7.
[131] Ibid., pp. 9, 32, 34.
[132] Ruth Benedict,
[133] David S. Landes,
[134] Benedict,