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20th Century Japan
Japanese Society prior to 1853
By 1615, after many long and bloody battles, the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa had gained complete control of Japan, having defeated the Imperial rulers. Ieyasu strongly disapproved of the empire building carried out by the previous Emperor and went to the opposite extreme. The Tokugawa house banned foreign trade altogether, except for one strictly watched Dutch trading post in Nagasaki harbour. The death penalty was decreed for any foreigner attempting to enter Japan.
While allowing the daimyo (feudal lords) to reign as virtual rulers within their territories, Tokugawa kept them loyal to his court at Edo (the old name for Tokyo) through a rigidly enforced system of taxes, tributes, ceremonial rituals and hostage taking. Sword-bearing samurai were forced to live in the castle towns of the daimyo as soldier-bureaucrats and became dependant on the local daimyo for their livelihood. Peasants were altogether forbidden to use weapons.
With Japan now formally isolated, the Tokugawa shoguns, following ancient Chinese models, compartmentalised Japan’s feudal society into four distinct classes: the samurai (shi), who included bureaucrats and scholars; farmers (no); artisans (ko); and at the base of the feudal totem pole, merchants (sho). Internal immigration was banned. Without special permission from the shogunate no one could leave the fief in which he dwelled.In this way, Ieyasu and his heirs froze Japanese society.
Generations later, a historian, Fukuzawa Yukichi, sketched an unforgettable potrait of tokugawa society:
"The millions of Japanese at the time were closed up inside millions of individual boxes. They were separated from one another by walls with little room to move around. The four-level class structure of warriors, farmers, artisans and tradesmen froze human relationships along prescribed lines. Even within the samurai class there were distinctions in terms of stipends and offices. At one extreme, the occupations of Confucian teachers and doctors became hereditary, too. Each of the other classes of society also had its determining patterns of behaviour. The walls separating them were as strong as iron and could not be broken down by any amount of force. Having no motivation to employ their talents in order to progress forward, people simply retreated into the safety of their own shells. Over the course of several hundred years this routine became second nature to them. Their spirit of initiative, as it is called, was lost completely."