The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan
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BAKUFU ORGANIZATION 175
they were assigned to bureaucratically demanding jobs. And so a
compromise was made.
50
For certain offices, special "office funds"
(yakuryo)
were added, beginning in 1655. Later, the practice of tempo-
rarily enhancing the officeholder's base stipend during his tenure, a
practice known as
tashidaka,
was adopted, thereby making it possible
to assign to an office an individual whose base salary was below that of
the office to which he was named. These added expenditures for office
and salary support were just one of many categories that required
funding beyond normal expectations.
The most important source of bakufu income was, of course, gra-
nary land. This had swelled to over 4 million koku by the end of the
seventeenth century and occasionally rose to over 4.5 million in the
ensuing years. From these holdings the bakufu received between 1.4
million and 1.6 million koku in taxes annually. There were other
sources of income, however, such as the numerous miscellaneous reve-
nues from commercial business, export and import dues, transport
taxes,
and frontage taxes collected in the major
cities.
The bakufu also
received income from the monopoly of certain commodities such as
silk thread imported from China at Nagasaki. The shogun's control of
the currency also yielded important revenues, first, as new coins were
minted from ore produced from the shogun's mines and, after 1698,
when the bakufu resorted to debasing the circulating coins. Because of
the lack of documentation, it is difficult to get an overall picture of
bakufu finances, but some sense of the complexity of the conditions
faced by the bakufu can be gained from Furushima Toshio's Chapter
10
in this volume.
51
The overall financial and economic health of the Edo bakufu within
the
bakuhan
system should be viewed in evolutionary terms.
52
Under
the early shoguns, finances were not a problem: The numerous
daimyo attainders allowed the confiscation of land and goods. The
high productivity of the bakufu mines fed the large stores of bullion
that accumulated in Osaka, Edo, and Sumpu storehouses. At his death
Ieyasu left some 1.9 million ryo of gold, well over the entire annual
budget by 1840. This permitted a distribution of inheritance to the
Owari and Kii collaterals of 30,000
ryo
each and 15,000
ryo
to Mito.
Hidetada left to Iemitsu
a
3.2 million-ryo
reserve,
permitting
a
distribu-
50 Kitajima, Kemyoku kozo, pp. 474-9.
51 Furushima Toshio is one of the primary scholars working in this field; see his Kinsei
keizaishi
no kiso katei -
nengu
shudauu to kyodotai (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1978). Chapter 10 in this
volume reflects his findings in the larger work.
52 See the tightly reasoned survey of bakufu finances in Ono Mizuo, "Kanjosho," in Kokushi
daijilen, vol. 3, pp. 834-6.
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176 THE BAKUHAN SYSTEM
tion of 32,000 ryo in gifts to daimyo. Under Iemitsu the bakufu con-
fronted numerous special expenses such as the building of the Nikko
mausoleum, the giving of largess to the merchants of Edo and Kyoto
when the shogun made his progress to Kyoto, and the suppression of
the Shimabara Rebellion. Moreover, these were years when the bakufu
could still call on the daimyo to pick up the expense of
castle
construc-
tion, the building of residences in Edo and Kyoto, and many other
symbols of conspicuous display.
But after the third shogun died, the flow of special financial support
began to move in other directions. Beginning with the great Edo
fire
of
1657,
we find the bakufu providing loans and gifts of money to help
the rebuilding of daimyo and samurai residences. Fires and periodic
natural calamities, such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions of Mt.
Fuji and Mt. Asama, required costly rehabilitation. Fiscal deficits
began to appear in 1678. And from this time on, maintaining solvency
was a running battle. The discovery of the expedient of currency
debasement was the single most useful device for balancing the bakufu
budget, and it was used frequently.
Recognition of fiscal realities grew in three stages in the bakufu
leadership. First came the realization that corruption was a problem
and required immediate and drastic action. Second came the effort to
identify special problems for specific remedial action, illustrated by
Arai Hakuseki's efforts to reform bakufu policy toward foreign trade.
Third, we come to the time of shogun Yoshimune, who attempted to
work out an overall, comprehensive fiscal, or economic, policy for the
country. He recognized that such a policy would have to include
within its purview the country's growing commercial dimension.
Urban administration
From the middle of the eighteenth century a significant portion of
bakufu income was derived from taxes on urban property, fees on com-
mercial and transport activities, and other nonagricultural sources. To
understand this development we must turn to the urban sector of the
Edo government. The standard pattern of city administration was
through the bakufu-appointed city magistrate
(machi
bugyo),
who for
large cities like Edo, Osaka, and Kyoto would be daimyo or bannermen
of some size and importance.
The typical city under the
bakuhan
system was the castle town, like
Edo,
which had grown up in response to the needs of a daimyo as he
organized his domains during the warfare of the sixteenth century- As
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BAKUFU ORGANIZATION 177
the regional hegemons built fortresses of great size and drew garrison
troops around them, new cities developed that became the domiciles
for nearly the entire samurai class. These in turn drew large numbers
of service personnel: merchants, artisans, and professional groups of
all types.
53
The bakufu set the model for urban administration, as most of the
largest cities were held under its direct control. Edo, Osaka, Kyoto,
Sumpu, Nagasaki, and Otsu, the most important of the
tenryo
cities,
were each quite different in history and function, but the general
pattern of administration was similiar. Bakufu administration over the
nonsamurai residents was vested in the city magistrate, who main-
tained an office
(bugyosho)
to which were attached a staff of
clerks
and
enforcement officers
(yoriki,
doshin).
In both Edo and Osaka it became
necessary to divide the office into two, on opposite sides of the city.
And it was always customary to name two magistrates who rotated on
duty on alternate months. Below the magistrates the urban popula-
tion, referred to as
chonin,
was organized much as the rural populace
was,
under
a
system of local management. The basic unit was the ward
(machi
or
cho)
headed by ward heads
(machidoshiyori).
Urban house-
holders were required to form mutual responsibility groups
(gonin-
gumi),
as did villagers. Osaka was further divided into districts com-
posed of several wards, and these were headed by elders
(sodoshiyori).
Thus there were several layers of
chonin
administrators between samu-
rai officialdom and the city dwellers themselves.
In the formative years of the
bakuhan
system, daimyo and shogun
adopted a positive attitude toward the mercantile community, offering
merchants and other service groups attractive conditions in order to
lure them to their castle headquarters. Although later the
chonin
be-
came subject to a variety of excise taxes, license fees, and compulsory
loans (both forced and secured), they were never as systematically and
heavily taxed as were the agriculturalists. Samurai government placed
merchants under various restraints, but it also relied on the mercantile
community to bridge the gap between the urban-based samurai and
the rural commoners who produced food and other goods. Urbaniza-
tion and the spread of money economy created conditions that enabled
merchants and manufacturers to become essential to the well-being of
the warrior class. But the Edo period samurai government had diffi-
53 The study of castle towns has grown in proportion to the study of daimyo domains. Chapter
11,
by Nakai Nobuhiko and James L. McClain, in this volume provides a good overview of
Edo period urbanization. McClain also has written a thorough survey of Kanazawa as a castle
town.
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178 THE BAKUHAN SYSTEM
culty working out institutionally a satisfactory relationship between
the two segments of the society.
The first three Tokugawa shoguns articulated the shogunate's basic
policies toward the commercial sector. Special service, or contract,
merchants
(gqyo shoniri)
- among them the houses charged with pro-
curing precious metals and minting them into currency - were given
new charters. Restrictions were placed on foreign trade to the advan-
tage of chartered merchants who monopolized foreign imports of silk
on behalf of the bakufu. The bakufu also issued generic laws and
regulations (furegaki) that established the national structure within
which the commercial economy could operate. The regulations of
1615 that dealt with such matters as the disputes between commercial
litigants or problems of family inheritance were typical of the effort of
the samurai government to pass on to each class the management of its
own internal affairs. But the destinies of the samurai and the
chonin
were closely linked, and when the bakufu finally woke up to the
deterioration of its fiscal condition, the problems it faced were deeply
embedded in the underlying economy. The
financial
expedients under-
taken by the fifth shogun, Tsunayoshi, the shogunal adviser Arai
Hakuseki, and the eighth shogun, Yoshimune, such as price fixing,
currency debasement, and restraints on exports of precious metals, all
reflect the effort to deal with ill-understood economic problems that
were truly national in scale. Whereas military and political issues had
been the primary concerns that had dictated policy choices until now,
the bakufu by the time of Tsunayoshi was faced with real fiscal prob-
lems that required economically informed solutions. The debate over
whether or not to carry out currency debasement discussed in Chapter
9 of this volume is an obvious case in point.
The junior
councilors
and military organization
The point is often made that bakuhan civil government was nothing
more than the application to peacetime conditions of an administrative
system developed by the daimyo during years of constant warfare.
This should not be construed to mean that civil administration from
top to bottom was handled as a sideline by officials whose normal
functions were military service. During the Sengoku wars, the daimyo
had obviously accentuated the military side of their houseband
buildup. But the civil administration of the towns and villages within
their domains was given due attention. Ieyasu's appointment, during
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BAKUFU ORGANIZATION 179
his Okazaki years, of commissioners for civil administration is illustra-
tive.
During the years of heavy warfare, members of
a
daimyo's vassal
band were obliged to function in both military and civil positions.
When peaceful conditions were assured, these two types of service
tended to become separate in practice as the qualification for office
became more specialized.
As we noted, the Tokugawa houseband consisted of three major
segments: the house daimyo, the bannermen, and the housemen.
Whereas the senior councilors handled the affairs of the shogun's
daimyo-rank vassals, the junior councilors were made responsible for
carrying out functions appropriate to the other two classes of shogunal
officials. These were military guard duty and service to the person of
the shogun and his household. The office was occupied by four to five
daimyo of minor rank.
On paper, a wartime muster of the shogun's armed forces would
draw on all levels of support. Army units would be led by the senior
councilors, the junior councilors, and the several daimyo. Under the
command of the senior councilors were the keepers of Edo Castle, the
members of the twelve great guards
(obari),
the inspector general, and
the necessary signal officers and civil engineers. Under the command
of the junior councilors were ten body guard
(shoimbari)
units, ten
inner guard
(koshogumibari)
groups, eight units of the new guard
(shimban),
as well as numerous specialized units trained for communi-
cation, firearms, naval warfare, and the like.
In peacetime these specialized units were expected to hold them-
selves in functioning order. The guard groups remained as castle
guards, shogunal body guards, and military attendants when the sho-
gun traveled outside Edo Castle. Despite the tedium of guard duty,
membership in them was considered more desirable than were civil
administrative positions. The more domestic of the positions under
the purview of the junior council were in such services as construction
and repair (kobushin), shogunal pages (kosho), shogunal attendants
(konando),
inspectors
(tnetsuke),
physicians (ishi), Confucian scholars
(jusha),
the kitchen (zen
bugyo),
women's apartments
(ooku),
and the
like.
It should be kept in mind that this list of functions applied to
more than just the Edo headquarters; that is, the bakufu establish-
ment was grounded in numerous subsidiary castles, like Sumpu,
Osaka, and Kyoto, and administrative positions, like the Kyoto dep-
uty (Kyoto
shoshidai),
and each of these commands had detachments
of military guards and service units assigned by Edo.
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l8o THE BAKUHAN SYSTEM
Selection for
office
and administrative
procedures
It was frequently observed by foreign visitors to Japan in the mid-
nineteenth century that the samurai government was greatly over-
staffed. This was the result of carrying over into peacetime the undi-
minished rosters of shogun and daimyo vassal bands and attached
service personnel that had grown to inflated proportions during the
warfare of the last half of the sixteenth century. But the financial
burden that this decision placed on the samurai government in the
nineteenth century was not understood at the time. Nor should we
imagine that the bureaucratic system was totally defenseless against
the pressures created by the hereditary retention of stipends by so
many members of an underused aristocracy.
54
The samurai's practice of enrolling in the service rosters of the
daimyo and shogun was relatively open and fluid when war was being
waged. Assignment to office or to military service unit most frequently
was tied to battlefield performance, and rewards for courage or loyal
service were easily paid in the currency of captured fief land. But once
military action had ended, the basis of assignment and promotion in
rank or office had to be systematized and ultimately institutionalized.
Criticism has been directed toward the hereditary nature of samurai
officeholding, especially that toward the end of the Tokugawa regime.
It is true that the samurai families appeared to remain, by hereditary
right, on the bakufu and daimyo rolls. But what about the holding of
office? Appointment to office throughout the bakuhan society rested
on the concept of family status (mibun or kakaku). The status of a
given house could be expressed in terms of military or bureaucratic
rank and in size of income measured in koku of rice. Thus what any
house inherited was rank and not office.
55
Positions within the bureaucracy were graded according to the occu-
pant's rank and salary. For any given office, there were obviously
many qualified individuals. And for each samurai of a given status
there were numerous positions for which he was qualified. Accord-
ingly, the matching of status to office rested on the basic philosophy
behind the assignment to office and the requirements of the office.
54 The application of these principles of status inheritance is clearly brought out in the case of
a
daimyo domain such as the Bizen han. See Hall, "The Ikeda House and Its Retainers in
Bizen," pp. 87-8.
55 Recruitment procedures were well developed in both the bakufu and the han. For an example
of the latter, see John Whitney Hall, "The Nature of Traditional Society: Japan," in Robert
E.
Ward and Dank wart A. Rustow, eds., Political
Modernization
in Japan and
Turkey
(Prince-
ton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp.
14-41.
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BAKUFU ORGANIZATION l8l
Because it was assumed that size of income reflected the individual's
stature and administrative experience, it required
a
person of an appro-
priate income to fulfill the requirements of a given position. This
minimum income requirement for office was termed yakudaka, and
for a few, such requirements were as follows: senior councilor (25,000
koku),
chamberlain (5,000 koku), inspector general or Edo city magis-
trate (5,000 koku), and page (500 koku).
But before long, as bannermen and housemen incurred their own
financial problems, the minimum income requirement became increas-
ingly
meaningless.
Thus beginning in 1665, captains of the great guard
were given an office expense allowance
(yakuryo)
of two thousand
hyd
(bales of rice) to take care of office costs. Eventually this practice was
applied to nearly all bakufu offices. A few examples: inspector general
(one thousand ryo), head of the Finance Office (seven hundred ryo),
and inspector (five hundred
ryo).
A further innovation in office com-
pensation was the practice begun by Yoshimune of offering compensa-
tory salary increases to individuals whose basic house income was
below the minimum income requirement for a given post. Called
tashidaka,
a bannerman with a two thousand-Aso&u stipend, for exam-
ple,
could receive a temporary salary enhancement of one thousand
koku
so as to qualify for appointment to a post listed at three thousand
koku. Although these measures were cumbersome in practice, they
helped, to some degree, open up the bakufu bureaucracy to talent
from below.
Within a system so strongly colored by hereditary constraints, how
were the talents of potential officeholders recognized, and how were
appointments made from the pool of eligibles? Here another common
bureaucratic technique was relied on, namely, the use of
the
personnel
group, or kumi. Samurai were enrolled in the service registers of sho-
gun or daimyo at a given rank and assigned to a given personnel
group, before being assigned to a post. As a member of
a kumi
he came
under the supervision of the kumi head
(kumigashira),
who served as
personnel officer for the group, assisted in advancing the careers of
men under his supervision, and preparing and presenting to a higher
authority the petitions for promotion or transfer. The personnel group
head was different from the administrative or military command supe-
rior, and this separation of the command and status systems made for
a
more impartial handling of bureaucratic personnel matters.
Finally, we should note that many of the positions in the bakufu
bureaucracy were filled by more than one person, which reflects the
common practice of multiple authority, or responsibility, and alterna-
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182 THE BAKUHAN SYSTEM
tion of duty. In the service of both the shogun and the daimyo, espe-
cially in sensitive assignments, two or more individuals alternated in
office, usually on a monthly rotation basis. This practice served to
protect the political process from being dominated by any
single
individ-
ual,
for multiple appointment meant that important policy decisions
would have to be made collectively by all officials, whether or not on
duty. On the other hand, duty rotation meant that minor issues were
often allowed to remain undecided, in the hope that they would be
handled by the next duty officer. These practices worked against rapid
and decisive bureaucratic
action.
Just as in the practice of retaining the
daimyo in a centralizable political organization, the retention of these
conservative administrative practices militated against a number of
"modern" tendencies in samurai government during the Edo period.
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CHAPTER
5
THE
HAN
The
han, or
daimyo domains, covered some three-quarters
of the
total area
of
the Japanese islands. They presided over most
of
Japan's
wealth
and
garnered most
of its
taxes. Under their control came
the
greater part
of
Japan's military forces,
as at
least three-quarters
of the
samurai class were
in
their service.
For the
majority
of the
common
people,
the
only form
of
government they knew
was
provided
by
their
han.
Its
borders, seldom
if
ever passed, formed
the
edge
of
their
known world,
and its
officials were
the
only ones they could ever
expect
to see. The han
gave
the
majority
of
Japanese their roads,
their bridges, their laws,
and
their order. When villages quarreled
over water supply
or
rights
to
forage
in the
mountains,
it
was
the
han
that stepped
in to
separate them. When crops failed,
the han
doled
out rations. Should
a
river burst
its
banks, then
the
responsibility
for
relief and restoration fell
to the
han.
1
This
is not to say
that those who lived
in the
han
were
not
conscious
of higher forms of authority. Above the
han
was the Tokugawa bakufu,
presided over
by a
shogun from whom every daimyo,
or han chief,
derived
his
legitimacy.
One
step beyond that again stood
the
emperor
and
his
court, powerless
in
fact
but
nevertheless
the
symbolic fount
of
all authority, even that of the bakufu
itself.
Yet
to
most people living
in
the
han
- the
farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, servants,
day
laborers,
and fishermen
-
shogun
and
emperor would have been little more
than abstractions, dimly perceived
and of no
immediate relevance.
The samurai class, being both educated
and
traveled
to an
extent
denied other sections
of
society, would have known
of
these more
exalted bodies
-
would perhaps have
had
some degree
of
personal
contact with one
or
other of them
at
some time
- but for
most of them,
too,
their
han was
paramount.
It was the han
that
met
their needs,
both material
and
ideological, satisfying
the one
with stipends
and the
i Throughout this chapter
the
term
han
will denote not only
an
area
of
land
but
also
its
military,
administrative,
and
fiscal
superstructure. This
is in
accordance with Japanese usage.
I8
3
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184 THE HAN
other with an opportunity to serve. The stipends may have been far
from large, and the service often as much
a
socially acceptable counter-
feit as anything of real substance, but nontheless it defined, as nothing
else could, the place of
this
privileged and shamefully underemployed
class within the community. By whatever yardstick, therefore, the
han
formed an integral part of Japanese life.
Nobody in Tokugawa Japan could have doubted the importance of
the han, just as nobody would seriously contest it now. But such was
not always the case. For more than seventy years after the han were
abolished in 1871, they and their function in Tokugawa society were
substantially ignored. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, Japanese scholars - servants themselves of strong central
government - took their own preoccupations with state power and
imperial loyalty with them when they studied the Edo period, only
rarely looking beyond the bakufu, its individual leaders, and what
their attitude toward the imperial court in Kyoto might have been.
Insofar as the han were considered at all, it was through their associa-
tion with individual daimyo - Tokugawa Mitsukuni of
Mito,
for exam-
ple,
or Hoshina Masayuki of Aizu - statesmen whose devotion to the
imperial house or to Confucian morality seemed exemplary enough to
warrant attention. Of the considerable role played by the han them-
selves in the social, economic, cultural, and institutional life of their
time,
little notice was taken.
2
Only after World War II did attention shift significantly in the
direction of han studies, largely through the leadership of ltd Tasa-
buro,
a historian at the University of
Tokyo.
Even before the war Ito's
research on a number of individual
han
- Mito, Kii, Nakamura, and
Tsushima among them - had delineated a whole new field for histori-
cal research. Then, in 1956, with the publication of
his Bakuhan taisei
(The bakuhan system), he brought han studies to academic promi-
nence. As the title of his book suggests, the han were now to be
recognized as entities distinct from, and in a sense comparable to, the
Tokugawa bakufu with which they shared responsibility for governing
Japan. At the same time Ito Tasaburo, and the group of like-minded
scholars he gathered around him - Taniguchi Sumio, Kobayashi Seiji,
Kanai Madoka, and Fujino Tamotsu, among others - have between
them, individually and as members of the Hanseishi kenkyukai (Soci-
2 See, for example, the old standard works on Tokugawa history: Yoshida Togo, Tokugawa
seikyo ko, 2 vols. (Tokyo: Fuzambo, 1894); Ikeda Koen,
Tokugawa
jidai shi (Tokyo: Waseda
daigaku shuppanbu, 1909); and Kurita Mototsugu, Sogo Nihonshi gaisetsu ge (Tokyo:
Chubunkan, 1943).
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