The Cambridge History of Japan, Vol. 4: Early Modern Japan

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THE TANUMA PERIOD 465

were actually minted from silver brought into Japan through the sale

of exports.

The development of Hokkaido was another issue to which Tanuma

devoted much thought. Always aware of their vulnerability to foreign-

ers from the south, the Japanese at the end of the eighteenth century

were beginning to look northward as well, and not without reason.

The Russians had crossed Siberia, colonized portions of Kamchatka,

and had even started to press southward toward the Kurile Islands.

Russian ships were being sighted along Japanese coasts with increasing

frequency. In 1777, indeed, a group of Russians approached the au-

thorities of the Matsumae domain in Hokkaido with a request for

trade. This was officially rejected, but there seems to have been some

surreptitious trade, for some Russian goods were later to be found in

the Osaka markets.

News of these developments came to Tanuma's attention in a curi-

ously roundabout fashion. Some of his friends had passed on to him a

work entitled Aka Ezo

fusetsuko,

written by Kudo Heisuke, a medical

practitioner from Sendai. Kudo's argument in favor of commercial

exchange with Russia was so convincing that the senior councilor

dispatched a team to Hokkaido in 1785 to investigate the possibilities

of opening trade relations. As events transpired, the resulting report

was notably unenthusiastic, putting an immediate end to any prospect

of Japan's trading with its northern neighbor. On the other hand, the

investigating team did urge the development of Hokkaido, contending

that land reclamation there could bring the shogunate an additional

5.83 million koku annually in tax revenues, an amount that would have

more than doubled its income. Given the state of agricultural technol-

ogy at the time, this may well have been too optimistic an assessment,

but in any case, like other plans, this too would collapse along with

Tanuma's own political career.

While Tanuma's government was experimenting with these new

policies, a series of

crises

overtook Japan. The farming community, on

whose revenues all political power rested, was beginning to fall apart

under the combined pressure of mounting agrarian unrest and succes-

sive natural disasters. Protest in rural areas, already formidable by the

end of the Kyoho period, had risen, by the 1780s, to an average of

more than fifty incidents a year.

Their scale was growing too, as was

the level of

violence.

More importantly, the nature of protest had also

70 Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 312-29; and Numata Jiro, "Nisshin boeki ni okeru ichi mondai," Rekishi

chiri

68 (November-December 1936): 421-34, 543-8.

71 Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 295-312. 72 Aoki, Hyakusho ikki, p. 31.

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466 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

changed. In the 1750s, protest had usually been in the form of de-

mands from village communities that their feudal overlord - whether

the bakufu or daimyo - reduce taxes or provide them with extra rice

for food or seed. By the 1770s and 1780s, however, poor farmers were

beginning to unite in attacks on the more prosperous members of the

village community

itself,

particularly the village headmen (nanushi),

landlords, and wealthy rural merchants. In some cases, these uprisings

were echoed in Japan's towns and cities. To combat this alarming

trend, the shogunate in 1769 instructed all daimyo that such outbreaks

of violence were to be stamped out, irrespective of the merits of their

grievances. In 1770, signs were posted throughout Japan offering re-

wards to those ready to inform on agitators. Despite this increased

government attention, however, agrarian unrest continued to grow.

The situation was not helped by an extraordinary succession of

natural disasters: storms, droughts, volcanic eruptions, crop failures,

famines, and epidemics throughout the countryside and fires in the

cities.

All of these made the life of the common people that much more

precarious. They also focused resentment on the government, for in a

Confucian society natural disasters were taken as Heaven's way of

reproving earthly misrule. No one knows how many people died in the

great Temmei famine, which began in 1782 and continued until 1787,

but its severity can perhaps be gauged by the fact that the shogunate's

land-tax revenues fell by more than half during its duration.

Certainly there is no doubt that one of its casualties was Tanuma

Okitsugu

himself,

the man held directly accountable for all his coun-

try's maladies.

The first blow came with the assassination of his son

in the spring of 1784. At the end of the following year Matsudaira

Sadanobu, the man destined to supplant Tanuma as leader of the

government, bribed his way into the shogunate's highest advisory

body, the Tamarinoma, and began to work toward the senior coun-

cilor's overthrow. This was not long in

coming.

In the autumn of 1786,

Tokugawa Ieharu, the tenth shogun, fell gravely ill and died. Even

before his death, Tanuma's projects had been stopped, and now, left

without a protector, Tanuma was turned out of office. Subsequently

he lost twenty thousand koku of his domain and was placed under

house arrest. Then early in the summer of 1788, he too died, in his

seventieth year, leaving to his grandson Okiaki a domain that had

shrunk to a mere ten thousand koku.

73 Hayashi, "Horeki," pp. 113-17; and Yamada, "Horeki," pp. 149-74.

74 Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 116-34. 75 Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 32-59, 220-42.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE KANSEI REFORMS 467

THE KANSEI REFORMS

With the accession of the thirteen-year-old ienari as shogun, Matsu-

daira Sadanobu's rise to political prominence was assured. As daimyo

of Shirakawa, Sadanobu had already won the support of the new

shogun's natural (as distinct from his adoptive) father, Hitotsubashi

Harusada. A prominent leader of one of the three Tokugawa cadet

branches descended from Yoshimune, Harusada was able to enlist the

support of the prestigious Owari, Kii, and Mito branches for Sada-

nobu as well. All were ready to encourage the young politician in his

plan to mount a program of reforms, for not only was Sadanobu a

grandson of Yoshimune, the Kyoho reformer, but he had also proved

himself a capable administrator in his own domain at Shirakawa,

where he had managed to keep the impact of

the

Temmei famine to an

absolute minimum.

Nevertheless, the initial steps in the campaign to install Sadanobu in

the inner circles of the shogunate proved unexpectedly difficult.

Tanuma Okitsugu may have been dismissed, but his associates still

remained, in both the bureaucracy and the shogun's household, and

particularly in the ooku, the women's quarters. The political tussle

between Sadanobu's faction and the Tanuma diehards continued into

the new year, until popular unrest brought it to a stop. In 1786, two

years earlier, there had been 57 peasant protests, and in just the previ-

ous year, 1787, violent riots had rocked Edo, Osaka, and other major

cities.

Finally, in 1788 there were 117 separate revolts.

They were exactly what Tanuma's opponents needed to drive the

last of his adherents from the shogunal household and clear the way

for Matsudaira Sadanobu to be elevated to the post of senior councilor

and shortly thereafter to chief senior councilor

(roju

shuseki).

At his

urging, the newly installed shogun quickly called together the senior

administrators and ordered them to perform their duties in accordance

with the spirit of Yoshimune, the reforming shogun of fifty years

before. Following this command, Sadanobu told the bureaucrats in

considerable detail exactly what was expected of them. This consti-

tuted the opening maneuver in what came to be known as the Kansei

Reforms.

There were still some obstacles, however. The new shogun, Ienari,

was just fifteen and unable to offer much assistance. Moreover, only

two members of Sadanobu's own faction had thus far been brought

into the administration - Honda Tadakazu as junior councilor, and

Kano Hisanori as assistant chamberlain (sobayaku gqyo toritsugi).

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

468 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Against this, Tanuma's old supporters were still strongly entrenched

in important posts. Matsudaira Yasuyoshi still served as senior coun-

cilor and Mizuno Tadatomo as the titular senior councillor (roju

kaku).

Faced with this much opposition, Sadanobu petitioned the

heads of the Kii, Owari, and Mito branches of the Tokugawa house

for some additional sign of official approval to help him implement

his reform program. This petition had some success, although not as

much as he would have wished. He had in mind promotion to grand

councilor but had to settle for the ancient position of shogunal ad-

viser (hosa), a post unfilled for more than 150 years. Once this step

had been taken, early in 1788, both his major opponents, Mizuno

and Matsudaira, resigned from the Senior Council, to be replaced

with Sadanobu's own friends - Matsudaira Nobuakira as senior coun-

cilor, Honda Tadakazu as chamberlain, and Toda Ujinori as superin-

tendent of temples and shrines. These changes gave Matsudaira

Sadanobu the commanding position he needed inside the bakufu and

the shogun's own household. With this base and the support of the

three cadet daimyo, as well as Ienari's father Hitotsubashi Harusada,

Sadanobu could now begin his own reforms.

Of all the manifold problems confronting him, the legacy of social

chaos left by the events of the last years of the Tanuma period was the

most disturbing. To cope with this, Sadanobu believed it necessary to

rebuild the entire social system, to restore morale, and to revive the

economy, and all as quickly as possible. In particular, the problem of

the bakufu's own samurai retainers, now largely demoralized, called

for urgent attention. To restore morale, the government exhorted the

samurai to improve their general behavior and encouraged them to

devote themselves to scholarship and to training in the martial arts.

The administration also promised to identify men with the necessary

skills and qualities to take charge of such a program, and so orders

went out to promote even subordinate, low-ranking samurai who

might be considered for such responsibilities.

Then, in mid-1790, the government issued the Igaku no kin (Prohi-

bition of heterodoxy). The administration believed that the orthodox

Chu Hsi philosophy espoused by Tokugawa officials for nearly a cen-

tury and

half had been undercut by new philosophies.

the authori-

ties,

members of the Ancient Learning school and the proponents of

76 Kikuchi Kenjiro, "Matsudaira Sadanobu nyukaku jijo," Shigaku zasshi 26 (January 1915):

1-22; Inobe Shigeo, Bakumatsu shi no kenkyu (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 1927), pp. 1-17;

Takeuchi Makoco, "Kansei kaikaku," in Iwanami koza Nihon rekishi, vol. 12 (Kinsei 4)

(Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 5-14; Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 151-7, 237-8.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE KANSEI REFORMS 469

eclecticism seemed to be turning people away from the practical appli-

cation of Confucian ethics and, instead, promoting undesirable habits

of mind, antiquarianism and pedantry among them.

Accordingly, Matsudaira Sadanobu took steps to protect Chu Hsi

Confucianism, as it was defined by the Hayashi school, long the sho-

gunate's custodian of doctrinal purity. Hayashi Nobutaka, head of the

school, was instructed to see that the official orthodoxy was main-

tained and that all other branches of philosophy were avoided as hereti-

cal.

Because the underlying intent was to reform all Japanese, not just

the samurai, through proper Confucian morality, the Igaku no kin was

accompanied by other similar measures. Stricter censorship was an-

nounced, with an absolute ban on pornography, a step that led to the

prosecution of some well-known figures, including the writer Santo

Kyoden. On a more positive note, the shogunate also ordered a na-

tional search for

cases

of exemplary behavior and later published appro-

priate examples under the title

Kogiroku

(Records of righteousness and

filial

piety).

There was also another side to the Igaku no kin, and this concerned

the training of capable officials. To demonstrate its commitment to

promoting scholarship and the martial arts, the shogunate also turned

its attention to training students at its own academy, where future

bureaucrats were instructed. To this end, it established in 1792 a five-

tier system of annual examinations for shogunal vassals and their sons.

These examinations were open to any samurai who wished to sit for

them, but the government directed senior administrators to invite

capable subordinates to apply, whether or not they wished to. In

practice, however, this system did not prove as praiseworthy as ex-

pected: Anyone could score well with hasty and mindless cramming,

and the odds were still stacked against candidates of humble status, no

matter how able. Still, the impulse itself was a good one, and it was

revived later by the Meiji government with the introduction of com-

petitive public service examinations.

The Igaku no kin was significant in another way as well. By encour-

aging scholarship in such a decisive manner, the bakufu, perhaps

coincidentally, was staking its claim to ultimate authority over Japan's

academic and technological development. This impulse can be seen

clearly in its approach to the matter of medical training. Before 1791,

the government gave no more than unenthusiastic support to the

Igakukan, one of the country's many medical schools. In that year,

however, the administration reversed course and took over the Iga-

kukan, which then became the official medical school. Igakukan stu-

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470 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

dents received exemptions from formal examinations, whereas all

other doctors in bakufu employ were obliged to be examined there

before they could be registered. Similarly, the government also took

the first steps toward controlling the study of Western science and

technology. In 1797, for example, the preparation of a new calendar

became a pretext for bringing the country's best astronomers into

employment in its own observatory. If many aspects of the Kansei

Reforms were reactionary attempts to resolve the crisis of the late

eighteenth century by restoring the older, feudal-based order, here, at

least, they anticipated several late-nineteenth-century developments,

for the Meiji academic establishment was ultimately created along

lines suggested by Matsudaira Sadanobu's experimental efforts.

Samurai demoralization was not the only problem confronting the

shogunate. Farming communities, too, were in desperate need of stabi-

lization. In many areas, agriculture had been so damaged by natural

disasters that there was little any government could do to restore

productivity. In the Kanto and Tohoku regions, for example, the

events of the previous decade had driven many peasants to abscond,

leaving their farms to revert to wilderness. This was hardly a problem

that the shogunate could ignore, so from the late 1780s onward the

authorities began to devise strategies to cope with the phenomenon of

"deserted villages." One plan was to encourage more well-to-do farm-

ers to begin their own land reclamation projects, using the labor of less

fortunate fellow villagers. Another was to identify "honest vagabonds"

(mushukumono),

that is, men who had left their villages and were no

longer registered at any temple, and to grant them parcels of land in

areas that needed more cultivators.

The government also severely restricted the drift of seasonal work-

ers from the country to the

city.

Toward the end of 1790 the shogunate

announced that men who had come to Edo from the country would be

provided with money for travel, food, and agricultural implements,

provided they agreed to go home again. If for any reason they could

not do so, or no longer had relatives or farms there, then the authori-

ties would offer to settle them somewhere else.

Abortion and infanticide, common in some parts of Japan during

the famine of the 1780s, were seen as another cause of declining rural

population. To cope with this, the government ordered local adminis-

77 Tahara Tsuguo, "Kansei kaikaku

ichi kosatsu,"

Rekishigaku kenkyu

178 (December 1954):

9—21;

Kumakura Isao, "Kasei bunka no zencei," in Hayashiya Tatsusaburo, ed.,

Kasei bunka

no kenkyu

(Tokyo:

Iwanami shoten, 1976), pp. 47-59; and Takeuchi, "Kansei kaikaku," pp.

15-17.

Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008

THE KANSEI REFORMS 471

trators to instruct village officials and the mutual responsibility

groups

(goningumi)

to watch over the health of pregnant women. Such

women were to be given every assistance, even sums of money to use

to rear their children when necessary, but local officials were also

instructed to rigorously investigate the death of any of these children.

All in all, these efforts to rebuild rural Japan cost the shogunate a

good deal. In 1800, for example, almost 150,000 gold pieces, some 10

percent of its total expenditures for that year, were devoted to this

cause.

In the end, however, agriculture could not be revived without the

help of competent local administrators. Consequently, the bakufu

again removed several local officials believed to be incompetent and

replaced them with new appointments. Some of the dismissals were

quite spectacular: Both Chigusa Senjuro, district magistrate

(gundai)

of Mino, and Okusa Masatada of Hida were banished in 1789. The

following year Ina Tadataka of the Kanto had his stipend confiscated

and was placed under permanent house arrest, and in 1793 Ibi Miki-

nosuke, another prominent district magistrate, was dismissed from

office. All four men were of extremely high status, far higher than

usual for this level of

local

administrator, and all had been responsible

for very large areas of shogunal land. Their fates, therefore, warrant

special attention.

Take, for example, the case of Ina Tadataka, the Kanto district

magistrate, whose family had held that position for over two hundred

years,

ever since Tokugawa Ieyasu had moved into the region at the

end of the sixteenth century. The family was very well liked and also

trusted by the people in the region, as Tadataka had discovered in 1781

and again in 1787, when he had used his popularity to quiet a series of

violent local disturbances. Back in 1764 his grandfather Tadaoki, too,

had used his personal standing in the community to disperse mobs of

angry peasants. Why then, should the shogunate place such a man

under permanent house arrest? The official reason was that Tadataka

had failed to control a dispute among his own subordinates and that

his report of the matter to higher levels of the bureaucracy had been

less than frank. It is more likely, however, that the real reason con-

cerned his poor handling of government loan funds. Yields on high-

78 Takeuchi, "Kansei kaikaku," pp. 22-23; Kishimoto Junkichi, Kishimoto Budayu

kun

jiseki

(Tokyo, 1919), pp. 26-30; Nagayama Usaburo, Hayakawa daikan (1929), pp. 190-201;

Kanazawa Harutomo, Teranishi daikan jiseki shu (Tsunetoyo, Fukushima: Tsunetoyo kyo-

doshi kankokai, 1930); and Murakami Tadashi, Daikan (Tokyo, Jimbutsu orai sha, 1963),

pp.

144-5, 151-2, 154-65. 181-6, 195.

472 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

interest loans had become extremely important to administration fi-

nances. Early in the Tanuma period the government had decided to

offset falling land-tax revenues by turning moneylender and had dra-

gooned its local administrators into helping. They were compelled

personally to borrow funds from the shogunate, as well as from

wealthy farmers in their areas, and then to lend out the monies to local

farmers at high rates of

interest.

Under normal conditions this scheme

might have worked, but the turmoil in the Kanto during the 1780s,

the area for which Ina Tadataka was responsible, made it impossible.

People simply could not repay their debts, and consequently, neither

could Tadataka. In 1789, when he requested a twenty-year extension

of his debt of fifteen thousand gold pieces, the shogunate refused. At

the same time, his local reputation also suffered because of his role as

moneylender, and he came to be seen as an ally of the rich against the

poor. When a dispute erupted among his retainers, therefore, the

shogunate simply took advantage of the opportunity to replace him.

Ibi Mikinosuke was a man of similar eminence. In 1767 the bakufu

announced that the office of west county magistrate would be granted

to the Ibi family in perpetuity in honor of its exemplary record in local

administration over the previous three generations. Some two decades

later, however, Ibi Mikinosuke was denied the traditional privilege of

an audience with the shogun. Two years later the shogunate dismissed

Mikinosuke from office on the grounds that his predecessor had raised

large sums of money from wealthy farmers on the pretext of lending it

out to the needy and had then proceeded to use it for his own benefit.

That same success in moneylending that had brought the family offi-

cial recognition in the first place had also led to their downfall.

Disgrace also awaited the Okusa family of Hida, who had been piling

up debts for generations, ever since the time of Okusa Masatada's

grandfather, Masanaga. They too were charged with misappropriating

public money. Such corruption, linked as it was with moneylending,

had little to do with the Kansei Reforms but, rather,

was

the legacy of an

earlier period.

Having unmasked and punished one lot of local administrators,

Sadanobu's administration then set about replacing them with new

ones.

Nine intendants were appointed in 1788 and another ten the

following year. Several of these men went on to become famous offi-

79 Takeuchi Makoto, "Kanto gundai Ina Tadataka no shikkyaku to sono rekishi-teki igi,"

Tokugawa rinsei-shi kenkyujo kenkyu kiyo (1966), pp. 173-203; and Tsuji Tatsuya, "Edo

Bakufu Policy in the Late Eighteenth Century," Yokohama shiritsu daigaku

ronso

19 (1967):

34-49-

THE KANSEI REFORMS 473

cials.

Okada Hakaru (better known by his pen name of Kansen) was a

well-known Confucian scholar who, together with Shibano Ritsuzan,

had been active in the shogunate's academy. His appointment was a

gamble on Sadanobu's part, but it was a successful one. Some changes

were made further down the hierarchy as well. Instead of using local

peasants or commoners as clerks, a practice that had led to much

corruption in the past, the government now decided that its local

officials should appoint their subordinates from among the sho-

gunate's own vassals.

Despite all this activity, however, the bakufu never overcame cor-

ruption at the local level, especially the problems associated with

moneylending. Sadanobu's administration never considered a straight-

forward program of distributing grants of money for purposes like

land reclamation or the care of orphaned children. Instead, it en-

trusted large sums of money - as much as twenty thousand gold

pieces in some cases - to local officials with instructions that the

funds be lent out to wealthy peasants and merchants, and the interest

used to create a fund from which the poor could then be assisted.

This was precisely what Ina Tadataka and others had done, except

that the Kansei Reforms had reasserted government authority, rather

than leaving it in the hands of people who, like the Ina, Ibi, and

Okusa, were compromised by their connections with the wealthy

families of their areas.

Toward the end of

1788,

the bakufu tried to establish

closer associa-

tion between the Finance Ministry and seven prominent Edo mer-

chants. The significance of this may not be immediately apparent, but

the government was effectively offering tacit recognition to a new

commercial force. Formerly, two distinct merchant groups had domi-

nated Edo's commercial life. One consisted of semiofficial merchants

who ran the gold and silver guilds and managed the cloth trade. The

other comprised entrepreneurs from elsewhere - places like Kyoto,

Osaka, Omi, and Ise - whose nationwide interests dictated that they

maintain branches in Edo. During the eighteenth century, and particu-

larly after the Kyoho Reforms, a third group had emerged. These

were local Edo entrepreneurs who had found new routes to wealth and

influence. By enticing representatives of this group into its service, the

bakufu hoped to tap their resources and to use them to supervise the

activities of the city's rice and money markets. Already, earlier in that

80 Kumakura, "Kasei bunka," pp. 59-67; and Takeuchi, "Kansei kaikaku," pp. 17-18;

Murakami, Daikan, pp. 140-74, 179-204.

474 POLITICS IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

same year of 1788, the government had asked them to contribute

funds for repairing the Imperial Palace in Kyoto.

The second objective was to enlist the efforts of these merchant

elites in fund-raising schemes. The administration lent the men money

at low interest and had them put that money to work in various

spheres. At the same time the men could also commit their own capi-

tal,

in full expectation of guaranteed government support on debt

collections. It was not long before the government needed their ser-

vices.

In the autumn of 1789 the regime ordered the cancellation of all

debts incurred by the samurai. This, it was hoped, would remove one

of the government's most pressing concerns, but it was also recognized

that unless something further was done, this measure might well have

unfortunate repercussions, namely, that the rice brokers and money-

lenders, whose loans had been abruptly and unilaterally wiped out,

would simply refuse to lend money to samurai again. The govern-

ment, therefore, asked their new merchant allies, whose numbers had

increased from seven to ten, to open a bureau at Saruyacho where

distressed rice brokers and moneylenders could borrow money at ad-

vantageous rates.

Then in

1791,

the bakufu instructed each of

the

residential wards in

Edo to economize on administrative costs and to keep 70 percent of

what they saved in a ready

reserve.

These funds, augmented by money

from the bakufu, were to be administered by another bureau for poor

relief or for low-interest loans. Naturally, the administration's new

allies would manage this as well and thus have control over the city's

money lending system. By using them, rather than representatives of

Osaka or Kyoto, it was coincidentally helping raise Edo's own finan-

cial status.

Foreign affairs had already begun to emerge as a political issue

during the Tanuma period, when there were indications that the policy

of seclusion might be modified.

The development of Hokkaido was

being planned in precisely this context. Matsudaira Sadanobu, on the

other hand, believed that traditional policies should not be tampered

with, and he also argued that an undeveloped Hokkaido provided the

best-possible buffer against foreign encroachment. Looking inward,

81 Takeuchi Makoto, "Kansei kaikaku to 'Kanjosho goyotashi' no seiritsu," pts. I and 2, Nihon

rekishi 128 (February 1959): 23-32; and vol. 129 (March 1959): 44-56; and Takeuchi

Makoto, "Bakufu keizai no hembo to kin'yu seisaku no tenkai," Nihon keizaishi taikei, vol. 4

(Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1965), vol. 4, pp. 197-207.

82 Tsuji, Tanuma, pp. 295-7; and Numata Jiro, "Tanuma jidai to Isaac Titsingh," Nihon

rekishi

380 (January 1980): 101-6.