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

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THE LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY 655

recognition of

the

relativity of human experience and knowledge vis-a-

vis universal nature, Banto believed, that human reason could gain

objectivity, for this allowed the mind to see history and custom as

relative.

Using natural ontology as his premise, Banto thus could turn to

relative history and bring that history down to the imperfect present

and his relative view of the state of the national economy. Banto pre-

sents an unequivocal affirmation of the knowledge that merchants

possessed as crucial to the goal of saving people. If Shundai at the

beginning of the century had posited a political view of the economy

and trade in particular, Banto at the close presented, in this carefully

constructed piece against dreams, a case for an economic view of

politics, claiming knowledge of the former as a precondition for

proper governance, regardless of the relative merit of the political

structure that might be received from history.

The two central sections of the treatise are thus termed "econom-

ics."

And here, while referring to agricultural production as the base

of society, because it supplies food for the populace, Banto concen-

trated on the relationship among money, price, and trade that had

thrown the economy into disarray and caused famines and uprisings

among the people. Political leaders had failed to grasp certain basic

principles of political economy from which to regulate the economy.

By minting money with uneven metallic content, for example, they

had brought on inflation and price instability.

The politicality in Banto's thinking is striking. Merchants must see

their work not merely as the extensions of their virtue but as funda-

mental to the well-being of the nation. Politics, he contended, could

no longer rely on military norms, or on cultural ones either. The

ongoing historical crisis called for emergency action as being the nor-

mal course to take. This constant need for emergency action also called

for merchants to alter their view of the political world and see their

knowledge of wealth as essential to promoting the national well-being.

Here then was yet another vision formulated in the late eighteenth

century, parallel and distinct from Toshiaki's and Sontoku's, and ar-

ticulated from the perspective of the merchant leaders. It is a vision

that clearly anticipates the status given to wealth as a key ideological

component to the modern polity.

What is impressive about Banto's claim for merchant knowledge is

that it is placed in the broadest possible conceptual framework. He

used the Copernican theory, in particular, to state from the outset that

the center of the universe was elsewhere and not in the immediately

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656 HISTORY AND NATURE IN TOKUGAWA THOUGHT

inhabited globe or in received history. This construction, which Ranju

had used as a basis of syncretism, to choose relatively insightful texts,

Banto now used to decentralize the globe and other presumably fixed

objects, such as national history and its language, and the status struc-

ture received from history that placed the aristocracy at the top and

merchants at the bottom. Banto's rejection of this in the sections on

economics is angry and insistent and reveals his use of natural ontol-

ogy, in a radical manner consistent with the thinking of Seiryo,

Toshiaki, and Sontoku.

EPILOGUE

The eighteenth century left

its wake

profound ambivalence regard-

ing the integrity of the aristocracy as the custodians of political history.

From Sorai and Shundai on down through the Nakai brothers, Seiryo,

Toshiaki, and Daini, there is a consistent theme of skepticism regard-

ing the validity of the aristocracy that was contained in general discus-

sions about history and nature. Sorai had expanded the discourse by

arguing that because virtue was distributed randomly by Heaven, the

social institution of aristocracy was at odds with this general theory.

His prescription that the samurai be returned to the soil was a prag-

matic consequence of

his

view that the aristocracy was at once concep-

tually unstable - as it was not an extension of nature - and, more

importantly, economically disruptive. This view was echoed in the

thinking of the Mito scholars, who were not devotees of Sorai studies,

and it was also in the ideas of the Nakai brothers who, as teachers

among merchants, were staunchly opposed to the elitist and restrictive

implications of Sorai's conception of political virtue. Whether ad-

dressed from the historicist perspective of Sorai or of Motoori Nori-

naga in his national studies or in the scientific perspective of Ekken,

Joken, Ranju, Baien, and Banto, the idea that the aristocracy had a

special claim on virtue steadily lost credibility during the eighteenth

century. The study of national history no longer provided a secure

projection for the ruling aristocracy.

Throughout the eighteenth century, then, the reliance on

hoken

as a

comprehensive representation of virtuous noncentralized rule in Japa-

nese history became increasingly problematical. For thinkers such as

Yamagata Daini and Nakai Riken, the rejection of it was firm, but for

Yamagata Banto there was an ambivalence based on a deep-seated

reservation about the viability of centralized bureaucratic rule. Viewed

earlier as a glorious achievement in indigenous history,

hoken

by the

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EPILOGUE 657

end of the century had come to convey the opprobrious implication of

betrayal, in which ambitious and passionate men seized power totally

contrary to the values of loyalty and benevolence. The positive evolu-

tionary flow of history over some six hundred years was now shown to

be one of steady decline to the ineffectual political present. The think-

ing of men in the countryside resonated with this perception. Ando

Shoeki, Miura Baien, and Ninomiya Sontoku shaped epistemologies

and communal strategies that called on the peasantry to seize their

own history by acquiring firm knowledge without anticipating the

benevolent mediations of domain lords.

Somewhat analogous to the fate of feudalism as

broad characteriza-

tion of Western history, hoken underwent a similar transformation.

Entirely positive and celebrative at the beginning of the century,

hoken,

like feudalism, acquired the negative implication of aristocratic

privilege gained at the expense of both the emperor and the people as

whole. (We shall only mention in passing that the term

hoken

would be

used to translate feudal in modern Japanese, thereby infusing into

feudalism much of the late-eighteenth-century understanding of

hoken

as a stage in history belonging to a failed past and embodied in the

Tokugawa aristocracy of the sword, outwardly proud and autocratic

yet ineffectual in its leadership.)

Yamagata Banto's synthesis of eighteenth-century thought also pro-

vides suggestive insight. Though situating his ideas clearly in the

tradition of natural ontology as articulated by Ranju, his summation is

innovative. Instead of emphasizing the choice of different texts based

on their relative perspective on universal nature, Banto imposes catego-

ries of knowledge arranged from the most universal to the particular:

astronomy, geography, prehistory, history, and political economy. Al-

though the various fields are relative to the universe as the ultimate

reference, the entire force of reasoning is to bring the problem of

knowledge down from the universal to the theoretically decentralized

yet immediate world of cognition, which was the concrete reality of

political economy in the Tokugawa present and his own perception of

it as a merchant intellectual. There is here an ideological force in the

entire conceptual procedure that is informed throughout by an austere

dedication to principle and the self-conscious denial of play, faith, and

dreams as mediations to objectivity. It was indeed this relentlessness

that marks Banto's treatise against dreams as a radical consummation

of eighteenth-century thought.

If Banto took eighteenth-century epistemology to such an extreme,

the other side of that closure, during the Tempo era that ends the

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658 HISTORY AND NATURE IN TOKUGAWA THOUGHT

eighteenth century, was the idealism of his younger contemporary,

Oshio Heihachiro.

In an equally radical fashion, he rejected the

supremacy of rational principle. In contrast with Banto's polemic

against dreams and irrational thinking of all kinds, Oshio attacked

reason as the source of deception. A low-ranking bakufu official in

Osaka who studied at the same merchant academy that Banto had,

Oshio shaped an idealistic philosophy of action that denounced the

epistemology of rational observation as having failed to address the

problem of action against perceived injustice. The very claim to objec-

tivity, Oshio lectured, was the source of distinctions on which human

prejudices rested, so that the entire discourse on history and nature

was useless as a moral resource for action in the present. While agree-

ing with his friend Rai San'yo that received history revealed a pattern

of disloyalty and betrayal, he did not find in the writing of history the

resolution to the problem of action against that history.

Convinced, then, that the corruptions of received history could not

be rectified through observing nature or studying that history

itself,

Oshio turned his philosophy into a moral theory of active resistance

and revolt. He called this radicalism the way of truthfulness. Earlier,

Tominaga Nakamoto had used this ethical concept of truthfulness to

indicate, from his historicist stance, action that was reasonable, mean-

ing accurate and fair, without reference to classical language and text.

And Ishida Baigan used this to teach commoners about their inner

spiritual worth, regardless of their function or status in life. Oshio

transformed it to mean action against received history. Whereas

Nakamoto advised men to ignore the past as unreliable, and Baigan, to

select from the various great religious traditions, Oshio called on them

to attack the past as a corrupt present.

Oshio's theory of action, therefore, called for the anarchic leveling

of the present as morally unacceptable and recommended directly

saving the people. Unlike Ando Shoeki, who urged a withdrawal to the

natural community at the periphery of the nation, Oshio revolted

against the public order in his shocking uprising in Osaka in 1837.

Expecting the beleaguered peasants in the area to respond in

populist

revolt, Oshio in fact met defeat in a tragic and violent end, one to

which Rai San'yo had anticipated his philosophy would take him. Yet

with Oshio the possibility of revolt was forcefully introduced in the

59 Miyagi Kimiko, Oshio Heihachiro (Tokyo: Asahi shimbunsha, 1977); Miyagi Kimiko, ed.,

Oshio Chusai, vol. 27 of Nihon no meicho (Tokyo: Chud koronsha, 1978); and my "Oshio

Heihachiro (1793-1837)" in Albert Craig and Donald Shively, eds., Personality in Japanese

History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 155-79.

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EPILOGUE 659

political discourse of the day. If the eighteenth century may be said to

have begun in 1702 with the forty-seven

ronin

carrying out the ven-

detta against a single wicked bureaucrat in the name of loyalty, in 1837

Oshio struck against the reason of that century that Banto epitomized

and called for a

public

revenge against the political order on behalf of

the suffering populace. This theme was repeated even after the eigh-

teenth century in the tumultuous end of Tokugawa rule, known as the

Bakumatsu.

The interfacing of Oshio's radical commitment to idealism and

action with Banto's singular faith in reason marks the end of the

eighteenth century. Banto remained within the outer limits of the

eighteenth century because he held to the optimism of that period.

Even as his sense of crisis and historical decline deepened, Banto did

not surrender the view that through the effective control of knowl-

edge,

history could also be brought under intelligent management.

This conviction was shared by thinkers before him such as the his-

toricists Sorai and Shundai and by Baien, Sontoku, and others who

based their ideas on nature. Toward the end of the century, this

conviction often was mediated by emotive metaphors such as dream,

play, and death.

Although despairing of their present, eighteenth-century thinkers

created autonomous spaces to better control knowledge and to live

their lives as eccentrics. Kaiho Seiryo, it will be recalled, abandoned

the aristocracy to seek a principle of knowledge among commoners,

and he called this arena the world of play. And although death to

Oshio meant the ultimate sacrifice of the moral sage, to Miura Baien

and Yamagata Banto it was a phenomenon in nature about which

people had imperfect knowledge and should not use, therefore, as an

emotive metaphor. Death was part of

universe that the human mind

would continuously gain more knowledge about but never exhaust.

People in the present, these thinkers were convinced, knew more

about nature than the ancient sages did, and future minds would

correct the misconceptions of the present. In short, nothing in the

universe, including death, was to be treated as being beyond the uni-

verse of reason. It was the eighteenth-century faith in reason that

Baien and Banto embodied that would now flow into a new era of

idealistic political activism and the concurrent quest for a new political

order.

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CHAPTER

TOKUGAWA SOCIETY:

MATERIAL CULTURE, STANDARD OF

LIVING, AND LIFE-STYLES

Our material possessions, however mundane or trivial, are extremely

important to determining the quality of our lives. Indeed, the houses

we live in, the possessions that provide our creature comforts, and

what we eat and drink - which combine to create what can be called

our material culture - are of more immediate concern and interest in

our day-to-day existence than is our higher culture, namely, our reli-

gion, ideology, and arts.

Also,

our material possessions and our percep-

tions of them are essential elements to the formation of our values,

goals,

philosophy, and much of what we consider to be culture. A

study of the material aspects of life is also more capable of illuminating

the lives of the majority of most populations, the common people who

form the backbone of the economy but about whom little is written in

most historical documents.

The level or quality of our material culture can also serve as a

principal measure of what we refer to as our standard of living, an

abstract concept determined by the quantities of goods and services we

consume and the amount of leisure we enjoy. The level of material

culture, codetermined by income (flow) and wealth (stock), can also

be used as an indicator or proxy for the standard of living in societies

for which reliable statistics on income and wealth are not available.

Both material culture and standard of living are, in turn, major

components of what we term lifestyle, the way of life or the patterns of

how people live. Not only does material culture influence life-style,

but conversely, life-styles help determine which mix of material goods

people choose to obtain and how they divide current disposable in-

come between consumption and savings. The nature of the material

culture also affects well-being as defined by quality of life. For exam-

ple,

different kinds of foodstuffs or housing may cost approximately

the same - and hence will be regarded as similar in measuring the

standard of living - but they can result in very different levels of

health and therefore stamina and energy (hence productivity) and life

expectancy. These three aspects of life - material culture, standard of

660

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TOKUGAWA SOCIETY 66l

living, and life-style - all are affected by the availability of resources,

the levels of technology and interregional trade, the social and political

systems that determine the pattern of income distribution and the

level of government imposts, and a host of other factors.

Until the 1970s, few professional Japanese historians regarded mate-

rial culture and life-styles as subjects of serious inquiry. Of the three

topics, only the premodern standard of living was of academic con-

cern, because it was an integral part of the debate between Marxist and

non-Marxist economic historians. That is, scholars using a Marxist

framework of analysis emphasized a low standard of living for com-

moners in the Tokugawa period, focusing

what they saw

exploita-

tion of the cultivators and others at the bottom of

society.

Their ques-

tions centered on distribution, or who gets how much.

In the last two decades, however, the small but growing group of

Japanese economic historians trained in neoclassical economic theory

have found increasing evidence to support the view that total output

was growing ever larger (though not at a fast rate compared with

twentieth-century growth rates) and that the shares of all grew as the

economy grew. In the 1980s, Marxists and non-Marxists alike found

evidence that during the Tokugawa period the standard of living did

rise.

Finally, the material culture and life-styles of the common folk

have become acceptable as objects of academic inquiry, just as they

have in the West, and now research on all three topics is being pursued

in Japan.

Although numerous sources, such as government records, diaries,

novels, household budgets, and laws, reveal how people lived in Toku-

gawa times, these tend to be partial, random, and specific to regions,

so that it is difficult to obtain a comprehensive picture of

the

life-styles

and levels of living of larger groups and classes. Nor are there suffi-

cient data from which to compile statistics, except for limited times

and

locales.

The records, though far better than those for earlier centu-

ries in Japan, are not so good with regard to life-styles as are those for

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe or the United States. Nev-

ertheless, there is sufficient evidence from the seventeenth century on

to enable us to discover how people must have lived.

Because of the nature of the sources, arguments over interpretation

are to be expected. For instance, rice is considered to have been the

staple food, but many histories report that rice was a luxury for most

people and was consumed only infrequently, for ceremonies and dur-

ing festivals. Then how many Japanese actually ate rice as the staple of

their diet? Also, historians have usually considered that life for most

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662 TOKUGAWA SOCIETY

people improved with industrialization in the late nineteenth century,

which has caused them to underestimate the standard of living in the

preceding centuries. However, recent studies on the course of industri-

alization in Japan suggest that the standard of living and quality of life

may instead have fallen for many Japanese during the early years of

industrialization.

Arguments about the standard of living and quality

of life are as heated for early modern Japan as they are for Western

Europe in the century following industrialization.

Not only does a study of the material culture fill out our picture of

Japan from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, but it also

changes some of the accepted outlines. Because the formal sociopoliti-

cal structure did not change for over two centuries, we tend to assume

that life, too, was unchanging. However, a study of the material cul-

ture and living standards provides evidence that Japan was always

changing, albeit more slowly than in the twentieth century. Although

many "traditional" life-styles had their origins in the Sengoku and

early Tokugawa periods, and even earlier, many of the key elements of

the material culture were developed, refined, and diffused as late as

the second half of the Tokugawa period. Examples of these elements

are wooden houses with raised floors covered with rush matting

(tatami); meals of white rice with soup, pickles, and possibly a simple

side dish; and bedding consisting of quilts filled with cotton batting

and spread directly on the flooring.

The civil wars of the sixteenth century and the concurrent social

and economic developments were catalysts in the transformation of

the material culture and life-styles of the common folk. Artisans and

merchants were increasingly drawn into the towns and cities, as were

the samurai. Farmers and fishermen, left in the rural areas, were

organized into formal governmental entities called mura (villages)

which were also the major social and economic units. This develop-

ment led to the creation of the three main social classes - the villager,

the urban commoner, and the samurai - from which developed the

three major life-styles and patterns of consumption of the Tokugawa

period. The civil wars affected the material culture as well: Daimyo

1 For an analysis of change and continuity from the late Tokugawa through the Meiji periods,

see Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in

Transition:

From Tokugawa to Meiji

(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986), especially the chapters by Hayami Akira,

Nishikawa Shunsaku, Saito Osamu, Kozo Yamamura, and Susan B. Hanley.

2 For two examples, see Susan B. Hanley, "A High Standard of Living in Nineteenth-Century

Japan: Fact or Fantasy?" Journal of Economic History 43 (March 1983): pp. 183-92; and

Yasuba Yasukichi, "Standard of Living in Japan Before Industrialization: From What Level

Did Japan Begin? A Comment," Journal of Economic History 46 (March 1986): 217-24.

TOKUGAWA SOCIETY 663

imported cotton for military use - sails, uniforms, and fuses - and it

was produced domestically and spread throughout the population in

the following centuries. During the late sixteenth century, the sweet

potato was introduced into western Japan, and by the early eigh-

teenth century it provided a bulwark against famine in years of poor

rice

crops.

With the Tokugawa peace, the new institutional arrangements en-

couraged economic development, which in turn spurred on social

changes.

Freed from the need to be ever-prepared for war, domains

could allocate more effort and resources to economic development.

Large engineering projects to reclaim land for cultivation and provide

flood control and irrigation were sponsored by both daimyo and the

bakufu during the seventeenth century. The amount of arable land is

estimated to have doubled during the Tokugawa period, and much of

the increase occurred during the seventeenth century. New agricul-

tural techniques also enhanced productivity. Paralleling the increases

in output and productivity in agriculture was the accelerated commer-

cialization of the economy. By the early eighteenth century, the major

goods traded included rice, cotton, rapeseed oil, sake, silk, fertilizer

(dried fish cakes), draft animals, salted and dried marine products,

and scores of regional specialties. The rapid urbanization in the seven-

teenth century stimulated the demand for products of all kinds in the

towns and cities.

The first peak of this economic growth

was

reached by the late seven-

teenth century, in the Genroku era (1688-1703), noted not only for

economic prosperity but even more for the cultural

flowering

of the first

mass

culture centered in

the

metropolises of Kyoto and

Osaka.

The new

commoner prosperity and cultural boom were not confined to the me-

tropolises but spread to the castle towns throughout Japan, and then to

the towns that grew up in the countryside and even to the villages. The

sankin kotai system, which had many samurai traveling to Edo and

living there for part of

the

time, the growing trade, regional specializa-

tion, and increasing participation by villagers in the national economy

all contributed to the economic growth. Villagers not only traded over

wide

areas,

often national in

scope,

but themselves traveled

find

work

and to make religious pilgrimages. The growing contact among Japa-

nese gradually brought about cultural unification.

With the lasting peace and the economic development of the early

3 For an analysis and description of both the economic and the accompanying social changes, see

Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and

Demographic

Change in Preindustrial

Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1977).

664 TOKUGAWA SOCIETY

Tokugawa years, the population grew, though no one is certain by how

much. The national population survey of

1721,

the first of its kind in

Japan, gave a figure of just over 26 million for the commoner popula-

tion. Estimates for the population in 1600 range from just over 10

million to 18 million, but whichever figure is accurate - and the latter

is probably closer - the population growth rate was considerable dur-

ing the seventeenth century.

Part of this growth may be accounted for

by the absence of warfare, but at least part was due to the trend for

landowners to shift from managing the labor themselves to parceling

out their land to tenants, who were then free to marry.

During the Tokugawa period, patterns of income distribution in city

and countryside alike changed as a result of economic growth, led by

continued growth in the agricultural sector and the accelerated growth

of commerce. Both farmers and merchants benefited by the inability

of the samurai elite to tax commercial activities effectively or to cap-

ture the productivity gains in agriculture. By the early nineteenth

century at the latest, the social groupings no longer indicated income,

as the samurai elite would have liked. Also, the transmission of ideas

and goods flowed across class as well as regional boundaries, and by

the end of the Tokugawa period, commoners were imitating the life-

styles of the samurai and had adopted many of their values. By the late

eighteenth century, some well-to-do farmers lived in houses resem-

bling samurai residences, and the lowest-ranking samurai in most

respects lived the life-style of an ordinary townsman. There were poor

among the samurai as well as among the commoners, and a small

number of merchants rivaled or even exceeded many high-ranked

daimyo in personal disposable income. Thus there were differences in

standard of living and life-styles by social class, by income stratum

within each class, and by region and locale as well as by city and

village.

Material culture, as defined by Japanese scholars, is composed of

three basic elements:

i-shoku-ju,

or clothing, food, and housing. In this

chapter, we shall examine these three major components and then

analyze how the material culture differed by class and income, what

daily life was like, and how the material culture affected the physical

well-being of the Japanese. Finally, we shall look at the implications of

4 The population figures can be found in Sekiyama Naotaro, Kinsei Nihon nojinko kozo (Tokyo:

Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1958), pp. 137-9. A discussion of these figures and the various esti-

mates can be found in Hanle'y and Yamamura, Economic and

Demographic

Change, chap. 3.

5 For a discussion of these changes and the effect of the market on agriculture, see Thomas C.

Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modem Japan (Stanford,

Calif.:

Stanford University Press,

1959)-