Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan In what ways did the political, social, and economic system of the Tokugawa lead to the disintegration of the Bakuhan system?
From years 1603 to 1869, the country of Japan was under the rule of the Tokugawa Shogunate. During this period of Japanese history, the country suffered from a feudal military dictatorship under the rule of the shoguns of the Tokugawa family. The Feudal period in Japan, also known as the Edo period, was a time when the caste system was very firmly fixed and only the feudal lords and the samurai stood on top. Japan also became isolated because of foreign policies rejecting any offers from western nations to trade with the exception of the Dutch. Eventually due to the strict social orders and the exploitation of the peasant class by the government Japan became socially unstable. It was until the arrival of the United States naval ships led by Commodore Matthew Perry that Japan was forced to end its isolation from the western empires. This event created crisis within the country leading to the downfall of the Tokugawa Shogunate. Opposition forces in Japan used the humiliating intrusion of foreigners as an excuse to overthrow the discredited shogun and the Tokugawa bakufu.
The Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated its power during the reigns of Ieyasu (1603-1605), his son Hidetada (1605-1623), and his grandson Page 1
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan Iemitsu (1623-1651). The Tokugawa Shogunate was the most effective government that Japan had experienced so far in its history, but it was not a centralized monarchy. The shogun shared power and authority with the local daimyo in a system known as Bakuhan. Bakuhan was a combination of the bakufu, which functioned as the central government, and the han, feudal domains under the control of the daimyo. The Tokugawa family had direct control over one quarter of the productive land in the country. The rest were dominated by the daimyo, who had their own governments, castle towns, warrior armies, tax and land systems, and courts.
The fall of the Tokugawa Shogunate was a result of many events such as wars, rebellion, and treaties that caused the end of the Tokugawa rule. Historians of Japan and modernity agree to a great extent that the history of modern Japan begins with the crise de regime of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the military rulers of Japan from the year 1600. It is therefore appropriate to explore the relevant themes of political instability, foreign contact and inner contradictions that eventually led to the decline and subsequent collapse of this regime, while at the same time giving these factors a closer look in order to understand whether the bakuhan system could have been preserved had the Tokugawa leaders followed an alternate policy.
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Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan Historians debate the importance of the events that occur during the fall of the Tokugawa but they all agree that foreign invasion, economic crisis, and revolutions are major reasons for the collapse of the feudal government. The Tokugawa Shogunate was abolished in year 1868 when the imperialist rebels defeated the Shogunate forces and restored the power to the emperor of Japan.
There has been a debate regarding the nature of the Tokugawa Shogunate, i.e., whether it was feudal or not. Most historians, such as Barrington Moore Jr. and others have argued that Tokugawa Japan was a feudal state, which came to an end due to Western influences, leading to modernization.
E.H. Norman opines that a society in which political power derived exclusively from control over agricultural produce and the agricultural producer, regardless of the extent of sub-infeudation, might fairly be called feudal, even though he disagrees with regard to the impact of the West.
However, recently some Western scholars like Andrew Gordon and some Japanese historians such as Asakawa and Fukuda Tokuzo have denied that a state so highly centralized as Tokugawa Japan could be described Page 3
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan as feudal.
Fairbank has adopted the terminology of the Japanese social historian, Professor Honjo, who spoke of early or ‘decentralized feudalism’ and late or ‘centralized feudalism’ to describe the nature of the Tokugawa state as ‘centralized feudalism’. He says that in Japan, a centralization of political power occurred in the late 16th century but through the use of a basic feudal pattern.
The real power was in the hands of a dynastic military leader or shogun (bakufu). The political system of the bakufu was called the bakuhan (military government). The shogunate implied a distinctly separate set of government for the Emperor and his court, and exercised supreme administrative authority. This office had been hereditary in the Tokugawa family since 1603.
The Tokugawas also set out to create institutions that would stabilize political and social conditions and thereby prevent a lapse back into feudal warfare. Among their officials, the most powerful were the councillors of the state (Roju), called the “elders”, who were responsible for national policy and for supervision of the court and the shogun’s own
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Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan domain. The shogunate classified the various daimyo into categories in terms of to the lord’s relationship to the Tokugawa family.
The Tokugawa society was Confucian based. Confucian concepts of natural law and social hierarchy were applied in determining not only social control and status, but also a moral order and code of conduct for all classes. This also became the basis of the four-fold class system, known as shi-no-ko-sho (warrior-farmer-artisan-merchant), which placed samurai, farmer, artisan, and merchant in a natural order of merit and importance.
Samurai were at the top stage of the social hierarchical order. The samurai were part of the ruling class consisting of shogun, daimyo, and his retainers. The samurai enjoyed consistency of status, wealth, and power. There were three ranks of samurai— upper, middle, and lower.
Below them were the peasants, who were accorded second place in society because they produced the basic essential food. However, they were exploited and were deprived of many privileges. The peasants had been regarded by the rulers as tax-producing machines, whose surplus crops were to be swallowed by those in power. They were even forbidden to drink tea of superior quality. Page 5
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan
The peasants were followed by artisans. The carpenter, the mechanic, the weaver, artist, sculptor, crafts-worker, were all included in this class. The artisans mostly were in the same kind of predicament as the peasants.
The chonin (merchants) were at the lowest stage of the social ladder. The chonin were not given a high status because according to Confucian ethics, a trader lived on the labour of others. They were not allowed to used palanquins, wear silk or carry swords.
All the four classes were assigned their distinct roles and were not allowed to interact with each other. Each class was facing social, economic, and psychological problems and were unhappy in the Tokugawa regime.
Samurai was unhappy because he held superior social status but had declined financially. In order to cope up with the increasing economic difficulties, the daimyo-samurai had become dependent upon the rich peasants and merchants. This indebtedness of the top social class to the lowest class obviously undermined the whole theory and spirit of the Tokugawa system. Artisans and peasants were unhappy because of poverty and shortage of food. The chief cause of chonin's discontent was Page 6
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan their inferior social status and the richest of them suffered from various interferences, high taxes and other restrictions by the bakufu.
Thus, the rise of a daimyo-ronin-chonin alliance with a distinct antibakuhan character and a common cause to end the Tokugawa regime, according to Barrington Moore Jr., represented a breakdown of the rigid social hierarchies that was part of the system of what John K. Fairbank called ‘centralized feudalism’.
Nathaniel Peffer claimed that the nice balance of the Tokugawa clan, the lesser feudal lords and their attendant samurai, the peasants, artisans and merchants could be kept steady only as long as all the weights in the scale were even. However, according to him, the emergence of the Japanese version of the European bourgeoisie from amongst the merchant classes was the real deal-breaker in the entire precariously balanced equation.
According to W.G. Beasley, the immediate background to the threat Japan faced from the Western powers was the latter’s trade with China. The isolationist policy of the Tokugawa regime with regard to foreign trade was envisaged in the policy of sakoku which aimed to show hostility and aggression to any foreigner in Japanese waters.
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Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan Among historians, there have been two main schools of opinion on what really caused the downfall of the Shogunate.
The first school believed that the Tokugawa system of government might have continued essentially unchanged had it not been for the forcible opening of the closed door by the United States and other countries. It had been customary for these historians to refer to the primitive nature of Japan's economy before 1867 and to treat the Tokugawa period as though it were an era of almost stagnation. Therefore, the school of opinion argued that it was only the coming of the foreigners that undermined the authority of the Tokugawa government and so ruined it.
The second school of opinion, however, emphasized the undoubted fact that the whole regime had been under indirect attack from many directions inside Japan long before Perry arrived.
In the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, rapid economic growth had produced an advanced economy capable of ready transformation into an entirely new political and social order.
By the middle of the 19th century, the antiquated political system and absurd political and social philosophy of the Tokugawa were more than Page 8
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan 200 years out of date. The simple concept of the division of classes into rulers, warriors and commoners had little relation to Japan of the 19th century with its crowded cities, rich merchants, restless samurai and discontent peasantry.
Despite the division of the land into a large number of feudal fiefs, the people had developed a strong sense of national consciousness. The growth of nationalism and the development of a modern commercial economy had made Japan ready for the more efficient political forms of the modern nation.
The coming of the foreigners, symbolized by the Perry expedition, merely provided the final impulse towards a collapse that was unavoidable.
The theory that the main cause of the Shogunate's collapse was the forced opening of Japan to foreigners cannot be accepted, but the 2nd school of opinion has inclined to go too far in underestimating the impact of successful Western pressure on Japan in the 1850's. It is hardly believable that the Shogunate would have collapsed had it been able to resist the demands made by the United States, Russia, Great Britain and other countries of the West. The early Tokugawa succeeded in creating a Page 9
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan system capable of preserving political stability that the machine was still running relatively smooth. It was therefore necessary for an external pressure to disrupt it. This pressure provided by the foreigners was consequently fatal to the power of the Tokugawa which had already been weakened by other forces.
The economic weakening of the Tokugawa feudalism had been serious by the early 18th century. Moreover, the Shogunate itself was on the whole better off than most of the daimyo. It could debase the currency to its own advantage and it controlled all the great cities and most of the economically advanced parts of the country. It would be hard to argue that the Shogunate fell from the economic difficulties, all the easier. The downfall of the Tokugawa regime was thus the result of the conjunction of 2 processes: the internal decay of feudal society pressure from the Western nations
The defeat of the Tokugawa government was a result of the anger Japanese people had of the western invasion, economic crisis, and abuses of their Shogunate rulers. In 1853 a fleet of U.S. warships steamed into Tokyo Bay and demanded permission to establish trade and diplomatic Page 10
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan relations with Japan. This event is considered by John Whitney Hall to be critical to the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate of Japan.
The 19th century ‘Western impact’ on Japan led first to the opening of the country to foreign commerce and then in 1868 to the end of the Tokugawa hegemony. According to Hall, “the western pressure was acutely felt first as a threat to national security and secondly as a stimulus to reform”. The Japanese at that time felt that seclusion from foreign policies was good because they needed nothing from the western nations. They also feared that the western nations would invade their nation and colonize their territory. The Japanese knew what happened to the Chinese and how they were forced to sign unequal treaties during the Opium Wars. For these reasons, the people of Japan saw this western invasion as dangerous for their country and they blamed the Tokugawa Shogunate for being weak.
It was only through the coincidence of these forces of internal decay and external pressure that contributed to the so-called Meiji Restoration in 1868.
However, before Japan could come to a firm policy one way or another, the West intervened to decide the issue. The United States, by taking Page 11
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan California in the Mexican War (1846-48), had become a Pacific power practically overnight. In 1853, a fleet of American warships commanded by Commodore Perry delivered a conciliatory letter from the president to the Japanese head of state and a more belligerent letter written by Perry himself. The gist of Perry's message was that Japan had better open its doors to the West or the United States would kick down those doors and force Japan to trade.
Conclusion The bakuhan system was created with flaws from the outset, and the precarious position that the Tokugawa’s enjoyed was bound to collapse at some point. Compounding these were various other factors – financial instability, the arrival of Western powers, the unequal treaties, feudal nature of society, the daimyo-ronin-chonin alliance, the sankin-kotai system and the opposition of certain daimyo to Tokugawa rule – led to a situation where it was only a matter of time for the Tokugawa to fall. It is unsure whether or not the Tokugawas would have survived had events in the two decades prior to the deposition been handled differently. However, it does not seem likely that such a significant difference would have been made, as the Tokugawa Shogunate dug its own grave as events continued on course. Hence, the fall of the Tokugawa bakuhan system was the result of a variety of internal and external factors, at some points Page 12
Crisis of Tokugawa Regime in Japan working together while at others being especially distinct in themselves, and paved the way for the eventual ‘Meiji’ Restoration.
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