Lecture 2005-01-29
"Tokugawa Japan (1603 – 1868) and its Influence upon Modern Japan"
Mr. Tsunenari Tokugawa


Annual General Meeting

This year's Annual General Meeting was one of the most notable occasions of recent times, attended by some 180 people, if not more. We were delighted that our honorary patron, H.I.H. Princess Takamado, was able to be with us, and we welcomed two special guests of honour. These were former Greek ambassador and our former President Dr. George Sioris, and Captain Panagiotis N. Tsakos, a leading Greek ship owner and initiator of the Maria Tsakos Foundation in Montevideo, Uruguay, who has undertaken to defray the costs of printing the Society's Transactions.

Dr. Sioris introduced Captain Tsakos, after first explaining how happy he had been to have found someone who had responded to the invitation to supply the Society's acute need for funding, which he himself had keenly felt. Captain Tsakos, he said, had since the 1970s built up a fleet of some seventy large ships and tankers which was amongst the largest, if not the largest, in Greece. Captain Tsakos then responded to Dr. Sioris's remarks by saying that although he stood in this place of honour tonight, when he had first come to Japan it was in the very humble position of a young merchant marine cadet in the early 1950s when he was earning only a few pounds sterling a week. There then followed a ceremony in which the Society expressed its gratitude to Captain Tsakos in tangible form. In the presence of our honorary patron, H.I.H. Princess Takamado, the Society's President, Professor Hugh Wilkinson, presented Captain Tsakos with a Certificate of Appreciation, and then handed him a letter telling him that he had been made an Honorary Member, together with a copy of the latest volume of the Transactions, with his name listed in the front as funding its publication.

Our speaker at this meeting was Mr. Tsunenari Tokugawa, the 18th head of the Tokugawa family, and, after retiring from Nihon Yūsen Kaisha in 2002, the President of the Tokugawa Memorial Foundation.

Mr. Tokugawa began by outlining the history of the periods immediately preceding the Tokugawa era. The medieval period of the Warring States had been followed by one of reunification, in which various military leaders had vied for supremacy as the national ruler, the tenka. One decisive factor in this struggle was the introduction of the musket by the Portuguese in 1543, and it has been calculated that at one stage one-third of all the muskets in the world were in Japan; in 1575 the combined forces of Oda Nobunaga and Tokugawa Ieyasu routed the forces of Takeda Katsuyori by their use at the battle of Nagashino. Nobunaga was followed by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who, after unifying Japan, turned his attention to Korea, and launched a disastrous invasion with the aim of conquering China, which terminated only with his death in 1598.

After the final battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu became shogun (Sei-I-Taishōgun, "Barbarian Subduing Generalissimo") in 1603, establishing the Tokugawa Shogunate, which continued for 265 years with 14 successive shoguns, and kept Japan in absolute peace both externally and domestically. He established his capital at Edo, where the population rose to one million, while the total population of the country was 12 million. In 1635, the country was closed to all contact with the outside world, with the exception of traders from Holland and Korea, and, unofficially, China and Russia, and this situation continued until 1854. In 1635 also, all the missionaries in the country were turned out on the suspicion, based on a statement by a Spanish officer, that missionary work was a prelude to colonization. By 1854 it had become impracticable to continue this policy owing to the superior military strength of the Western world, and Japan opened up and signed peace treaties with the USA, Russia, Britain, France and Holland. This action on the part of the shogunal government was sharply attacked by the Emperor, the court nobles and the regional daimyō in Western Japan, and in 1868 the last shogun, Yoshinobu, restored the political power to the Emperor, conscious, as his records show, that if Japan was embroiled in civil war this would only strengthen Western intervention in Japan (with the Opium War giving an example of what could happen). (A woodblock print included in the handout showed what a great part river and coastal traffic played in Japanese life, and these small wooden craft would have been helpless against ironclads.) Within some 40 years, Japan had become fully Westernized.

The word "shogun" has acquired strange associations, becoming affected by popular images of samurai and ninja in films and television. But the Tokugawa shoguns aimed at establishing a peaceful society, and they succeeded in this because the population had become tired of war and wanted a stable existence. The actual structure of the government required very little personnel, about 5-7% of the population, as compared with 20% today. There was also a certain system of checks and balances. For example, Edo had two mayors, a mayor of the north, Kitamachi bugyō, and a mayor of the south, Minamimachi bugyō, and they alternated in office each month, with 290 samurai engaged in the administration, 145 at a time. The result was that if a citizen could not obtain satisfaction one month, he only had to wait a month and he might have better luck next time. The low cost of administration meant that taxes in the cities were also kept low, at a rate of about 0.9% to 1.8% in Edo and Osaka for covering the maintenance costs of urban services, and they were paid as part of the rent to the landlord. However, citizens had the duty of participating physically in public works, but in time this was commuted to monetary payment for the hire of workers. A huge infrastructure of ricefields was created, and the landlord daimyō were paid in rice. In the time of Hideyoshi, the tax rate in the government domains had been about 70% of the crop, but by the time of the 5th shogun this had been reduced to 30%; later this was found to be providing the government with too little funding, and the rate changed to about 35% until the coming of the Meiji era.

In Tokugawa society there was a separation between power, which lay with the samurai, and wealth, which lay with the merchants. The samurai, who never touched money, became a bureaucratic ruling class, governed by the ethical principles of Confucianism and bushidō, while the merchants enjoyed a 100% free market economy. The currency was unified, there was a fixed system of weights and measures, a legal framework was established, and handwriting was regularized. There were different education systems for samurai and non-samurai, the latter being trained in practical matters like the use of the abacus and the writing of contracts. The level of education was high, with 80% being educated as compared with about 25% in Britain at the time.

The economy was self-contained, and the key to it was the sustainability of resources, with a total recycling system. A second reference to the print in the handout showed a mass of people carrying goods slung from poles balanced over their shoulders. Many of these goods were salvaged waste items – broken umbrellas, the ends of burnt candles, hair swept up from barbers' shop floors – everything was reused. The "night soil" was collected and used as a fertilizer, which meant that the rivers were kept clean, unlike the Thames which stank so much at one point that Parliament had to suspend its sitting.

After the first hundred years of the shogunate, the population had grown from 12 million to 30 million, and Japan had the highest ratio of urban population in the world. This was the beginning of a true mass culture, with the blossoming of literature, theatre, painting, crafts and the like. It is also noteworthy that, in contrast to Europe, people travelled around the country in large numbers. It has been estimated that 2 million people moved up and down the Tokaido every year. Diary records of 1843 show that three ladies of means, all over fifty, went on a tour from Fukuoka that took in Miyajima, Osaka, Nara, Ise, Nagano, Nikko, Edo and Enoshima. During the course of five months they walked 3,200 kilometres, and had no difficulty in finding the necessary facilities everywhere they went.

In conclusion, Mr. Tokugawa said that by the end of the Tokugawa era Japan had developed a civilization of its own which differed greatly from that of the West. Based on the spirit of coexistence, people enjoyed a simple and happy life under continuing peaceful conditions. Tokugawa Japan lacked the machines of Western civilization, but otherwise it was favoured with a high level of education, a hard-working people, a high social morality and a well-developed market economy. Consequently it only took a minimum of time for Japan to catch up with Western modernization, once the course was set.

Time was left for questions, and Mr. Tokugawa confirmed first that there was no tax on daimyō, who were supplied with so many koku of rice from the farmers (35% of the crop), out of which they supported their retainers. The Tokugawa domains, the richest, received about 7 million koku, and the Maeda, the next richest, about 1 million. On another matter, the Tokugawa era had often been regarded as a benighted period, an image that had been projected during Meiji times. But old opinions were now being revised, and people were realizing, in these money-conscious times, that there were other values also in society. The Tokugawa era could teach a lesson about the balance between power and money.

On the question of why the West had never tried to conquer Japan, Mr. Tokugawa replied that the country had been saved by its geographical remoteness. In the 17th and 18th centuries it would have been difficult to assemble strong enough forces to attack, not least because of the weeks of sailing needed to carry an army to Japan, and in the 19th century adroit political moves saved the country at the last minute. When it came to women's roles in society, there was a clear distinction between samurai families, where they had a low position, and the merchant class. When Edo was first settled, the population consisted mainly of men, and there was a shortage of women. The result was that a woman could choose her husband, and some married as many as seven times! As the merchants became richer, their sons were often spoilt good-for-nothings, so the tendency was for a father to send the son off with some money and then pick a hard-working husband for his daughter. Thus we find that in many families the inheritance passed through the woman.

The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Professor Robert Morton, the editor of our Transactions, who remarked that Mr. Tokugawa had said that his sketch of the Tokugawa period was a rough and simple one because he was not a historian himself. Although Mr. Tokugawa's talk might appear a simple one, this was the same kind of apparent simplicity seen in the tea ceremony; it was evident that a very great amount of thought and research had gone into the talk. In addition, while it might be the case that Mr. Tokugawa is not a historian, there are any number of professional historians, whereas there is only one Mr. Tokugawa with history in his blood.