The New Penguin History of the World (90 page)

In particular areas, the lawlessness of these centuries often inflicted grave social and economic damage. As was long to be the case, most Japanese were peasants: they might suffer terribly from an oppressive lord, from banditry, or the passage of an army of retainers from a rival fief. Yet such damage was nationally insignificant, it seems. In the sixteenth century a great burst of castle-building testifies to the availability of substantial resources, there was a prolonged expansion of the circulation of copper coinage, and Japanese exports – particularly the exquisite examples of the work of the swordsmiths – began to appear in the markets of China and south-eastern Asia. By 1600 Japan’s population stood at about eighteen million. Both its slow growth (it had somewhat more than trebled in five centuries) and its substantial urban component rested on a steady improvement in agriculture, which had been able to carry the costs of civil strife and lawlessness as well. It was a healthy economic position.

Sooner or later the Europeans were bound to come to find out more about the mysterious islands which produced such beautiful things. The first were the Portuguese who stepped ashore from Chinese ships, probably in 1543. Others followed in the next few years and in their own ships. It was a promising situation. Japan was virtually without a central government to undertake the regulation of intercourse with foreigners and many of the southern magnates were themselves highly interested in competing for foreign trade. Nagasaki, then a little village, was opened to the newcomers by one of them in 1570. This nobleman was a zealous Christian and had already built a church there; in 1549 the first Christian missionary had arrived, St Francis Xavier. Nearly forty years later Portuguese missionaries were forbidden, so much had the situation changed, though the ban was not at once enforced.

Among other things brought by the Portuguese to Japan were new food crops originally from the Americas – sweet potatoes, maize, sugar cane. They also brought muskets. The Japanese soon learnt to make them. This new weapon played an important part in assuring that the baronial wars of ‘feudal’ Japan came to an end, as did those of medieval Europe, with
the emergence of a preponderant power, a brilliant, humbly born soldier-dictator, Hideyoshi. His successor was one of his henchmen, a member of the Tokugawa family. In 1603 he revived and assumed the old title of
shōgun
and so inaugurated a period of Japanese history known as the ‘great peace’, which lasted until a revolutionary change in 1868 but was itself an immensely creative period, in which Japan changed significantly.

During the Tokugawa shogunate, for two and a half centuries, the emperor passed even further into the wings of Japanese politics and was firmly kept there. Court gave way to camp; the shogunate rested on a military overlordship. The
shōguns
themselves changed from being outstandingly important feudal lords to being in the first place hereditary princes and in the second the heads of a stratified social system over which they exercised viceregal powers in the name of the emperor and on his behalf. This regime was called the
bakufu
– the government of the camp. The quid pro quo provided by Ieyasu, the first Tokugawa
shōgun
, wasorder and the assurance of financial support for the emperor.

The key to the structure was the power of the Tokugawa house itself. Ieyasu’s origins had been pretty humble, but by the middle of the seventeenth century the clan appears to have controlled about one-quarter of Japan’s rice-growing land. The feudal lords became in effect vassals of the Tokugawa, linked to the clan by a variety of ties. The term ‘centralized feudalism’ has been coined to label this system. Not all the lords, or
daimyo
, were connected to the
shōgun
in the same way. Some were directly dependent, being vassals with a hereditary family attachment to the Tokugawa family. Others were related to it by marriage, patronage or business. Others, less reliable, formed an outer category of those families which had only at length submitted. But all were carefully watched. The lords lived alternately at the
shōgun
’s court or on their estates; when they were on their estates, their families lived as potential hostages of the
shōgun
at Edo, the modern Tokyo, his capital.

Below the lords was a society strictly and legally separated into hereditary classes and the maintenance of this structure was the primary goal of the regime. The noble
samurai
were the lords and their retainers, the warrior rulers who dominated society and gave it its tone, as did the gentry bureaucrats of China. They followed a Spartan, military ideal symbolized by the two swords they carried, and were allowed to use on commoners guilty of disrespect.
Bushido
, their creed, stressed above all the loyalty owed by a man to his lord. The original links of the retainers with the land were virtually gone by the seventeenth century and they lived in the castle towns of their lords. The other classes were the peasants, the artisans, and the merchants, the lowest in the social hierarchy because of their
non-productive character; the self-assertive ethos of the merchant which emerged in Europe was unthinkable in Japan, in spite of the vigour of Japanese trade. As the aim of the whole system was stability, attention to the duties of one’s station and confinement to them was determinedly enforced. Hideyoshi himself had supervised a great sword hunt whose aim was to take away these weapons from those who were not supposed to have them – the lower classes. Whatever the equity of this, it must have told in favour of order. Japan wanted stability and her society accordingly came to emphasize the things that could ensure it: knowing one’s place, discipline, regularity, scrupulous workmanship, stoical endurance. At its best it remains one of humanity’s most impressive social achievements.

One weakness of this system it shared with the Chinese; it presumed effective insulation from external stimuli to change. It was for a long time threatened by the danger of a relapse into internal anarchy; there were plenty of discontented
daimyo
and restless swordsmen about in seventeenth-century Japan. By then, one obvious external danger came from Europeans. They had already brought to Japan imports which would have profound effect. Among them the most obvious were firearms, whose powerfully disruptive impact went beyond that which they achieved on their targets, and Christianity. This faith had at first been tolerated and even welcomed as something tempting traders from outside. In the early seventeenth century the percentage of Japanese Christians in the population was higher than it has ever been since. Soon, it has been estimated, there were over half a million of them. Nevertheless, this happy state of affairs did not last. Christianity has always had great subversive potential. Once this was grasped by Japan’s rulers, a savage persecution began. It not only cost the lives of thousands of Japanese martyrs, who often suffered cruel deaths, but brought trade with Europe almost to an end. The English left and the Spanish were excluded in the 1620s. After the Portuguese had undergone a similar expulsion they rashly sent an embassy in 1640 to argue the toss; almost all of its members were killed. Japanese had already been forbidden to go abroad, or to return if they were already there, and the building of large ships was banned. Only the Dutch, who promised not to proselytize and were willing as a symbolic act to trample on the cross, kept up Japan’s henceforth tiny contact with Europe. They were allowed a trading station on a little island in Nagasaki harbour.

After this, there was no real danger of foreigners exploiting internal discontent. But there were other difficulties. In the settled conditions of the ‘great peace’, military skill declined. The
samurai
retainers sat about in the castle towns of their lords, their leisure broken by little except the ceremonial parade in outdated armour which accompanied a lord’s progress
to Edo. When the Europeans came back in the nineteenth century with up-to-date weapons, Japan’s military forces would be unable to match them technically.

This could, perhaps, hardly have been foreseen. Nor could another result of the general peace in which internal trade prospered. The Japanese economy became more dependent on money. Old relationships were weakened by this and new social stresses appeared. Payment in cash forced lords to sell most of the tax rice which was their subsistence to pay for their visits to the capital. At the same time, the market became a national one. Merchants did well: some of them soon had money to lend their rulers. Gradually the warriors became dependent on the bankers. Besides feeling a shortage of cash, those rulers found themselves sometimes embarrassed by their inability to deal with economic change and its social repercussions. If retainers were to be paid in coin, they might more easily transfer loyalty to another paymaster. Towns were growing, too, and by 1700 Osaka and Kyoto both had more than 300,000 inhabitants, while Edo may have had 800,000. Other changes were bound to follow such growth. Price fluctuations in the rice market of the towns sharpened hostility towards the wealthy dealers.

Here we face the great paradox of Tokugawa Japan. While its rulers slowly came to show less and less ability to contain new challenges to traditional ways, those challenges stemmed from a fundamental fact – economic growth – which in historical perspective now appears the dominant theme of the era. Under the Tokugawa, Japan was developing fast. Between 1600 and 1850 agricultural production approximately doubled, while the population rose by less than half. Since the regime was not one which was able to skim off the new wealth for itself, it remained in society as savings for investment by those who saw opportunities, or went into a rising standard of living for many Japanese.

Dispute continues about the explanation of what seems to have been a successful stride to self-sustaining economic growth of a kind which was elsewhere to appear only in Europe. Some are obvious and have been touched upon: the passive advantages conferred by the seas around Japan, which kept out invaders such as the steppe-borne nomads who time and again harried the wealth-producers of mainland Asia. The shogunate’s own great peace ended feudal warfare and was another bonus. Then there were positive improvements to agriculture which resulted from more intensive cultivation, investment in irrigation, the exploitation of the new crops brought (originally from the Americas) by the Portuguese. But at this point the enquiry is already touching on reciprocal effects: the improvement of agriculture was possible because it became profitable to the producer, and
it was profitable because social and governmental conditions were of a certain kind. Enforced residence of noblemen and their families at Edo not only put rice on the market (because the nobles had to find cash), but created a new huge urban market at the capital which sucked in both labour (because it supplied employment) and goods, which it became more and more profitable to produce. Regional specialization (in textile manufacture, for example) was favoured by disparities in the capacity to grow food: most of Japanese industrial and handicraft production was, as in early industrial Europe, to be found in rural areas. Government helped, too; in the early years of the shogunate there was organized development of irrigation, standardizing of weights and currency. But for all its aspirations to regulate society, the government of the
bakufu
in the end probably favoured economic growth because it lacked power. Instead of an absolute monarchy, it came to resemble a balance-of-power system of the great lords, able to maintain itself only so long as there was no foreign invader to disturb it. As a result it could not obstruct the path to economic growth and divert resources from producers who could usefully employ them. Indeed, the economically quasi-parasitical
samurai
actually underwent a reduction in their share of the national income at a time when producers’ shares were rising. It has been suggested that by 1800 the per capita income and life expectancy of the Japanese was much the same as that of their British contemporaries.

Much of this has been obscured by more superficial but strikingly apparent features of the Tokugawa era. Some of these, of course, were important, but at a different level. The new prosperity of the towns created a clientele for printed books and the coloured wood-block prints which were later to excite European artists’ admiration. It also provided the audiences for the new
kabuki
theatre. Yet brilliant though it often was, and successful, at the deepest economic level (if undesignedly) as it was, it is not clear that the Tokugawa system could have survived much longer even without the coming of a new threat from the West in the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the period there were signs of uneasiness. Japanese intellectuals began to sense that somehow their isolation had preserved them from Europe but also had cut them off from Asia. They were right. Japan had already made for herself a unique historical destiny and it would mean that she faced the West in a way very different from the subjects of Manchu or Moghul.

9
Worlds Apart

Africa and the Americas moved towards civilization to rhythms very different from those operating elsewhere. Of course, this was not quite so true of Africa as of the Americas, which were cut off by the oceans from all but fleeting contacts with other continents. The Africans, by contrast, lived in a continent much of which was gradually Islamicized, and for a long time had at least peripheral encounters with first Arab and then European traders. These were of growing importance as time went by, though they did not suck Africa completely into the mainstream of world history until the late nineteenth century. This isolation, combined with an almost complete dependence for much of the story on archaeological evidence, makes much African and American history an obscure business.

African history before the coming of European trade and exploration is largely a matter of an internal dynamic we can barely discern, but we may presume folk-movements to have played a large part in it. There are many legends of migration and they always speak of movement from the north to the south and west. In each case, scholars have to evaluate the legend in its context, and with help from reference in Egyptian records, travellers’ tales and archaeological discovery, but the general tendency is striking. It seems to register a general trend, the enrichment and elaboration of African culture in the north first and its appearance in the south only much later.