Early Modern Japan / Edition 1

by Conrad Totman

Overview

This thoughtfully organized survey of Japan's early modern period (1568-1868) is a remarkable blend of political, economic, intellectual, literary, and cultural history. The only truly comprehensive study in English of the Tokugawa period, it also introduces a new ecological perspective, covering natural disasters, resource use, demographics, and river control.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520203563
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	08/01/1995
Series:	Philip E. Lilienthal Book in Asian Studi
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	593
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Conrad Totman is Professor of History at Yale University and the author of Japan Before Perry: A Short History (California, 1981) and The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-Industrial Japan (California, 1989).

Read an Excerpt

Early Modern Japan

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By Conrad Totman

University of California Press

Copyright © 1995 Conrad Totman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520203563

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One—
Geography and Climate

Aspects of Geography
Aspects of Climate and Ocean Currents
The Environmental Setting in 1600

The fundamental rhythm of Japan's early modern history sprang from the interaction of the human populace and its environmental surroundings. The lay of the land, the climate, and the flora and fauna that flourished there gave shape and limits to that human experience. They influenced not only the temporal sequence of growth and stasis but also the regional relationships of center and periphery and, later in the Tokugawa period, tension between southwest and northeast.

Aspects of Geography

Since ancient times the heartland of Japanese civilization has been the Inland Sea region, particularly the rich Kinai basin at its eastern end. The Inland Sea permitted convenient, reasonably safe transportation and was lined with small but productive and comfortable sedimentary basins, supported by richly wooded hinterlands. As society grew during the centuries before 1600, the heartland was extended eastward along Honshu's southern littoral to the Kanto*

plain, the largest area of flat land in the country. This elongated strip of coastal plain retained its role as heartland because the Kinai, Nobi, and Kanto plains, allof which were attractive climatically, provided agricultural foundations large enough to support political organizations that ambitious leaders could employ to conquer outlying populations to the south and north.

During the early modern period, Japan consisted essentially of the

three major islands of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku, with a gross land area of about 295,000 square kilometers (113,500 square miles), making it about the size of Arizona or Italy.1 The three islands lie along the eastern edge of the Eurasian continent, extending from about 310 north latitude at the southern end of Kyushu to 420 at the northern tip of Honshu. The climate ranges from subtropical to cold temperate, roughly akin to the range between Georgia and New Hampshire on the east coast of North America. Natural forest vegetation ranges similarly from evergreen broadleaf in the south through deciduous broadleaf to coniferous boreal forest in the north and in higher mountain areas of central Honshu.

Japan's topography betrays its geologic youth. Mountain building in the region accelerated about 5 million years ago, becoming especially intense during the past 2 million years, so the archipelago's mountains are exceptionally young. As a corollary, they thrust skyward with exceeding abruptness, a characteristic unmodified by glacial activity, because Japan experienced little glaciation during the Pleistocene ice ages. Instead, the archipelago's mountains still culminate in sharp peaks and ridges, which are subject to uncommonly rapid erosion. Debris-laden streams and rivers rush precipitously down to the lowlands, where the detritus settles out to form alluvial fans and sedimentary flood plains.

The thrust-and-fold activity that formed the ranges proper has been supplemented by vulcanism, which has dotted the islands with volcanoes, lava and ash surfaces, and regions of continuing geothermal activity. Indeed, Japan's sixty-odd active volcanoes constitute about 10 percent of the total number of currently active volcanoes worldwide.2

The bedrock mountains produced by this tectonic activity constitute about 80 percent of Japan's modern land surface. The other 20 percent is sedimentary terrain of very recent provenance, situated in small basins, mostly fronting the sea and mostly giving way abruptly at their inland borders to acutely tilted mountain slopes. This means that easily manipulable surfaces are modest in scope and inelastic: when one reaches the edge of flatland, there is, except for fans and terrace deposits, very little in the way of gradually rising plains or hill country that can with somewhat more labor be turned to human use. Compared to most re-

As will be apparent in chapter 13, the island of Hokkaido, which was mostly populated by Ainu or other northern peoples, was a borderland, only its southern tip being subject to a sustained Japanese presence before the nineteenth century.

Yutaka Sakaguchi, "Characteristics of the Physical Nature of Japan with Special Reference to Landform," in Association of Japanese Geographers, ed., Geography of Japan (Tokyo: Teikoku-Shoin, 1980), p. 17.

gions of dense preindust population, this topography has helped make the transition from ampleness of land to ecological overload an exceptionally abrupt one.

On the other hand, because Japan was not subject to significant glaciation, its lowlands contain little glacial residue and their natural drainage systems have remained more regular in configuration and hydrologic behavior than in areas where glaciation has occurred. This more orderly lowland topography has fostered uniformity and regularity in land-use patterns—notably irrigated rice culture—and in the social arrangements that accompany them.

Pleistocene glacial cycles also shaped Japan's natural environment in another way that was consequential to early modern history. By dropping ocean levels substantially, the several epochs of glaciation periodically transformed Japan from an island chain into a mountainous northeastward extension of a vast coastal lowland that reached southward to Vietnam and westward to interior China. These events sustained Japan's association with the East Asian biome, enabling the archipelago to share in East Asia's extraordinary vegetational wealth. Whereas western Europe records about 80 species of indigenous trees and North America about 250, for example, East Asia, including Japan, numbers some 500.3

This richness of floral diversity has given the archipelago an extremely adaptable biosystem, which has offered humans a variety of resources and could make many responses to human encroachment. Unquestionably that biological diversity helped the island chain cope with the widespread deforestation, land reclamation, and population growth that marked the seventeenth century.

Aspects of Climate and Ocean Currents

Situated in the Earth's northern temperate zone, Japan experiences a regular seasonal pattern that assures the islands of ample precipitation, averaging 180 centimeters annually, ranging from more than 400 in the southwest to about 100 in the northeast. This moisture enables the island chain to convert its rich floral potential into uncommonly lush

Franz Heske, German Forestry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 52. Heske attributes Europe's silvic poverty to the region's east-west running mountains, which stymied Pleistocene plant migration. More recently, I. G. Simmons, Biogeography: Natural and Cultural (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1979), p. 114, has reported the maximum number of plant species at forty per hectare in North America and eight per hectare in Europe, a disproportion somewhat greater than Heske's.

forest cover. However, the combination of steep slopes and heavy rainfall gives the archipelago one of the world's highest rates of natural erosion, and that condition, which is sporadically intensified by the natural shocks of earthquake and vulcanism, can also be exacerbated by human activity, as we shall see. Climate thus complicates hillside tillage and reinforces the abruptness of transition from potentially arable to nonarable terrain.

The island chain's mountainous backbone and its 1,500 kilometer length from northern Honshu to southern Kyushu give Japan's climate important regional variations. On the Sea of Japan littoral, cold, snowy winters have discouraged human settlement, whereas generally sunny winters along the Pacific seaboard have made habitation comparatively pleasant. Although annual precipitation is high along the Sea of Japan, furthermore, the bulk of it comes as snow and rushes to the sea as spring runoff, providing relatively little value for cropping. In the southwest, by comparison, most precipitation comes as rain, and the growing season is long enough to permit widespread double cropping.

Agriculture in northern Honshu, especially along the Sea of Japan, has been discouraged by summer weather as well as winter, because the area is subject to the yamase effect, in which cool air from the Sea of Okhotsk irregularly prevails throughout the summer, sharply lowering temperatures and damaging agricultural production.4 The impact of the yamase effect has been especially serious for rice culture because the type of rice grown in Japan (Oryza sativa japonica ) requires a mean summer temperature of 200 centigrade or higher to flourish.5 A drop of 2–30 can lead to a 30–50 percent drop in rice yield. The yamase influence can produce an even greater drop than that and appears to have played an important role in crop failure and famine of the later Tokugawa period.

Annual rhythms of climate have thus shaped Japan's agricultural capacity and sharpened regional differences. In the longer term, as well, fluctuations in temperature have affected human affairs. Most significant for this study, there is a close correlation between unusually low summer temperatures during the 1780s and 1830s and crop failures that led to two exceptionally severe periods of famine in northern Ja-

Ikuo Maejima, "Seasonal and Regional Aspects of Japan's Weather and Climate," in Association of Japanese Geographers, ed., Geography of Japan , p. 67.

H. Arakawa, "Three Great Famines in Japan," Weather (publ. by the Royal Meteorological Society, London) 12 (1957): 211–12. Strictly speaking, there are several varieties of japonica rice, with modest variations in climatic tolerance among them.

pan. The timing of those disasters may reflect a longer-term "Little Ice Age" in the later Tokugawa period.66 Or it may indicate that human activity had altered the landscape, particularly in the northeast, in ways that made crops more vulnerable to cold summers than during earlier centuries. Or it may simply reveal that inequities in the distribution of yield had become so pronounced by then that the poor succumbed in time of stress. In any case, the situation surely added to the regional tensions between northeast and southwest.

In short, the climate in general and patterns of precipitation in particular have historically encouraged the Japanese to cluster their settlements along the southern littoral, most densely along the sheltered Inland Sea, and it is only more recently that they have reluctantly moved into the northeast and the coastal plains facing the Sea of Japan. In the latter areas, the limits that topography imposes on production are drawn tighter by climate, with the result that agricultural output has been more modest and less reliable, making it easier to fall short of the margin needed for survival once the human population reached the limits of a given locality's carrying capacity.

This general climatological bias in favor of the south has long been reinforced by the flow of offshore ocean currents. The southern coast is warmed by the kuroshio , or Japan Current, which carries equatorial water from east of the Philippines northward through the Ryukyus*

, eastward along the coast south of the Kanto*

plain, and on into the Pacific. North of the Kanto, by contrast, the oyashio , or Chishima Current, brings arctic water down along the Kurils, past Hokkaido, to the east coast of northern Honshu, depressing ambient temperature and shortening the growing season, thereby exacerbating the north-south distinction.

These warm and cold currents also exerted other influences on early modern Japan. They helped give the archipelago rich and varied sources of fish, shellfish, seaweed, and other marine products. The rich fisheries

Arakawa, "Three Great Famines," pp. 212–17. Sources do not fully agree on whether the century or two before 1850 were generally colder than earlier ones. Most notably, see Takeo Yamamoto, "On the Nature of the Japanese Climate in So-called 'Little Ice Age' between 1750 and 1850," Geophysical Magazine 35-2 (Jan. 1971): 165–85, and the following essays by Arakawa: "Twelve Centuries of Blooming Dates of the Cherry Blossoms at the City of Kyoto and Its Own Vicinity," and "Remarkable Winters in Japan from the Seventh Century," both in Geofisca pura e applicata 30 (Jan. 1955): 144–46, 147–50; "Fujiwhara on Five Centuries of Freezing Dates of Lake Suwa in the [sic ] Central Japan," Archiv f|r Meteorologie, Geophysik und Bioklimatologie , ser. B, 6 (1955): 152–66; "Climatic Change as Revealed by the Data from the Far East," Weather 12 (1957): 46–51; and "Dates of First or Earliest Snow Covering for Tokyo since 1632," Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 82 (1956): 222–26.

off the coast of northeast Honshu, for example, provided many villagers with employment during the later Tokugawa period, when wholesale harvesting of marine life became economically feasible owing to a rise in demand for fish-meal fertilizer. This growth in maritime exploitation added a new dimension to the economic relationship between the northeast and the metropolitan region around Edo—today's Tokyo. Within a few decades, however, those same fisheries became targets of American and European whalers, whose appearance on the scene promoted a transformation in Japan's external relations that culminated in destruction of the Tokugawa order.

The Environmental Setting in 1600

To the people of sixteenth-century Japan, the geography and climate of their realm were too commonplace for comment. For travelers from afar, however, they were distinctive and received considerable mention, so visitors' observations give us a look at the land. The foreigners did not, of course, see with unprejudiced, all-knowing eyes. An observer carrying in his mind recollections of the lush, rolling hills of Kent surely saw Japan differently from one making a silent comparison with the arid plateaus of Iberia. The traveler to southern Kyushu could not thereby know Tohoku*

. The year-long sojourner could observe more than the springtime visitor. The commentator moved by aesthetics did not report in the same way as one looking for crops of value. Despite the idiosyncracy of every observer, however, we can still glean from these reports a partial picture of this island realm in the years around 1600.7

The richness of the archipelago's biological inheritance impressed one of the earliest European visitors, Jorge Alvares, a Portuguese merchant who described the lush vegetation he had seen in the vicinity of Kagoshima in 1546:

It is a beautiful and pleasing country, and has an abundance of trees, such as the pine, cedar, plum, cherry, peach, laurel, chestnut, walnut, oak (which yields many acorns) and elder . . . There is also much fruit not to be found in our country; they grow the vegetables which we have in Portugal, except lettuces, cabbages, dills, corianders, and even mint; all the rest they have. They also cultivate roses, carnations and many other scented flowers, as well

The quotations that follow can be found in Michael Cooper, They Came to Japan: An Anthology of European Reports on Japan , 1543–1640 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), pp. 6–7 (Jorge Alvares), 10–11 Joco Rodrigues), 7–8 (Arthur Hatch), and 10 (Bernardino de Avila Girsn).

as both sweet and bitter oranges, citrons (though I did not see any lemons), pomegranates and pears.

The land is intensely cultivated and each year three crops are laid down in the following manner. In November they sow wheat, barley, turnips, radishes and other vegetables, such as beet, which they eat; in March they sow Indian corn, maize, mangoes, chick-peas, beans, artichokes, cucumbers and melons; in July they sow rice, yams, garlic and onions. The land is fertilised each time with horse manure and dug with a spade, and then left fallow for a year. They use small, tough horses when working the land because they have but few cows, although in some places they use cows.

There are no pigs, goats or sheep, and only a very few stringy hens. They hunt and eat deer, rabbits, pheasants, quails, doves and other birds. They hunt deer and rabbits with bows and arrows, and catch birds with nets. The nobles employ splendid hawks and falcons and I was told that they also hunted with royal eagles, but only the great lords were allowed to keep these birds for their amusement.

Joco Rodrigues, a Portuguese Jesuit who lived several years in Japan, commented on the scarcity of arable land and the comparative absence of contagious disease:

Although in various regions of the kingdom of Japan there are broad and ample plains, cultivated or otherwise, the country is in general very mountainous with great lofty ranges and dense forests of trees. Some mountains are so high that their peaks pierce the very clouds, which in some places remain far below the summit. As Japan is so mountainous the country is more barren than fruitful, and hence they must diligently dung the land in order to raise crops every year.

The air is extremely wholesome and temperate and thus there are no prevailing maladies, such as the plague, in the kingdom. As a result the common people, who are not given to luxuries, usually lead a long life, and the old folk are well disposed, strong and healthy.

Arthur Hatch, an Englishman who visited Hirado in 1620 also noted the mountainous character of the country, its dearth of flatlands, and its comparative freedom from epidemic disease, as well as its disruptive storms and earthquakes:

The Countrey of Japan is very large and spacious, consisting of several Ilands and pettie Provinces; it is Mountainous and craggie, full of Rockes and stonie places, so that the third part of this Empire is not inhabited or manured; neither indeed doth it affoord that accomodation for Inhabitants which is needfull, or that fatnesse and conveniencie for the growth of Corne, Fruit, and small grayne as is requisite; which causeth the people to select the choysest and plainest parts and places of the land both to till and dwell in. The Climate is temperate and healthie not much pestred with infectious or obnoxious ayres, but very subject to fierce windes, tempestuous stormes, and

terrible Earthquakes, insomuch that both Ships in the harbour have been over-set, and driven ashore by the furie of the one, and Houses on the land disjoynted and shaken to pieces by the fearefull trembling of the other.

Finally, Bernardino de Avila Girsn, a Spanish merchant who spent some years in Japan, commented on mineral resources and weather in 1619,

There are many gold and silver mines in this realm, and at the present day only the king still works them. But there are mines everywhere and the metal is of high quality; the gold ore is so rich that they obtain ten taels of gold from every spadeful. In the same way there is a great deal of copper and iron which they extract very easily. There is also quicksilver and lead.

The land for the most part is barren with many mountains and high ranges. It is exceedingly cold with much snow and the cold weather often lasts from October to April, in which last month it sometimes snows. And the hot weather lasts from July to the middle of September, the pestilential and unbearable dog-days beginning on the sixth day of July. But there is no regularity in this either and it varies from year to year.

In sum, these voyagers found Japan a mountainous land, its plains few but—by European standards—vigorously tilled. Despite its volcanoes and earthquakes, it seemed an agreeable place to dwell. Particularly to Iberian eyes, it was a lush realm, well peopled, and fruitful. And it had been so for centuries.

Continues...

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Abbreviations
Introduction

PART ONE: BACKGROUND
1. Geography and Climate
2. The Human Legacy
3. Early Modern Japan: An Overview

PART TWO: THE ERA OF PACIFICATION,
1570-1630
4. The Politics of Pacification
5. The Economics of Pacification
6. Culture and Pacification

PART THREE: THE TOKUGAWA HEYDAY,
1630-1710
7. The Politics of Order
8. Economic Growth and Change
9. The Blossoming of Political Thought
10. Aesthetics and the Rise of U kiyo
11. Ecological Trends: The Period of Growth

PART FOUR: STRUGGLING TO STAND STILL,
1710-1790
12. Ecological Trends: The Period of Stasis (I)
13. Ecological Trends: The Period of Stasis (II)
14. Yoshimune and the Kyoho Reform
15. The Politics of Stasis, 17 51-1790
16. Thought and Society: The Eighteenth Century
17. The Later Years of Early Tokugawa
Arts and Letters

PART FIVE: THE EROSION OF STABILITY,
1790-1850
18. Later Tokugawa Arts and Letters
19. Thought and Society, 1790-1850
20. The Best of Times, 1790-1825
21. The Worst of Times, 1825-1850

Epilogue: Breaking Up and Breaking Out,
1850-1870

Appendixes
A. Year Periods (Nengo), 1570-1868
B. Dates of Tokugawa Shogun
c. Early Modern Emperors
Mentioned in the Text

Glossary of Japanese Terms
Suggestions for Further Reading in English
Index