John Whitney Hall

Christianity and the daimyo

Japan passed from a state of extreme political dissolution and social upheaval to a new era of unity and peace, it also turned inward and away from the relative cosmopolitanism of the Christian Centurys first half. From sengoku, Japan was transformed into sakoku, a closed country. For the daimyo, the establishment of a new order meant a reduction to fealty under the Tokugawa shogunate. For the Christian missionaries and their converts, it meant a bitter persecution and the nearly total eradication of their religion in Japan. For the country at large, it was the beginning of more than two centuries of national seclusion. The daimyo Shimazu Takahisa, Ōuchi Yoshitaka, and Ōtomo Yoshishige, who were the most important political personages of western Japan, were also the Christian missionary Francis Xaviers most important collocutors in the country. Christianity had been the objects of suspicion, denigration, and occasional persecution in various parts of Japan from the day of Xaviers arrival in the country.

The Castle Town and Japan's Modern Urbanization

Japans role in Far Eastern history has been unique in many respects. Traditionally an integral part of the Chinese zone of civilization, Japan has nonetheless demonstrated a marked ability to remain independent of continental influence. In recent years Japans remarkable record of adjustment to the conditions imposed upon her by the spread of Western civilization to the Orient has raised the provocative question of why Japan, of all Far Eastern societies, should be the first to climb into the ranks of the modern industrial powers. Is it possible, as one scholar has suggested, that Japan “has been the country which has diverged the most consistently and markedly from Far Eastern norms, and these points of difference have been by and large, points of basic resemblance to the West”?

Feudalism in Japan — a Reassessment

The question of whether Japan can rightly be said to “have had feudalism” is by no means settled. Although Westerners have been writing about “Japanese feudalism” for well over a hundred years, the acceptability of this practice is still a matter of controversy among professional historians, notably among those who make the study of medieval Europe their specialty. To a long line of Western historians ending with Herbert Norman, however, there was no question about the appropriateness of placing the feudal label on Japan. Nor does the contemporary Japanese historian question a term which has become so important a part of his professional as well as everyday vocabulary. In a Japan in which the reading public is daily reminded that the “struggle against feudalism” is still being waged, feudalism seems a present reality which by its very nature cannot be denied to have existed in Japans past.

The bakuhan system

This chapter traces the formation and the evolution of the bakuhan structure of government from the middle of the sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. The political and social institutions that underlay the bakuhan polity had their origins in the unification movement of the last half of the sixteenth century, especially in the great feats of military consolidation and social engineering achieved by Toyotomi Hideyoshi during the last two decades of the century. The story of the rise of the Tokugawa family to become the foremost military house of Japan follows a pattern common among a whole class of active regional military families who competed for local dominion during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The structure of power over which the Tokugawa shogun ultimately presided was conceived as a balance among several classes of daimyo and the interests of the shogun.

Tanuma Okitsugu, 1719-1788 : forerunner of modern Japan

This is a study of Tanuma Okitsugu, the most powerful political figure in Japan during the quarter century between 1760-1786. The book also provides a descriptive history of mid-eighteenth-century Japan.

The village and agriculture during the Edo period

This chapter provides an overview of the evolving agricultural community and to elaborate on the relationship between the transformations in village life and the changes in the mode of agricultural production. During the Edo period, agriculture passed through three technological stages of varying degrees of complexity: the slash and burn technique, the self-contained village economy, and the commercialized cash crop economy and the shift from one stage to another lay at the bottom of three different life styles. The rise of the samurai marked an important stage in the transition from the increasingly ineffectual shoen system to the social institutions of Tokugawa society. The gap between the upper-class farmers and the rest of the farming population was both a product of traditional social custom and a consequence of economic privileges and laws favorable to the elite rural families. Fertilization with night soil has often been viewed as a hallmark of Japanese agriculture.

Foundations of the Modern Japanese Daimyo

The institutional foundations of the Tokugawa daimyo have been obscured by the lack of insight which historians have traditionally shown into the history of the Ashikaga period and, in particular, into the late Ashikaga, or Sengoku, age. Like the Dark Ages in Europe, this chapter of Japanese history has been accepted in historiography as a dark and formless era of war and trouble. Japanese historians have dismissed the Sengoku period as a time of ge-koku-jō when the political order was capriciously turned upside down by unworthy leaders. The colorful Western historian, James Murdoch, has heaped his most caustic invectives upon the main figures in Ashikaga history. Of the founder of the Ashikaga shogunate he claimed, “Takauji may indeed have been the greatest man of his time, but that is not saying very much, for the middle of the fourteenth century in Japan was the golden age, not merely of turncoats, but of mediocrities.” 1 To Murdoch the Sengoku period was a “vile” age when the Japanese people showed, as he put it, a “lust for war and slaughter … utterly beyond human control,” and only the timely arrival of the “great trio” of daimyo, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and Ieyasu, saved the day for Japan.

The Motivation of Political Leadership in the Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration of 1868 constitutes one of the great turning points in Japanese history. Standing as the culminating events of the political struggle which agitated Japan in the years following the forcible “opening” of the country to the Western world, it signaled the end of the Tokugawa hegemony and the establishment of a new central authority under which Japan was to embark upon an era of unprecedented national development. Few episodes in Japanese history have been so voluminously recorded or so thoroughly studied as the Meiji Restoration. The events of the several decades on either side of 1868 have been traced and retraced, and their implications analyzed by succeeding generations of historians both Japanese and Western.

The social and economic consequences of unification

Japan underwent a major transformation in its social organization and economic capacity during the latter half of the sixteenth century. The three hegemonic leaders, such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who forged the military unification of Japan during the latter half of the sixteenth century. This chapter focuses on the events of the late sixteenth century, the pivotal transitional years that separated the chūsei from the kinsei epoch. The expansion of the productive capacity of agriculture was the keystone supporting the economic foundations of Japans early modern society. Commerce and urban centers grew together during the sixteenth century. At this time Kyoto was still Japans most important political city, as well as a center of a superlative tradition of craft and artisan production. The specific characteristics of the early modern social system were also closely associated with the requirements of the commercial economy.

Reflections on a Centennial

Our Association has met this year in Philadelphia, a city of historic memories, an appropriate place in which to contemplate anniversaries. There are several which come to mind. First, the Association for Asian Studies is itself twenty years old this spring, a fact in which we can all take pride; for we have grown as a professional society from a mere handful of scholars in 1948 to an organization of over 4000 members today. Next there is Japan, which in its modern incarnation is one hundred years old this year—a memorable national and even international event. And finally, I am put in mind by our presence in Philadelphia, that by a bit of stretching we can think of the United States as being roughly 200 years old. (In fact it was just 200 years ago that the citizens of this city banded together to prevent imports from Britain. And in 8 more years we shall be able to celebrate the bicentennial of the moment when Philadelphias Liberty Bell rang out the news of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.)