CHAPTER XXVIII
The Makers of Japan

THE history of Japan is an unfinished drama in which three acts have been played. The first—barring the primitive and legendary centuries—is classical Buddhist Japan (522-1603 A.D.), suddenly civilized by China and Korea, refined and softened by religion, and creating the historic masterpieces of Japanese literature and art. The second is the feudal and peaceful Japan of the Tokugawa Shogunate (1603-1868), isolated and self-contained, seeking no alien territory and no external trade, content with agriculture and wedded to art and philosophy. The third act is modern Japan, opened up in 1853 by an American fleet, forced by conditions within and without into trade and industry, seeking foreign materials and markets, fighting wars of irrepressible expansion, imitating the imperialistic ardor and methods of the West, and threatening both the ascendancy of the white race and the peace of the world. By every historical precedent the next act will be war.

The Japanese have studied our civilization carefully, in order to absorb its values and surpass it. Perhaps we should be wise to study their civilization as patiently as they have studied ours, so that when the crisis comes that must issue either in war or understanding, we may be capable of understanding.

I. THE CHILDREN OF THE GODS

How Japan was created—The rôle of earthquakes

In the beginning, says the oldest of Japanese histories,¹ were the gods Male and female they were born, and died, until at last two of them, Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, were commanded by the elder deities to create Japan. So they stood on the floating bridge of heaven, thrust down into the ocean a jeweled spear, and held it aloft in the sky. The drops that fell from the spear became the Sacred Islands. By watching the tadpoles in the water the gods learned the secret of copulation; Izanagi and Izanami mated, and gave birth to the Japanese race. From Izanagi’s left eye was born Amaterasu, Goddess of the Sun, and from her grandson Ninigi sprang in divine and unbroken lineage all the emperors of Dai Nippon. From that day until this there has been but one imperial dynasty in Japan.*

There were 4,223 drops from the jeweled spear, for there are that number of islands in the archipelago called Japan,† Six hundred of them are inhabited, but only five are of any considerable size. The largest-Hondo or Honshu—is 1,130 miles long, averages some 73 miles in width, and contains in its 81,000 square miles half the area of the islands. Their situation, like their recent history, resembles that of England: the surrounding seas have protected them from conquest, while their 13,000 miles of seacoast have made them a seafaring people, destined by geographical encouragement and commercial necessity to a widespread mastery of the seas. Warm winds and currents from the south mingle with the cool air of the mountain-tops to give Japan an English climate, rich in rain and cloudy days⁴ nourishing to short but rapid-running rivers, and propitious to vegetation and scenery. Here, outside the cities and the slums, half the land is an Eden in blossom-time; and the mountains are no tumbled heaps of rock and dirt, but artistic forms designed, like Fuji, in almost perfect lines.‡

Doubtless these isles were born of earthquakes rather than from dripping spears.⁶ No other land—except, perhaps, South America—has suffered so bitterly from convulsions of the soil. In the year 599 the earth shook and swallowed villages in its laughter; meteors fell and comets flashed, and snow whitened the streets in mid-July; drought and famine followed, and millions of Japanese died. In 1703 an earthquake killed 32,000 in Tokyo alone. In 1885 the capital was wrecked again; great clefts opened in the earth, and engulfed thousands; the dead were carried away in cartloads and buried en masse. In 1923 earthquake, tidal wave and fire took 100,000 lives in Tokyo, and 37,000 in Yokahama and nearby; Kamakura, so kind to Buddha, was almost totally destroyed,⁷ while the benign colossus of the Hindu saint survived shaken but unperturbed amid the ruins, as if to illustrate the chief lesson of history—that the gods can be silent in many languages. The people were for a moment puzzled by this abundance of disaster in a land divinely created and ruled; at last they explained the agitations as due to a large subterranean fish, which wriggled when its slumber was disturbed.⁸ They do not seem to have thought of abandoning this adventurous habitat; on the day after the last great quake the school-children used bits of broken plaster for pencils, and the tiles of their shattered homes for slates.⁹ The nation bore patiently these lashings of circumstance, and emerged from repeated ruin undiscourageably industrious, and ominously brave.

II. PRIMITIVE JAPAN

Racial components—Early civilization—Religion—“Shinto”—Buddhism—The beginnings of art—The “Great Reform”

Japanese origins, like all others, are lost in the cosmic nebula of theory. Three elements appear to be mingled in the race: a primitive white strain through the “Ainus” who seem to have entered Japan from the region of the Amur River in neolithic times; a yellow, Mongol strain coming from or through Korea about the seventh century before Christ; and a brown-black, Malay and Indonesian strain filtering in from the islands of the south. Here, as elsewhere, a mingling of diverse stocks preceded by many hundreds of years the establishment of a new racial type speaking with a new voice and creating a new civilization. That the mixture is not yet complete may be seen in the contrast between the tall, slim, long-headed aristocrat and the short, stout, broad-headed common man.

Chinese annals of the fourth century describe the Japanese as “dwarfs,” and add that “they have neither oxen nor wild beasts; they tattoo their faces in patterns varying with their rank; they wear garments woven in one piece; they have spears, bows and arrows tipped with stone or iron. They wear no shoes, are law-abiding and polygamous, addicted to strong drink and long-lived. . . . The women smear their bodies with pink and scarlet” paint.¹¹ “There is no theft,” these records state, “and litigation is infrequent”;¹² civilization had hardly begun. Lafcadio Hearn, with uxorious clairvoyance, painted this early age as an Eden unsullied with exploitation or poverty; and Fenollosa pictured the peasantry as composed of independent soldier-gentlemen.¹³ Handicrafts came over from Korea in the third century A.D., and were soon organized into guilds.¹⁴ Beneath these free artisans was a considerable slave class, recruited from prisons and battlefields.¹⁵ Social organization was partly feudal, partly tribal; some peasants tilled the soil as vassals of landed barons, and each clan had its well-nigh sovereign head.¹⁶ Government was primitively loose and weak.

Animism and totemism, ancestor worship and sex worship¹⁷ satisfied the religious needs of the early Japanese. Spirits were everywhere—in the planets and stars of the sky, in the plants and insects of the field, in trees and beasts and men.¹⁸ Deities innumerable hovered over the home and its inmates, and danced in the flame and glow of the lamp.¹⁹ Divination was practised by burning the bones of a deer or the shell of a tortoise, and studying with expert aid the marks and lines produced by the fire; by this means, say the ancient Chinese chronicles, “they ascertain good and bad luck, and whether or not to undertake journeys and voyages.”²⁰ The dead were feared and worshiped, for their ill will might generate much mischief in the world; to placate them precious objects were placed in their graves—for example, a sword in the case of a man, a mirror in the case of a woman; and prayers and delicacies were offered before their ancestral tablets every day.²¹ Human sacrifices were resorted to now and then to stop excessive rain or to ensure the stability of a building or a wall; and the retainers of a dead lord were occasionally buried with him to defend him in his epilogue.²²

Out of ancestor worship came the oldest living religion of Japan. Shinto, the Way of the Gods, took three forms: the domestic cult of family ancestors, the communal cult of clan ancestors, and the state cult of the imperial ancestors and the founding gods. The divine progenitor of the imperial line was addressed with humble petitions, seven times a year, by the emperor or his representatives; and special prayers were offered up to him when the nation was embarking upon some particularly holy cause, like the taking of Shantung (1914).²³ Shinto required no creed, no elaborate ritual, no moral code; it had no special priesthood, and no consoling doctrine of immortality and heaven; all that it asked of its devotees was an occasional pilgrimage, and pious reverence for one’s ancestors, the emperor, and the past. It was for a time superseded because it was too modest in its rewards and its demands.

In 522 Buddhism, which had entered China five hundred years before, passed over from the continent, and began a rapid conquest of Japan. Two elements met to give it victory: the religious needs of the people, and the political needs of the state. For it was not Buddha’s Buddhism that came, agnostic, pessimistic and puritan, dreaming of blissful extinction; it was the Mahayana Buddhism of gentle gods like Amida and Kwannon, of cheerful ceremonial, saving Bodhisattwas, and personal immortality. Better still, it inculcated, with irresistible grace, all those virtues of piety, peacefulness and obedience which make a people amenable to government; it gave to the oppressed such hopes and consolations as might reconcile them to content with their simple lot; it redeemed the prose and routine of a laborious life with the poetry of myth and prayer and the drama of colorful festival; and it offered to the people that unity of feeling and belief which statesmen have always welcomed as a source of social order and a pillar of national strength.

We do not know whether it was statesmanship or piety that brought victory to Buddhism in Japan. When, in 586 A.D., the Emperor Yomei died, the succession was contested in arms by two rival families, both of them politically devoted to the new creed. Prince Shotoku Taishi, who had been born, we are told, with a holy relic clasped in his infant hand, led the Buddhist faction to victory, established the Empress Suiko on the throne, and for twenty-nine years (592-621) ruled the Sacred Islands as Prince Imperial and Regent. He lavished funds upon Buddhist temples, encouraged and supported the Buddhist clergy, promulgated the Buddhist ethic in national decrees, and became in general the Ashoka of Japanese Buddhism. He patronized the arts and sciences, imported artists and artisans from Korea and China, wrote history, painted pictures, and supervised the building of the Horiuji Temple, the oldest extant masterpiece in the art history of Japan.

Despite the work of this versatile civilizer, and all the virtues inculcated or preached by Buddhism, another violent crisis came to Japan within a generation after Shotoku’s death. An ambitious aristocrat, Kamatari, arranged with Prince Naka a palace revolution that marked so definite a change in the political history of Nippon that native historians refer to it enthusiastically as the “Great Reform” (645). The heir-apparent was assassinated, a senile puppet was placed upon the throne, and Kamatari as chief minister, through Prince Naka as heir-apparent and then as Emperor Tenchi, reconstructed the Japanese government into an autocratic imperial power. The sovereign was elevated from the leadership of the principal clan to paramount authority over every official in Japan; all governors were to be appointed by him, all taxes paid directly to him, all the land of the realm was declared his. Japan graduated rapidly from a loose association of clans and semi-feudal chieftains into a closely-knit monarchical state.

III. THE IMPERIAL AGE

The emperors—The aristocracy—The influence of China—The Golden Age of Kyoto—Decadence

From that time onward the emperor enjoyed impressive titles. Sometimes he was called Tenshi, or “Son of Heaven”; usually Tenno, or “Heavenly King”; rarely Mikado, or “August Gateway.” He had the distinction of receiving a new appellation after his death, and of being known in history by an individual name quite different from that which he bore during his life. To ensure the continuity of the imperial line, the emperor was allowed to have as many wives or consorts as he desired; and the succession went not necessarily to his first son, but to any of his progeny who seemed to him, or to the Warwicks of the time, most likely to prove strongest, or weakest, on the throne. In the early days of the Kyoto period the emperors inclined to piety; some of them abdicated to become Buddhist monks, and one of them forbade fishing as an insult to Buddha.²⁵ Yozei was a troublesome exception who illustrated the perils of active monarchy: he made people climb trees, and then shot them down with bow and arrow; he seized maidens in the street, tied them up with lute strings, and cast them into ponds; it pleased His Majesty to ride through the capital and to belabor the citizens with his whip; at last his subjects deposed him in an outbreak of political impiety rare in the history of Japan.²⁶ In 794 the headquarters of the government were removed from Nara to Nagaoka, and shortly thereafter to Kyoto (“Capital of Peace”); this remained the capital during those four centuries (794-1192) which most historians agree in calling the Golden Age of Japan. By 1190 Kyoto had a population of half a million, more than any European city of the time except Constantinople and Cordova.²⁷ One part of the town was given over to the cottages and hovels of the populace, which seems to have lived cheerfully in its humble poverty; another part, discreetly secluded, contained the gardens and palaces of the aristocracy and the Imperial Family. The people of the court were appropriately called “Dwellers above the Clouds.”²⁸ For here as elsewhere the progress of civilization and technology had brought an increase in social distinctions; the rough equality of pioneer days had given way to the inequality that comes inevitably when increasing wealth is distributed among men ac cording to their diverse capacity, character, and privilege. Great families arose like the Fujiwara, the Taira, the Minamoto and the Sugawara, who made and unmade emperors, and fought with one another in the lusty manner of the Italian Renaissance. Sugawara Michizane endeared himself to Japan by his patronage of literature, and is now worshiped as the God of Letters, in whose honor a school holiday is declared on the twenty-fifth day of every month; and the young Shogun Minamoto Sanetomo distinguished himself by composing on the morning before his assassination this simple stanza, in the chastest Japanese style:

Under the enlightened Daigo (898-930), greatest of the emperors set up by the Fujiwara clan, Japan continued to absorb, and began to rival, the culture and luxury of China, then flourishing at its height under the T’ang. Having taken their religion from the Middle Kingdom, the Japanese proceeded to take from the same source their dress and their sports, their cooking and their writing, their poetry and their administrative methods, their music and their arts, their gardens and their architecture; even their handsome capitals, Nara and Kyoto, were laid out in imitation of Ch’ang-an.³⁰ Japan imported Chinese culture a thousand years ago as it imported Europe and America in our own day: first with haste, then with discrimination; jealously maintaining its own spirit and character, zealously adapting the new ways to ancient and native ends.

Stimulated by its great neighbor, and protected by orderly and continuous government, Japan now entered that Engi period (901-922) which is accounted the acme of the Golden Age.* Wealth accumulated, and was centered in a fashionable life of luxury, refinement and culture hardly equaled again until the courts of the Medici and the salons of the French Enlightenment. Kyoto became the Paris and Versailles of France, elegant in poetry and dress, practised in manners and arts, and setting for all the nation the standards of learning and taste. Every appetite was full and free; the cuisine invented novelties for the palate and heaped up feasts for gourmands and gourmets; and fornication or adultery was winked at as a very venial sin.³² Silks of fine texture clothed every lord and lady, and harmonies of color wavered on every sleeve. Music and the dance adorned the life of temple and court, and graced aristocratic homes attractively landscaped without, and luxuriously finished with interiors of bronze or pearl, ivory or gold, or wood most delicately carved.³³ Literature flourished, and morals decayed.

Such epochs of glittering refinement tend to be brief, for they rest insecurely upon concentrated wealth that may at any moment be destroyed by the fluctuations of trade, the impatience of the exploited, or the fortunes of war. The extravagance of the court finally ruined the solvency of the state; the exaltation of culture above ability filled administrative posts with incompetent poetasters, under whose scented noses corruption multiplied unnoticed; at last offices were sold to the highest bidder.³⁴ Crime rose among the poor as luxury mounted among the rich; brigands and pirates infested the roads and the seas, and preyed impartially upon the people and the emperor; tax-gatherers were robbed as they brought their revenues to the court. Gangs of bandits were organized in the provinces, and even in the capital itself; for a time Japan’s most notorious criminal, like ours, lived in open splendor, too powerful to be arrested or annoyed.³⁵ The neglect of martial habits and virtues, or military organization and defense, left the government exposed to assault from any ruthless buccaneer. The great families raised their own armies, and began an epoch of civil war in which they contended chaotically for the right to name the emperor. The emperor himself was every day more helpless, while the heads of the clans became again almost independent lords. Once more history moved in its ancient oscillation between a powerful central government and a feudal decentralized regime.

IV. THE DICTATORS

The “shoguns”—The Kamakura “Bakufu”—The Hojo Regency—Kublai Khan’s invasion—The Ashikaga Shogunate—The three buccaneers

Tempted by this situation, a class of military dictators arose, who assumed full authority over various sections of the archipelago, and recognized the emperor merely as the divine façade of Japan, to be maintained at a minimum of expense. The peasants, no longer protected from bandits by imperial armies or police, paid taxes to the shoguns, or generals, instead of to the emperor, for only the shoguns were able to safeguard them from robbery.³⁶ The feudal system triumphed in Japan for the same reason that it had triumphed in Europe: local sources of authority grew in power as a central and distant government failed to maintain security and order.

About the year 1192 a member of the Minamoto clan, Yoritomo, gathered about him an army of soldiers and vassals, and established an independent authority which, from its seat, acquired the name of the “Kamakura Bakufu.” The very word bakufu meant a military office, and indicated bluntly the nature of the new regime. The great Yoritomo died suddenly in 1198,* and was succeeded by his weakling sons; for, says a Japanese proverb, “the great man has no seed.”³⁸ A rival family set up in 1199 the “Hojo Regency,” which for 134 years ruled the shoguns who ruled the emperors. Kublai Khan took advantage of this trinitarian government to attempt the conquest of Japan, for clever Koreans, fearful of it, had described it to him as desirably rich. Kublai ordered from his ship-builders so vast a fleet that Chinese poets represented the hills as mourning for their denuded forests.³⁹ The Japanese, in heroic retrospect, reckoned the vessels at 70,000, but less patriotic historians are content with 3,500 ships and 100,000 men. This gigantic armada appeared off the coast of Japan late in the year 1291. The brave islanders sailed out to meet it in an improvised and comparatively tiny fleet; but, as in the case of a smaller but more famous Armada,† a “Great Wind,” renowned in thankful memory, arose, smashed the ships of the mighty Khan upon the rocks, drowned 70,000 of his sailors, and saved the others for a life of slavery in Japan.

The turn of the Hojos came in 1333. For they, too, had been poisoned by power, and hereditary rule had passed in time from scoundrels and geniuses to cowards and fools. Takatoki, last of the line, had a passion for dogs; he accepted them in lieu of taxes, and collected from four to five thousand of them; he kept them in kennels with gold and silver decorations, fed them on fish and fowl, and had them carried in palanquins to take the air. The contemporary emperor, Go Daigo, saw in the degeneration of his keepers an opportunity to reassert the imperial power. The Minamoto and Ashikaga clans rallied to him, and led his forces, after many defeats, to victory over the Regency. Takatoki and 870 of his vassals and generals retired to a temple, drank a last cup of sake, and committed hara-kiri. “This,” said one of them as he pulled out his intestines with his own hand, “gives a fine relish to the wine.”⁴⁰

Ashikaga Takauji turned against the Emperor whom he had helped to restore, fought with successful stratagem and treachery the armies sent to subdue him, replaced Go Daigo with the puppet emperor Kogon, and set up at Kyoto that Ashikaga Shogunate which was to rule Japan through 250 years of chaos and intermittent civil war. It must be admitted that part of this disorder was due to the nobler side of the Ashikaga dictators—their love and patronage of art. Yoshimitsu, tired of strife, turned his hand to painting, and became not the least artist of his time; Yoshimasa befriended many painters, subsidized a dozen arts, and grew into so refined a connoisseur that the pieces selected by him and his associates are the most coveted prizes of collectors today.⁴¹ Meanwhile, however, the prosaic tasks of organization were neglected, and neither the rich shoguns nor the impoverished emperors seemed able to maintain public security or peace.

It was this very chaos and looseness of life, and the call of the nation for leaders who would give it order, that produced a trio of buccaneers famous in Japanese history. In their youth, says tradition, Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Iyeyasu resolved together to restore unity to their country, and each took a solemn oath that he would obey as vassal whichever of the others should win the imperial consent to administer Japan.⁴² Nobunaga tried first, and failed; Hideyoshi tried second, and died just short of success; Iyeyasu bided his time, tried last of all, founded the Tokugawa Shogunate, and inaugurated one of the longest periods of peace, and one of the richest epochs of art, in human history.

V. GREAT MONKEY-FACE

The rise of Hideyoshi—The attack upon Korea—The conflict with Christianity

Queen Elizabeth and Akbar, as the Japanese would instructively put it, were contemporaries of the great Hideyoshi. He was a peasant’s son, known to his friends, and later to his subjects, as Sarumen Kanja—“Monkey-Face”; for not even Confucius could rival him in ugliness. Unable to discipline him, his parents sent him to a monastic school; but Hideyoshi made such fun of the Buddhist priests, and raised such turmoil and insurrections, that he was expelled. He was apprenticed to various trades, and was discharged thirty-seven times;⁴³ he became a bandit, decided that more could be stolen by law than against it, joined the service of a Samurai (i.e., a “sword-bearing man”), saved his master’s life, and was thereafter allowed to carry a sword. He joined Nobunaga, helped him with brains as well as courage, and, when Nobunaga died (1582), took the lead of the lawless rebels who had set out to conquer their native land. Within three years Hideyoshi had made himself ruler of half the empire, had won the admiration of the impotent emperor, and felt strong enough to digest Korea and China. “With Korean troops,” he modestly announced to the Son of Heaven, “aided by your illustrious influence, I intend to bring the whole of China under my sway. When that is effected, the three countries (China, Korea and Japan) will be one. I shall do it as easily as a man rolls up a piece of matting and carries it away under his arm.”⁴⁴ He tried hard; but a villainous Korean invented a metal war-boat—a pre-plagiarism of the Monitor and the Merrimac—and destroyed one after another of the troop-laden ships that Hideyoshi had dispatched to Korea (1592). Seventy-two vessels were sunk in one day, and the very sea ran blood; forty-eight other vessels were beached and deserted by the Japanese, and burned to the water by the victors. After an indecisive alternation of successes and defeats the attempt to conquer Korea and China was postponed until the twentieth century. Hideyoshi, said the Korean king, had tried to “measure the ocean in a cockle-shell.”⁴⁵

Meanwhile Hideyoshi had settled down to enjoy and administer the Regency that he had established. He provided himself with three hundred concubines, but he bestowed a substantial sum upon the peasant wife whom he had long ago divorced. He looked up one of his old employers, and returned to him with interest the money that he had stolen from him in apprentice days. He did not dare ask the Emperor’s consent to his assumption of the title of Shogun; but his contemporaries gave him, in compensation, the name of Taiko, or “Great Sovereign,” which, by one of those strange verbal Odysseys that characterize philology, is now entering our language as tycoon. “Cunning and crafty beyond belief,” as a missionary described him,⁴⁶ he subtly disarmed the people by ordering all metal weapons to be contributed as material for a colossal statue—the Daibutsu, or Great Buddha, of Kyoto. He appears to have had no religious beliefs, but he was not above making use of religion for the purposes of ambition or statesmanship.

Christianity had come to Japan in 1549 in the person of one of the first and noblest of Jesuits, St. Francis Xavier. The little community which he established grew so rapidly that within a generation after his coming there were seventy Jesuits and 150,000 converts in the empire.⁴⁷ They were so numerous in Nagasaki that they made that trading port a Christian city, and persuaded its local ruler, Omura, to use direct action in spreading the new faith.⁴⁸ “Within Nagasaki territory,” says Lafcadio Hearn, “Buddhism was totally suppressed—its priests being persecuted and driven away.”⁴⁹ Alarmed at this spiritual invasion, and suspecting it of political designs, Hideyoshi sent a messenger to the Vice-Provincial of the Jesuits in Japan, armed with five peremptory questions:

Not satisfied with the replies, Hideyoshi issued, in 1587, the following edict:

Amid all these alarms the great buccaneer found time to encourage artists, to take part in No plays, and to support Rikyu in making the tea ceremony a stimulant to Japanese pottery and an essential adornment of Japanese life. He died in 1598, having exacted from lyeyasu a promise to build a new capital at Yedo (now Tokyo), and to recognize Hideyoshi’s son Hideyori as heir to the Regency in Japan.

VI. THE GREAT SHOGUN

The accession of lyeyasu—His philosophy—lyeyasu and Christianity—Death of lyeyasu—The Tokugawa Shogunate

Hideyoshi being dead, lyeyasu pointed out that he had drawn the blood for his oath not from his finger or his gums, as the code of the Samurai required, but from a scratch behind his ear; hence the oath was not binding.⁵² He overwhelmed the forces of certain rival leaders at Sekigahara in a battle that left 40,000 dead. He tolerated Hideyori till his coming of age made him dangerous, and then suggested to him the wisdom of submission. Rebuked, he besieged the gigantic Castle of Osaka where Hideyori was established, captured it while the youth committed hara-kiri, and ensured his hold upon power by killing all of Hideyori’s children, legitimate and illegitimate. Then lyeyasu organized peace as ably and ruthlessly as he had organized war, and administered Japan so well that it was content to be ruled by his posterity and his principles for eight generations.

He was a man of his own ideas, and made his morals as he went along. When a very presentable woman came to him with the complaint that one of his officials had killed her husband in order to possess her, lyeyasu ordered the official to disembowel himself, and made the lady his concubine.⁵³ Like Socrates he ranked wisdom as the only virtue, and charted some of its paths in that strange “Legacy,” or intellectual testament, which he bequeathed to his family at his death.

Having captured power by arms, he decided that Japan had no need of further war, and devoted himself to furthering the ways and virtues of peace. To win the Samurai from the habits of the sword he encouraged them to study literature and philosophy, and to contribute to the arts; and under the rule which he established, culture flourished in Japan and militarism decayed. “The people,” he wrote, “are the foundation of the Empire,”⁵⁵ and he invoked the “special commiseration” of his successors for the “widower, the widowed, the orphaned and the lonely.” But he had no democratic predispositions: the greatest of all crimes, he thought, was insubordination; a “fellow” who stepped out of his rank was to be cut down on the spot; and the entire family of a rebel should be put to death.⁵⁶ The feudal order, in his judgment, was the best that could be devised for actual human beings; it provided a rational balance between central and local power, it established a natural and hereditary system of social and economic organization, and it preserved the continuity of a society without subjecting it to despotic authority. It must be admitted that Iyeyasu organized the most perfect form of feudal government ever known.⁵⁷

Like most statesmen he thought of religion chiefly as an organ of social discipline, and regretted that the variety of human beliefs canceled half this good by the disorder of hostile creeds. To his completely political mind the traditional faith of the Japanese people—a careless mixture of Shintoism and Buddhism—was an invaluable bond cementing the race into spiritual unity, moral order and patriotic devotion; and though at first he approached Christianity with the lenient eye and broad intelligence of Akbar, and refrained from enforcing against it the angry edicts of Hideyoshi, he was disturbed by its intolerance, its bitter denunciation of the native faith as idolatry, and the discord which its passionate dogmatism aroused not only between the converts and the nation, but among the neophytes themselves. Finally his resentment was stirred by the discovery that missionaries sometimes allowed themselves to be used as vanguards for conquerors, and were, here and there, conspiring against the Japanese state.⁵⁸* In 1614 he forbade the practice or preaching of the Christian religion in Japan, and ordered all converts either to depart from the country or to renounce their new beliefs. Many priests evaded the decree, and some of them were arrested. None was executed during the lifetime of Iyeyasu; but after his death the fury of the bureaucrats was turned against the Christians, and a violent and brutal persecution ensued which practically stamped Christianity out of Japan. In 1638 the remaining Christians gathered to the number of 37,000 on the peninsula of Shimabara, fortified it, and made a last stand for the freedom of worship. Iyemitsu, grandson of Iyeyasu, sent a large armed force to subdue them. When, after a three months’ siege, their stronghold was taken, all but one hundred and five of the survivors were massacred in the streets.

Iyeyasu and Shakespeare were contemporaries in death. The doughty Shogun left his power to his son Hidetada, with a simple admonition: “Take care of the people. Strive to be virtuous. Never neglect to protect the country.” And to the nobles who stood at his deathbed he left advice in the best tradition of Confucius and Mencius: “My son has now come of age. I feel no anxiety for the future of the state. But should my successor commit any grave fault in his administration, do you administer affairs yourselves. The country is not the country of one man, but the country of the nation. If my descendants lose their power because of their misdeeds, I shall not regret it.”⁶⁰

His descendants conducted themselves much better than monarchs can usually be expected to behave over a great length of time. Hidetada was a harmless mediocrity; Iyemitsu represented a stronger mood of the stock, and sternly suppressed a movement to restore to actual power the still reigning but not ruling emperors. Tsunayoshi lavished patronage upon men of letters, and on the great rival schools of painting, Kano and Tosa, that embellished the Genroku age (1688-1703). Yoshimune set himself to the ever-recurrent purpose of abolishing poverty, at the very time when his treasury faced an unusual deficit. He borrowed extensively from the merchant class, attacked the extravagance of the rich, and stoically reduced the expenditures of his government, even to the extent of dismissing the fifty fairest ladies of the court. He dressed in cotton cloth, slept on a peasant’s pallet, and dined on the simplest fare. He had a complaint box placed before the palace of the Supreme Court, and invited the people to submit criticisms of any governmental policy or official. When one Yamashita sent in a caustic indictment of his whole administration Yoshimune had the document read aloud in public, and rewarded the author for his candor with a substantial gift.⁶¹

It was the judgment of Lafcadio Hearn that “the Tokugawa period was the happiest in the long life of the nation.”⁶² History, though it can never quite know the past, inclines tentatively to the same conclusion. How could one, seeing Japan today, suspect that on those now excited islands, only a century ago, lived a people poor but content, enjoying a long epoch of peace under the rule of a military class, and pursuing in quiet isolation the highest aims of literature and art?