Analyse the reasons for the decline of the Tokugawa system.

 Following are the reasons for the decline of the Tokugawa system –

• 1)      Feudalism

The uestion of feudalism is also one which needs to be carefully understood. The Tokugawa political and social structure was not feudal in the classical sense but represented the emergence of a political system which was closer to the absolutist monarchies of Europe in the seventeenth century. The relationship between the Shogun and the feudal lords or Daimyo was fundamentally unequal and in all important matters the Shogun's authority was paramount. Thus, the Daimyo had to spend a certain period every two years in the capital Edo and during the period of their absence leave their families as hostages. During crisis. such as large-scale peasant rebellions the Shogun intervened directly, in spite of the-theory of han (feudal fief) autonomy. The Tokugawa had also, through seizure or when a Daimyo died heirless, reallocated Daimyo so that they were in no position to challenge the overriding authority of the Shogun. The Baku-han system functioned with many checks and balances to prevent the unity of any opposition group being realized and the paramount authority lay with the Tokugawa Shoguns in Edo.

The character of the ruling samurai elite had also undergone considerable change. The policy of separating the samurai from the land begun by Hideyoshi had insulted in their concentration in castle towns. The income of the samurai was derived in part from land and in part from a stipend which he received for a job. The samurai class was divided by status distinctions which restricted the nature of their jobs and many were unemployed. Thus the employed samurai gradually evolved into a bureaucracy where merit and performance became integral criteria. for judging them. Later burcaucratic legacy was in no small way responsible for the way in which the Meiji Government achieved its objectives of developing modern institutions and implementing new policies.

 

• 2)      Economic Changes

The decline of the Tokugawa order has its roots in a contradiction which lay in the structure itself when it was built in the seventeenth century. The contradiction was between the ideal which visualized a hierarchic status divided society based on a simple agrarian economy and the reality of a more complex commercial economy along with a social order which again was much more complex. The changes brought about by a long period of peaceful development generated such social and intellectual forces which questioned and undermined the basis of Tokugawa rule. The Bakufu's attempts to reform the system by returning to the basis of its simple ideas were increasingly ineffective. The Kansai reforms of 1790 carried out by a Tokugawa official Matsudaira Sadanobu were the last major effort by the Tokugawa to strengthen their #shaky rule and reassert their authority. Their failure marks the beginning of decline which was precipitated by the coming of Western powers seeking to open Japan. The domestic troubles were aggravated by foreign pressure and resulted in the collapse of the Tokugawa and the emergence of the Meiji Government.

The Tokugawa economy though even at the beginning of the nineteenth century largely agrarian, had by now been transformed. In 1800 the population was somewhere between 30 and 33 million and it was growing slowly. Eighty-five per cent of this population lived in the villages but the cities of Edo, Osaka and Kyoto had over 2 million people where as the castle towns had populations ranging of from 10,000 to 100,000. Thus, Japan was far from just a simple agrarian society. Urbanization had give an incentive to trade and commerce. There also develooed certain institutions for carrying  out these activities.

 

Osaka, which was the commercial capital of Tokugawa Japan; along with the merchant guilds in the city (Ten Exchange Houses or Junin ryogae) enjoyed the patronage of the Shogunate . These privileges entitled it to trade in tax-rice, change money and develop money-lending operations. The commercialization of economy put strains on the Tokugawa but there prescriptions for the ever growing financial deficits continued to be based on Confucian maxims i.e. restricting. lavish life-styles and consumption. The output of rice grew slowly and since rice was the traditional tax base any increase in taxes led the farmers to engage in other more profitable crops.

The rural economy was rapidly changing in character and by the nineteenth century regional specialization had produced a variety of economic activity. .In centrill and southern Honshu commercial activity had spread widely with many villages specializing in growing cotton, oil seeds, etc. In the area around Edo nearly a quarter of the rural population was by now employed in commerce and handicrafts. The cities had become the production centres of textiles, lacquer and vottery. But as these shifted from rural areas the cities became commercial and Bdmi;istrative centres and continued to attract unauthorized immigrants from rural areas.

The commercialization of the economy and a fairly constant tax base, because of the Tokugawa Bakufu's inability to effectively manages the new sources of .wealth, led to financial problems for both the Shogun and the Dalmyo and their samurai retainers. In 1830, for instance the domain of Satsuma owed thirty-three times its annual revenue and by 1840 Choshu owed twenty-three times it sgnnual revenue. This deterioration in finances affected the samurai whose incomes were low even in the seventeenth century and who were now faced with rising prices and an inability to satisfy their increasing demands.

 

The Bakufu had taken recourse to various steps to alleviate these problems but their reforms failed to understand the nature of the problem. In 1705 the Bakufu had confiscated the wealth of merchants, like the rich and powerful Yodoya, but this was of no use. In 1720's Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684 -1751) took measures to reform the fiscal and administrative system in which he licensed the merchants but he also took measures to reduce consumption and money supply, a traditional prescription. The only attempt which was substantially different I was by the Bakufu official Tanuma Okitsugu (1719-1788) who sought to encourage commerce and by taxing it raise government revenues. But these attempts were foiled and he was removed from office. His successor Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1788) sought to repeat the steps taken by Yoshimune and in 1841 Mizuno Tadakuni went so far as to abolish government sanctioned trading rights. These measures merely served to complicate and confuse the already grave situation and they had to be withdrawn.

The inability of the Bakufu to implement effective and suitable policies was matched by a growing increase in unauthorized trade between proddcers and local merchants, a trade which the domains were forced to accept or even actively support to overcome their own financial difficulties. In Choshu, for instance, in 1840 gross non-agricularal income was the same as net agricultural income but while agricultural income was taxed 39 pertcent rion-agricultural income was taxed only 10 per cent. By 1840 in the commercialized regions in Honshu and Shikoku villagers were firmly linked to a cash economy.

 

• 3)      Tensions And Conflicts

The growth of a cash economy and the consequent changes in social relations generated tensions and conflicts. The divisions within the samurai prevented the formation of a communality of interests. The merchants too were not a monolithic bloc but divided by their interests. The Osaka merchants favoured by the Bakufu ; were closely tied to the Tokugawa structure and when it collapsed they too were finished, except for the Mitsui house which survived because of the farsightedness of its founder.

The rural merchants who had begun to play a dynamic role were excluded from the benefits of privilege and they were responsive to the need for change. As in the cities so also in the rural areas, too, economic changes disrupted the social fabric and disorders become both frequent and increasingly violent.  In the 1780s and 1830s famine, price rise or excessive taxation resulted in peasantprotests. The Tokugawa peace had been enforced with vigour over the peasantry and as early as 1637 the Shimabara rebellion had been put down with great severity. Over the intervening years protests developed from mass petitions to violent actions involving thousands and spread over many villages.

Scholars have calculated that in the seventeenth century peasant rebellions averaged one or two a year while after 1790 they had gone up to over six a year. The early peasant actions had been as village solidarities, largdy peaceful and concerned with reduction of taxes. But in the latter period they were often against the advise of village elders, violent and often destructive of property. Peasant protests also evolved, at times, a millennia1 character. Thus, for instance, even in urban centres protests increased in the last years of the Tokugawa. The most representative of these urban protests were called Yonaoshi (world renewal) which drew their inspiration from folk traditions and sought a restoration of righteousness. Rural unrest was as much a product of economic changes as it was of increasing education and awareness.

 

• 4)      Education, Scholars and Ideas

Pre-modern statistics are not very reliable but it can be said that compared to most pre-industrial societies the level of education in Japan was high. A variety of schooli ranging from the terakoya or temple schools to others sponsored by the Daimyo and3akufu to private academies created a literate class of people. In the cities the spread of literary works testifies to the developed state of the publishing industry as well as to the education and cultural liveliness of the town dwellers.

The questioning of the values and ideals of Tokugawa society also gathered momentum and it sought its inspiration from a variety of sources. The questioning of the primacy of Chinese learning led scholars to search for the basis of Japanese culture and civilization in the past when it flourished uncorrupted by Chinese values. Motoori Norinaga through his study of the classic Heian novel by Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji sought to discover the true heart of Japanese culture which lay, according to him, in the divinely descended Emperor, in the Shinto kami or gods and in the primacy given to emotion over logical reasoning. These ideas, grouped under the School of National Learning came to emphasise the Imperial institution as central to Japanese culture and politics. Hence, the land of Japan was divine and the Emperor as a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess was a living god and hence Japan could not be compared to any other country. Motoori Norinaga's ideas were carried on by Hirata Atsutane (1776-1843) who was extremely critical of Chinese learning. Parallel to these ideas was the growth of historical scholarship around the Mito school. The hanof Mito was a collateral branch of the Tokugawa and couM provide a successor to the Tokugawa house. The han sponsored a history of Japan (Dai Nihon shi) and this too stressed on the role of the Emperor.

 

The Tokugawa Bakufu had virtually isolated Japan from international contact but they allowed the Dutch to retain a small trading station at Deshima, a man-made island off Nagasaki and this became a window to Western learning. There emerged among the Japanese a group of Dutch scholars (Rangakusha ), so-called because they studied Dutch and through the language translated various books oh medicine, metallurgy, fortifications and other practical subjects. These scholars formed an important and critical side stream which played an important role during the close of the Tokugawa period.

Sugita Genpaku (1733-1817) who studied medicine wrote about the impact that Western boaks on medicine had on him. In 1771 he participated in the dissection of a human body, done in secrecy as it was forbidden, and he found that the Dutch books on anatomy were absolutely accurate in their description and he was struck by the "great difference between the knowledge of the West and the East." Other scholars, like Honda Toshiaki (1744-1821) advocated economic development ano foreign expansion and Kaiho Seiryo (1755-1817) urged the government to engage in trade and commerce. These ideas were derived from their reading of Western works and studies of Western societies.

In the components of the new ideas prevalent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the awareness !hat the state must combine administrative, entrepreneunal and military skills to create a new and stronger Japan. Also suggested was the central importance of the Imperial institution. These trends coalesced and Lame together when political criticism of the Bakufu increased. The Bakufu was increasingly unable to tackle the problem of coping with the Western powers who were demanding that Japan open her doors and allow free access to trade and diplomatic relations.

 

I'he knowledge of the Dutch scholars was used by men of affairs to analyze the changing situation. Watanabe Kazan (1793-1841) represents one such attempt. 4 retainer from the domain of Tawara he was an accomplished and intelligent man who saw that the strength of the Western nations lay "in the study of things, a sense of science, and a forward motion of events." Science, in Western societies was to aid "the other three branches of knowledge represented by religion and ethics, government, and medicine and to extend the basis upon which rest the various arts and techniques that are subordinate to them." 'Though Kazan was arrested and he later committed suicide others carried on with similar work. Ogata Koan (1810-1863) opened a school in Osaka in 1838 where the fruits of Dutch learning were imparted and many of the students of this school were to play an important role in the Meiji Restoration.

In 1825 Aizawa Seishisai's New Thesis or Shinron appeared. Aizawa, (1781-1863) aware of the advances of the Russians in the north saw that the strategy that could counter the Western threat required military strength as well as a cultural regeneration. The West used Christianity and conscription and hence Japan must modernize its weapons and revive its kokutai national .essence. He wrote "The sun rises in our divine Land: and the primordial energy originates here. The heirs of the Great Sun have occupied the Imperial Throne from time immemorial." Aizawa was thus drawing on. ~rious traditions to put forward a new programme for meeting the challenges posed by the Western threat and he was using Western knowledge to reassert the primacy of Japan and Japanese values.

 

The loyalist ideals inspired by the imperial .invtitution which sought to reassert the purity of Japanese culture and at times to incorporate Western technology to reinforce and strengthen these native concepts &is further strengthened by 01 her intellectual currents. The School of Oyomei or Wang Yang Ming,.the Chinese philosopher, argued that conventional reasons were not helpful as guidelines to action and the individual must search for these within oneself and act accordingly. These concepts inspired Oshio Heihachiro, a low level official, to give up his job and lead a rebellion in 1837.

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