> In a way, the Tokugawa system was a success. Japan experienced near-total peace between 1600 and the late nineteenth century, a remarkable achievement for a premodern society and a dramatic contrast to Europe or China, where tens of millions of people died in wars.
> Tokugawa Edo stands as a monument to the power of rent-seekers, producing little and demanding immense resources as a condition of civil peace.
The two dominant political axes. Which of is more repellent to you: a rigid stable social system based around millions of rent seeking parasitic landlords, or frequent social upheaval and conflict and open warfare
I guess if I am one of the landlords, or if rents are very reasonable and competitive I prefer the former. However, if it becomes the case that I am having all of my productivity extracted by rent seekers and I no longer have agency over my own life then the benefits of stability get downgraded and I'm much more willing to roll the dice.
Warfare, or more plainly the deaths of many, seems like a pretty decisive tiebreaker: whatever the flip side of the option that involves the death of thousands is, I will choose that. Of course, without this example, most people would say something like the downside isn't that bad; this case study is instructive because it shows that yes, it is.
It's not a perspective we usually see: the nobility, not as a noble or morally elite class, but as a problem that a successful government can manage and minimize, without violence.
One thing that I find interesting about this is that "samurai lived in dignified but extreme poverty" but never really did anything to threaten the state and take its riches for themselves for hundreds of years, despite all of them being crammed together with lots of opportunity to organize an enormous rebellion right in the city where the king lived.
Perhaps they didn't think of it as poverty. Anyway, great read.
I suspect that, in reality, it is the indignity of poverty which motivates people to take up arms against each other. So long as dignity is retained, poverty may be emotionally bearable (perhaps to the point of actual starvation, when dignity becomes unsustainable).
That's pretty wise. I never considered that. During the very late part of the edo period China had the Taiping Rebellion, the deadliest religious civil war in human history by some meansures.
I've read that it was caused by a very complicated mix of things, one of which was resentment of the northern Manchu ethnic group which ruled China, combined with terrible floods and famine. Perhaps that's a case where lack of dignity helped cause war. People were starving, but in addition they felt disgruntled. I have a 1000 page book on that which I've been meaning to read for a year, so I'm sure I'll look back on this analysis and cringe when I finally get around to it.
It makes sense. Otherwise people would never become monks in certain sects, because there’s an innate indignity to poverty but subsuming yourself to a higher purpose negates the indignity.
They very much understood their situation. That was the means of control. Their incomes were directly defined by agricultural productivity, and their expenses largely controlled by the shogun. Daimyo couldn't meaningfully communicate with each other, easily intermarry, or form alliances. They were forced to maintain huge retinues and lavish estates, and the shogun could bankrupt them or kill their family at any point.
The shogunate needed to do some balancing along the way (including the introduction of metallic currency), but the government had enough levers to keep the samurai in line, right up until they couldn't.
To add on to this, the wives and heirs of daimyo had to live semi-permanently in the capital, which gave the shogun a powerful leverage over his subordinates. Any murmuring of an uprising would result in his family (and heirs) being killed. Nor was there freedom of movement across domains; this had to be granted by the shogun, preventing daimyo from easily communicating and organising.
Approximately 50-75% of a daimyo's budget went towards maintenance and boarding costs for when they were in attendance at the shogun's court. "Commerce" was considered a lowly profession not befitting a proud samurai. Most of their wealth was obtained through their right to collect agricultural taxes, which was granted to them by the daimyo.
While the samurai were a caste descended from warriors, after hundreds of years of peace they had largely become "sword-wearing bureaucrats". They weren't all that competent or experienced in warfare. They carried swords and practiced martial arts, but this was just as much a LARP (to use a modern phrase): a means of connecting to their martial heritage.
Looking at rebellions and revolutions in Europe (just because I know european history better than asian history), they tend to start when someone (not necessarily the poor) feel than the upper class/the king is not doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's not a cash grab, and in a lot of revolt what the rich have and don't deserve is not taken and distributed, but rather destroyed to show that it's about punishing traitors of the social contract, not robbing them.
Loved it. This is some necessary background that helps me contextualize a few other oddities of the time period that I have had floating in my short term memory
- Miyamoto Musashi (d. 1645)
- Tsujigiri, random slashing of bystanders
- the Great wave off Kanagawa, painted towards the end of the Edo period
- Shinobi evolving from mercenaries into secret police
This is fascinating after learning about and rading Peter Turchin's concept of Eelite overproduction [1]. The theory is that much of society's conflicts are actually fights between the elite and that this happens when the elite start fighting for the same resources.
From that point of view they seemed to have created a system that stopped the elites from starting wars with each other by imprisoning their families. And although they levered high taxes they did force many elites to accept a small amount of resources per elite to the point that some in elite status were effectively poor. Instead of money they got status and a title.
A nice article! It really does a great job of describing the hostage nature of keeping the various daimyo in check.
One thing that I think is commonly misstated though, is that this period was one of "peace".
When viewed from the elite perspective, the power struggles between daimyo in the Warring States Era had subsided, but for the common people, the Edo Period was anything but peaceful.
The samurai class could chop up any commoner at any time, for any reason, or no reason. Sometimes just to "test" a new sword, or because their "honor" had been challenged (maybe the person didn't get out of the way and bow fast enough).
After Bioshock Infinite came out, I imagined how cool it would be to have a shogunate-era Japanese version of it called "Floating World Edo", rendered in the style of ukiyo-e prints (which term means "pictures of the floating world"). Perhaps an alternate-universe Tokugawa family would use their floating capital to keep their daimyō in line, not by forcing them to live in Edo for half the year, but by bringing Edo directly to them. Yes, I know that's basically Laputa. (Fun fact: The bits in Gulliver's Travels concerning Laputa and Balnibarbi contain descriptions of not just an LLM, but a fairly typical organizational "AI transformation" replete with a skeptical holdout at risk of being punished by upper management for not embracing the new hotness!)
The part that stuck with me is the chō: 1,500+ walled blocks with gated alleys, the control built right into the streets. A commoner born there would never have known a city that wasn't a grid of gates, so to them it wouldn't feel like a cage at all, just normal.
Makes me wonder how much of our own daily background, the zoning, the cameras, the commutes, is just an old answer to some political problem nobody remembers was ever a question.
> Tokugawa Edo stands as a monument to the power of rent-seekers, producing little and demanding immense resources as a condition of civil peace.
The two dominant political axes. Which of is more repellent to you: a rigid stable social system based around millions of rent seeking parasitic landlords, or frequent social upheaval and conflict and open warfare
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