The merchants ranked just above the outcasts. However strange this seems to Americans, it was highly realistic in a feudal society. A merchant class is always disruptive of feudalism. As business men become respected and prosperous, feudalism decays. When the Tokugawas, by the most drastic laws any nation has ever enforced, decreed the isolation of Japan in the seventheenth century, they cut the ground from under the feet of the merchants. Japan had had an overseas trade all up and down the coast of China and Korea and a class of traders had been inevitably developing. The Tokugawas stopped all this by making it an offense worthy of capital punishment to build or operate any boat larger than a certain size. The small boats allowed could not cross to the continent or carry loads of trade, goods. Domestic trade was severely restricted, too, by customs barriers which were set up on the borders of each with strict rules against letting goods in or out. Other laws were directed toward emphasizing the merchant’s low social position. Sumptuary laws regulated the clothes they could wear, the umbrellas they could carry, the amount they could spend for a wedding or a funeral. They could not live in a samurai district. They had no legal protection against the swords of the samurai, the privileged warriors. The Tokugawa policy of keeping the merchants in inferior stations failed of course in a money economy, and Japan at that period was run on a money economy. But it was attempted.
The two classes which are appropriate to a stable feudalism, the warriors and the farmers, the Tokugawa regime froze into rigid forms. During the civil wars that were finally ended by Ieyasu, the great war-lord, Hideyoshi, had already completed, by his famous ‘sword hunt,’ the separation of these two classes. He had disarmed the peasants and given to the samurai the sole right to wear swords. The warriors could no longer be farmers nor artisans nor merchants. Not even the lowest of them could any longer legally be a producer; he was a member of a parasitic class which drew its annual rice stipend from taxes levied upon the peasants. The daimyo handled this rice and distributed to each samurai retainer his allotted income. There was no question about where the samurai had to look for support; he was wholly dependent upon his lord. In earlier eras of Japanese history strong ties between the feudal chief and his warriors had been forged in almost ceaseless war between the fiefs; in the Tokugawa era of peace the ties became economic. For the warrior-retainer, unlike his European counterpart, was not a sub-seigneur owning his own land and serfs nor was he a soldier of fortune. He was a pensioner on a set stipend which had been fixed for his family line at the beginning of the Tokugawa Era. It was not large. Japanese scholars have estimated that the average stipend of all samurai was about what farmers were earning and that was certainly bare subsistence. Nothing could be more to the family’s disadvantage than division of this stipend among heirs and in consequence the samurai limited their families. Nothing could be more galling to them than prestige dependent on wealth and display, so they laid great stress in their code on the superior virtues of frugality.
A great gulf separated the samurai from the other three classes: the farmers, the artisans and the merchants. These last three were ‘common people.’ The samurai were not. The swords the samurai wore as their prerogative and sign of caste were not may decorations. They had the right to use them on the common people. They had traditionally done so before Tokugawa times and the laws of Ieyasu merely sanctioned old customs when they decreed: ‘Common people who behave unbecomingly to the samurai or who do not show respect to their superiors may be cut down on the spot.’ It was no part of Ieyasu’s design that mutual dependence should be built up between common people and the samurai retainers. His policy was based on strict hierarchal regulations. Both classes headed up to the daimyo and reckoned directly with him; they were on different stairways, as it were. Up and down each stairway there was law and regulation and control and reciprocity. Between the people on two stairways there was merely distance. The separateness of the two classes was necessarily bridged by circumstances over and over again but it was not a part of the system.
During the Tokugawa Era samurai retainers were not mere sword-swingers. They became increasingly the stewards of their overlords’ estates and specialist in peaceful arts like the classical drama and the tea ceremony. All protocol lay in their sphere and the daimyo’s intrigues were carried out by their skilled manipulations. Two hundred years of peace is a long time and mere individual sword-swinging had its limits. Just as the merchants, in spite of the caste regulations, developed a way of life that gave high place to urbane and artistic and pleasurable pursuits, so the samurai, in spite of their ready swords, developed arts of peace.