The farmers, in spite of their legal defenselessness against the samurai, the heavy levies of rice made upon them and all the restrictions imposed upon them, had certain securities guaranteed them. They were guaranteed the possession of their farms and to have land gives a man prestige in Japan. Under the Tokugawa regime, land could not be permanently alienated and this law was a guarantee for the individual cultivator, not, as in European feudalism, for the feudal lord. The farmer had a permanent right to something which he valued supremely and he appears to have worked his land with the same diligence and unstinting care with which his descendants cultivate their rice fields today. Nevertheless, he was the Atlas who supported the whole parasitic upper class of about two million persons, including the government of the Shogun, the establishments of the daimyo and the stipends of the samurai retainers. He was taxed in kind, that is, he paid to the daimyo a percentage of his crops. Whereas in Siam, another wet-rice country, the traditional tax is 10 per cent, in Tokugawa Japan it was 40 per cent. But in reality it was higher than this. In some fiefs it was 80 per cent and always there was corvée or work requisitions, which bore down on the strength and time of the farmer. Like the samurai, the farmers also limited their families and the population of the whole of Japan stood at almost the same figure during all the Tokugawa centuries. For an Asiatic country during a long period of peace these static population figures tell a great deal about the regime. It was Spartan in its restrictions, both on the tax-supported retainers and on the producing class, but between each dependent and his superior, it was relatively dependable. A man knew his obligations, his prerogatives and his station and if these were infringed upon the poorest might protest.
The farmers, even in the direst poverty, carried their protests not only to the feudal lord but to the Shogunate authorities. There were at least a thousand of these revolts during the two and a half Tokugawa centuries. They were not occasioned by the traditional heavy rule of ‘40 per cent to the prince and 60 per cent to the cultivators’; they were all protests against additional levies. When conditions were no longer bearable, the farmers might march in great numbers against their overlords but the procedure of petition and judgment was orderly. The farmers drew up formal petitions for redress which they submitted to the daimyo’s chamberlain. When this petition was intercepted or the daimyo took no notice of their complaints they sent their representatives to the capital to present their written complaints to the Shogunate. In famous cases they could insure its delivery only by inserting it into some high official’s palanquin as he rode through the streets of the capital. But, no matter what risks the farmers took in delivering the petition, it was then investigated by the Shogunate authorities and about half of the judgments were in favor of the peasants.
Japan’s requirements of law and order were not satisfied, however, with the Shogunate’s judgment on the farmers’ claims. Their complaints might be just and it might be advisable for the State to honor them, but the peasant leaders had transgressed the strict law of hierarchy. Regardless of any decision in their favor, they had broken the essential law of their allegiance and this could not ho overlooked. They were therefore condemned to death. The righteousness of their cause had nothing to do with the matter. Even the peasants accepted this inevitability. The condemned men were their heroes and the people came in numbers to the execution where the leaders were boiled in oil or beheaded or crucified, but at the execution the crowds did not riot. This was law and order. They might afterward build the dead men shrines and honor them as martyrs, but they accepted the execution as part and parcel of the hierarchal laws by which they lived.
The Tokugawa Shoguns, in short, attempted to solidify the caste structure within each fief and to make each class dependent on the feudal lord. The daimyo stood at the apex of the hierarchy in each fief and he was allowed to exercise his prerogatives over his dependents. The Shogun’s great administrative problem was to control the daimyo. In every way he prevented them from forming alliances or from carrying out schemes of aggression. Passport and customs officials were maintained at the frontiers of the fiefs to keep strict watch for ‘outgoing women and incoming guns’ lest any daimyo try to send his women away and smuggle arms in. No daimyo could contract a marriage without the Shogun’s permission lest it might lead to a dangerous political alliance. Trade between the fiefs was hindered even to the extent of allowing bridges to become impassable. The Shogun’s spies too kept him well informed on the daimyo’s expenditures and if the feudal coffers were filling up, the Shogun required him to undertake expensive public works to bring him in line again. Most famous regulation of all was that the daimyo live half of each year in the capital and, even when he returned to his fief for his residence there, he had to leave his wife behind him in Yedo (Tokyo) as a hostage in the hands of the Shoguns. In all these ways the administration made certain that it maintain the upper hand and enforce its dominant position in the hierarchy.
The Shogun was not, of course, the final keystone in this arch for he held sway as the appointee of the Emperor. The Emperor with his court of hereditary nobles (kuge) was isolated in Kyoto and was without actual power. The Emperor’s financial resources were less than those of even lesser daimyos and the very ceremonies of the court were strictly circumscribed by Shogunate regulations. Not even the most powerful Tokugawa Shoguns, however, took any steps to do away with this dual rule of Emperor and actual ruler. It was no new thing in Japan. Since the twelfth century a Generalissimo (Shogun) had ruled the country in the name of a throne shorn of actual authority. In some centuries division of function had gone so far that the real power which the shadowy Emperor delegated to a hereditary secular chief was exercised in turn by a hereditary advisor of that chief. There has always been delegation upon delegation of original authority. Even in the last and desperate days of the Tokugawa regime, Commodore Perry did not suspect the existence of an Emperor in the background and our first envoy, Townsend Harris, who negotiated the first commercial treaty with Japan in 1858, had to discover for himself that there was an Emperor.