Lust, Commerce, and Corruption

An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai

Fumiko Miyazaki, Anne Walthall, John Breen, Mark Teeuwen, Kate Wildman Nakai

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780231535977
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia giapponese

By 1816, Japan had recovered from the famines of the 1780s and moved beyond the political reforms of the 1790s. Despite persistent economic and social stresses, the country seemed to be approaching a new period of growth. The idea that the shogunate would not last forever was far from anyone's mind.

Yet, in that year, an anonymous samurai author completed one of the most detailed critiques of Edo society known today. Writing as Buyo Inshi, "a retired gentleman of Edo," he expresses a profound despair with the state of the realm and with people's behavior and attitudes. He sees decay wherever he turns and believes the world will soon descend into war.

Buyo shows a familiarity with many corners of Edo life that one might not expect in a samurai. He describes the corruption of samurai officials; the suffering of the poor in villages and cities; the operation of brothels; the dealings of blind moneylenders; the selling and buying of temple abbotships; and the dubious strategies townspeople use in the law courts. Perhaps the frankness of his account, which contains a wealth of concrete information about Edo society, made him prefer to remain anonymous.

This volume contains a full translation of Buyo's often-quoted but rarely studied work by a team of specialists on Edo society. Together with extensive annotation of the translation, the volume includes an introduction that situates the text culturally and historically.

Part 1

BUYŌ INSHI AND HIS TIMES

What kind of society was Japan in the early nineteenth century? Many have contrasted Japan’s Edo period (1600–1868) to the Qing of neighboring China as an early modern era of progress, stressing that developments during that time prepared the country for its rapid rise in the world after the Meiji coup of 1868. Others have taken a negative view, portraying the period as an age of isolation and stagnation. These describe Edo Japan as a country caught in a time bubble, from which it could be saved only by a tidal wave of catch-up Westernization. One school of thought sees the Edo period as an era of peace that produced one of the world’s great civilizations, while another stresses the price that was paid for that peace. The former holds Edo Japan up as a highly urbanized society, boasting unrivaled literacy rates and ruled by a relatively humane bureaucracy. The latter protests that Edo society was as feudal as it was modern, based as it was on the principle that power should be hereditary and on a rigid system of class and gender discrimination.

There is some truth in all these perspectives. In the later Edo period Japan was a country of as many as thirty-two million people (exceeding any state in Europe except Russia), of whom more than one million lived in the shogunal city of Edo. Only a limited portion of the country was ruled directly by the central shogunal government; much of the population came under the jurisdiction of semi-independent domains. Restrictions on geographical and social mobility and an approach to governance that favored self-administration meant that rural communities retained a high degree of autonomy. Yet at the same time, countless official channels and unofficial loopholes ensured that no village or domain remained unconnected to nationwide networks of trade, religion, and politics.

All societies, of course, are multidimensional; Edo Japan was perhaps even more so than most. It is little wonder, then, that contemporary understandings of Edo society were no less diverse than modern historical accounts. Writings analyzing, describing, and criticizing the society of the time were by no means rare. This volume contains the translation of one such work. Titled Matters of the World: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard (Seji kenbunroku, or, in an alternative reading, Seji kenmonroku), it is among the Edo period’s most sustained attempts to examine society critically in its entirety, from shogunal worthies at the top to outcasts of various kinds at the bottom. Both the prologue and the final chapter of this substantial work, which in the most accessible modern edition fills more than 440 pages, are dated Bunka 13 (1816). Little is known about the text’s author, intended audience, or original purpose. The author’s identity remains hidden behind the pseudonym Buyō Inshi, “a retired gentleman of Edo.”¹ The text initially circulated only in manuscript, with parts of it published for the first time half a century after the time of writing.²

Buyō (as we will refer to him) reveals remarkably little about himself in the course of his lengthy account. There is no doubt that he was based in Edo and that he belonged to the warrior class. He identifies closely with the shogunate and has much less to say about the domains; this suggests that he may have been a retired shogunal retainer of some kind. On the other hand, Buyō reveals an intimate knowledge of many corners of society well beyond what one would expect of an elite samurai. In one passage, he recalls that for a while he “was able to make a little money” by means that he now regards as foul, but recently “stopped doing such improper things” and has “once again fallen into poverty” (see page 398). From such remarks and from Buyō’s interest in and knowledge of money lending, the handling of lawsuits, and Edo city life, researchers have surmised that he may well have had a connection with one of the protolawyers who unofficially assisted plaintiffs bringing suits (related mostly to debts and loans) in shogunal courts.³ Readers of Musui’s Story, the autobiography of another retired samurai written in the 1840s, may detect a certain resemblance to the multiple “fixers” on the margins of late Edo warrior society who populate its pages.⁴ Whatever Buyō’s background and earlier experiences, they evidently left him in a position of relative independence that allowed him to take an informed, if censorious, look at the world with some critical distance.

Buyō had the advantage over modern-day historians that he could describe Edo Japan firsthand. The reader will soon notice, however, that this does not necessarily make his account more objective, balanced, or even true. Buyō holds strong opinions about the way the world should be and measures society against those standards. His agenda is not to produce a Balzac-like naturalist portrait of his time. The anecdotes and descriptions of social practices that he includes often show a moralistic, not to say reactionary, perspective on the social dynamics of Edo. One scholar of the period has aptly characterized Matters of the World as “an articulate loser’s view of the times,”⁵ and the book is unquestionably as much a work of ideology as of history. Much postwar historical research on the Edo period has endeavored to relativize such a view and offer less ideologically biased readings of the record. Thanks to this research, it has now become clear that a good deal of what Buyō describes should be taken with a grain (or lump) of salt. Nevertheless, Buyō’s sharp delineation of the social and economic contradictions of late Edo life remains compelling, as do the vivid details he provides of financial and legal doings, and academic as well as more popular studies continue to cite him widely.⁶

When read as a window on Edo thought, Matters of the World introduces us to a section of the period’s intellectual scene that has been largely neglected in the literature on Japan’s history of ideas. Buyō does not number among the thinkers whom specialists of the period’s intellectual history have typically singled out for analysis, such as his more “progressive” contemporaries Kaiho Seiryō (1755–1817) and Honda Toshiaki (1744–1821). Buyō’s language is far from sophisticated, and his use of Confucian, Buddhist, and Kokugaku (“nativist”) concepts is eclectic, to say the least. Buyō expresses disdain for intellectuals who do their studies “sitting at a desk” (417), and although he mentions various authors in passing, he stresses that his knowledge of the world derives from his own observations. “Over the years,” he writes, “I have used my free time to mingle widely with people in the world,” making a conscious effort to befriend people from all walks of life (35). In many ways, his views echo a broadly shared “common sense” that exerted considerable influence on warrior politics in nineteenth-century Japan. As such, they offer something that more polished intellectual treatises may not: a picture of that common sense in action.

Buyō’s thesis is a simple one. In 1600, after over a century of endemic warfare, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), whom he refers to as the Divine Lord (Shinkun), established a near-perfect society through his mastery of the military Way. Seventeenth-century Japan was, in Buyō’s eyes, an era when frugal farmers supported a benevolent regime of enlightened warriors. These two classes, which together form the “foundation of the state,” were bound together by a mutual sense of duty, respect, and even understanding. Over time, however, the superb order created by Ieyasu and maintained by his immediate successors gave rise to wealth. As the world filled with “splendor,” merchants and “idlers” (yūmin) grew in number and consumed more and more of the state’s resources. As a result, money took over the world, corrupting even the warriors and the farmers. The Way of duty and righteousness succumbed to the Way of greed. For every merchant or idler who grew rich, hundreds if not thousands of farmers and even warriors were thrown into poverty. As money entered into people’s social relationships, natural intimacy and solidarity gave way to heartless calculation and alienation. A return to the golden age of the Divine Lord might no longer be possible, but at least it should serve as a guide to those currently in authority. To prevent the impending collapse of the realm, the number of townspeople and idlers—including nonproductive people such as popular writers, artists, and entertainers—should be reduced and the warrior class should restore its grip on the world. The key to such essential reform, Buyō argues, is to reassert the primacy of the military Way.

To understand Buyō’s anger, his analyses, and his proposed solutions, we need some sense of the historical context in which Matters of the World was written. To that end, here we first take a closer look at the larger structures of society in mid-Edo. Then we address some of the events in the age that must have formed Buyō’s worldview: the decades around 1800. Finally, we trace Buyō’s major concepts and categories and sketch the intellectual landscape that informed his outlook.

SOCIETY IN MID-EDO

How was society organized in Buyō’s day? Traditional theory divided the population into four classes: warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants (shinōkōshō). Reality was more complicated. In the broadest terms, one can arrange these different segments of society into two categories: the ruling and the ruled. The former included shogunal and domainal warriors (bushi), the court nobility in Kyoto, and the temple clergy. The latter can be divided into farmers (hyakushō), townspeople (chōnin), and outcasts (eta and hinin); “artisans” did not constitute a social category of their own in any meaningful sense. These groups were clearly distinguished from one another, entered into different census or household registers, and subject to different laws and rules. Less easy to categorize were free vocations, such as physicians and performers of different kinds. There was also a considerable number of “unregistered persons” (mushuku), people who had fallen out of the register system and thus were no longer incorporated in the basic framework of social control. Buyō designed his work around a simplified version of this social hierarchy: warriors, farmers, townspeople, and idlers.

WARRIORS

Warriors of the Edo period differed fundamentally from their forebears in that, after the initial decade or so, they were not called upon to fight. Further, policies adopted by national and regional leaders in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries had resulted in warriors’ being removed from their landholdings in the countryside and gathered in the castle towns that consequently sprung up throughout Japan. The largest such castle town was Edo, built both literally and metaphorically around the shogunal castle, which occupied the large area that today serves as the imperial palace. In Buyō’s time its resident was the eleventh shogun, Tokugawa Ienari (r. 1787–1837), whose reign was the longest of the fifteen Tokugawa shogun. The shogun held directly lands producing some four million koku;⁷ controlled the main cities, harbors, and mines; had a monopoly on minting coin; and supervised the largest markets in Osaka and Edo. A further three million koku of land were distributed as fiefs (chigyōsho) among the upper ranks of some fifty-two hundred shogunal retainers called bannermen (hatamoto), although almost all the holders of these fiefs resided permanently in Edo.⁸ Bannermen filled most civil and military positions in the shogunate, except for the very highest. Below them were some seventeen thousand housemen (gokenin). As a rule, these men did not hold fiefs but received fixed stipends of rice; the same was true for more than half the bannermen. What distinguished housemen from bannermen in formal terms was that housemen did not have the privilege of attending an audience with the shogun; Buyō often refers to them as “below audience rank.”

Both bannermen and housemen were organized in units under a chief (kashira) of higher rank or placed under the supervision (shihai) of some office. Appointments to official duties were channeled through these chiefs and supervisors, as were disciplinary matters. Such duties, which could involve both extra income and extra cost...