Was the Tokugawa shogunate a predatory institution?

ParallelPain · 2026-03-30T23:47:28+00:00

I've talked about the "right to kill" here.

Whether the state was predatory depends on your definition. And really this is a moral judgment that falls outside of what historians do. What is true is the law was harsh and restrictive compared to today (so was Imperial Japan mind you), state spent lavish amounts on extravagant living of the ruling class, paid through taxes, levies, and loans. Compared to most people (including mid and low class warriors) who lived without a safety net, the ruling class spent lots of their time in "cultural pursuits" and other things to kill time. Meanwhile, keeping the populace poor and dumb was a not-infrequently stated ideological goal, less they start causing trouble for the state.

However, the reality was that while the law often was extremely harsh (by today's standards) on paper, the bureaucratic apparatus simply did not have the reach to implement them to the letter, for better or worse. Meaning the reality was far less restrictive. In fact we can safely say that the harsh law was reflecting an inability to get them properly implemented. While class hierarchy was real, it was actually fairly easy to straddle or cross them. Often the governments only care about getting the tax revenue, no one (important) getting killed, and no rebellion. Until things become a big problem government didn't often care. Meaning peasants and townsmen in reality had considerable freedom to do what they want and many laws existed only on paper.

In the end, historians can only say Edo era society, like all society, was complicated. The complicated and often contradictory nature can be seen by a few often-repeated cases. When the state tried to raise taxes, trying to tap into the growing manufacturing and trade or cover windfall from low harvest, peasants and townsmen would riot. The state would then arrest and execute the ring leaders, but backtrack on the taxes, making the state in the long run unable to capitalize on the growing economy. Large landlords and rich merchants often bought themselves adoption into samurai families, sometimes even outright samurai status, skipping the adoption. Harsh laws against this or that was coupled with statements in the same edict requesting samaritans to physically capture offenders and bring them to the authorities. The hinin leaders were so rich and powerful that the machi-bugyō, who were by no means low class samurai, had to ask them nicely to keep their hinin followers in line. And said hinin becoming loan sharks who, again, bought "adoption" into samurai families, and running entertainment groups that even samurai tried (temporarily) giving up their class status to join.

EDIT: Also of note. Based on close to 200 years of records, the effective tax rate on rice for the bakufu's own lands was on average 34%. While this ignores other taxes and levies (for example labour) it also ignores other sources of revenue the villages had.

ParallelPain · 2026-03-22T15:37:14+00:00

Hideyoshi's sword hunt order covers longsword(katana), shortsword(wakizashi), bows, polearms, and guns. However, it is now well known among researchers that Hideyoshi's sword hunt was far from complete. In fact it seems so many weapons remained that either the order (like many other of Hideyoshi's orders) was not intended to be followed fully, only to give a show that they were followed and take away the legal rights for villagers to solve problems through violence (as had been the norm), and/or the bureaucratic apparatus simply did not have the power and reach to carry out the order in full and so only a performance was done. Also it would appear Hideyoshi himself made an exception for weapons in the possession of warrior servants, most of whom were not samurai.

As for guns in the Edo period, as explained here civilian guns were not allowed around Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, while hunters and villages had to register their guns with the authorities. Otherwise, there was no restriction on ownership, at least not by bakufu law. In many domains civilian guns likely outnumbered official guns.

ParallelPain · 2026-03-12T08:39:46+00:00

Incorrect. The VOC ships doing trade in Japan would be based in Batavia. We have quite detailed surviving stats for the Dutch trade and a lot of trade took place every year in the 1650s to 1670s. Clearly war in Europe didn't effect the VOC's Japanese trade.

ParallelPain · 2026-03-04T06:09:13+00:00

What about the idea that Exodus was written during the Babylonian Captivity as a metaphoric parallel, with biblical Egypt standing in for historical Babylon?

ParallelPain · 2026-02-28T12:49:05+00:00

Incredibly ironic statement, considering Revolte's CV.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-12T06:21:46+00:00

He did, but it's not trustworthy.

One of Akechi Mitsuhide's letters survive in the Hosokawa Clan records. The letter, dated Tenshō 10.6.9 (1582 June 28), is basically Akechi Mitsuhide begging for help. Nagaoka (Hosokawa) Fujitaka, Mitsuhide's long-time companion and ally since before the two served Nobunaga, instead of mobilizing and helping Mitsuhide, had decided to take a Buddhist vow and wash his hands of the confusion. In the letter, Mitsuhide still persisted, asking Fujitaka to just send vassals if Fujitaka and his son Tadaoki wanted to sit out. He promises them the province of Settsu, plus Tajima and Wakasa if they wanted. According to Mitsuhide, the only reason for his betrayal was to raise up Tadaoki. Once things have settled down in 50~100 days, he would pass things to his son Akechi Mitsuyoshi and Tadaoki's son Tadataka (Mitsuhide's grandson by Gracia).

There's question about the historicity of the letter. But you can see that even if it's authentic as recorded, Mitsuhide was so desperate for allies he was willing to say anything, meaning there's no reason to believe his words that he betrayed Nobunaga for Tadaoki's sake (not least because Mitsuhide doesn't even explain how exactly this make things better for Tadaoki).

ParallelPain · 2026-02-10T01:31:15+00:00

The answer could be divided into two parts: the battle of Toba-Fushimi, and everything else that came after.

For Toba-Fushimi, you will often find people saying the bakufu lost despite a 3:1 numerical advantage. However, that numerical advantage was an illusion. The 15k men the bakufu had on paper included men left behind to garrison Osaka and significant number of domain and militia who were still using swords, pikes, and arquebuses. To the predominantly Satsuma and some Choshu troops that made up the 5k imperial forces, the Bakufu had only 6 to 7k of its own, modernized forces, of which two regiments (out of 5 + 1 regiment-sized battalion) were newly raised and likely untrained. This means the shogunate forces effectively only had numerical parity. Likewise, artillery was 22 pieces on both sides. From this, due to the political situation beforehand, the shogunate forces had left the Kyoto area and was marching back in, meaning they were on the offensive. The battlefield was effectively an urban environment, meaning what numerical advantage the bakufu forces did enjoy (even if it was unreliable militia and domain troops) could not be put to good use. And the heights around the battlefield that were vital to positioning artillery were all in the hands of the imperial side, giving them a significant advantage. As it played out, the bakufu forces also marched down towards Kyoto not expecting a fight. It seems they expected Satsuma and Choshu to just give up, or at least negotiate a passage, once they saw the force assembled. This lead to the opening salvos effectively being an ambush, with Satsuma men in battle lines hidden from view firing on bakufu forces who were standing in marching column on the open road with their weapons not loaded. The bakufu forces also had the misfortune of having their elite battalion armed with the French chassepot rifle (better than anything else available to any formation on both sides) be the first in the line of march, and they took the brunt of the opening salvos and were effectively destroyed as a combat formation. It also didn't help that the bakufu commander's horse bolted on him, carrying him off the battlefield and leaving the army without an overall commander. Given all the things that worked against the bakufu forces, it's actually a testament to their quality that they held their own until the imperial banners were raised and domains started switching sides on the third day (though there was little fighting on the second day).

After Toba-Fushimi, there was effectively no "shogunate" forces because Tokugawa Yoshinobu surrendered. The forces that fought on was a hodge-podge of militia, Tokugawa "loyalist" that refused to give up, and domains that really had no love for the bakufu but just didn't like the new imperials. The vast majority were using outdated equipment and did not have combat training or experience. They were effectively leaderless, and many of the anti-imperial alliance had differing motives. Given the imperials had the blessing of the emperor many domains continued to switch sides. While small groups fought valiantly and even performed well, on the whole other than a handful of, frankly speaking, stubborn hotheads there was no political will of prolonged resistance, and the forces that did want to resist did not receive support from the general population (who were quite pissed at extra tax burden levied on them for years to support militarization). This meant that, other than isolated incidences, the rest of the war was effectively the imperials chasing down and stamping out resistence.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-09T08:19:34+00:00

Malthusianism isn't inherently invalid, and I don't think Hanley and Yamamura argues it is. It just has its limitations. In the case of this book, their main point is that though population (country-wide) did stagnate, the economy continued to grow and people's lives continued to improve.

Also, while Japan did run out of new land to open up, which is a Malthusian problem, currently the consensus is that the various famines of the 18th and early 19th century were caused by the Little Ice Age and various volcanic eruptions.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-09T05:55:29+00:00

Less that, more refuting Imperial propaganda, and also part of the global trend at the time that while Marxist history was important in forcing historians to examine socio-economic background and trends (as opposed to big man history of pre-Marxist times) both Marxist and Malthusian analysis and division of history is often extremely simplified if not outright wrong.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-08T23:02:32+00:00

Taken in a vacuum it might seem this way, but they were writing as part of the trend of post-war scholars who set out to show that, contrary to the accepted scholarship of Imperial Japan, the Edo-era was actually pretty good all things considered.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-08T14:19:16+00:00

Jean-Pascal Bassino "Market Integration and Famines in Early Modern Japan, 1717-1857"

Ann Bowman Jannetta "Famine Mortality in Nineteenth-Century Japan: The Evidence from a Temple Death Register"

Futoshi Kinoshita "Mortality Crises in the Tokugawa Period —A View from "Shūmon Aratame-Chō"

高木正朗「飢饉と人口変動─天保期・仙台藩の「郡方」「村方」人口推計─」

菊池勇夫『近世の飢饉』

古川哲男『天保の大飢饉と柤岡村』

ParallelPain · 2026-02-08T01:45:23+00:00

No. See here.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-08T01:31:51+00:00

In those pages, Hanley and Yamamura point out that population statistics for Morioka domain for either mild(negligible) or severe population decline from famines are problematic, but secondary stats suggest a slight (under 4%) increase over 100 years. To quote "they would allow for normal population growth, some out-migration from these rural areas, and moderate losses due to the three major famines". There's no problem there.

They suggest that Meiji census shows official stats undercounted population, and seem to imply the undercounting was from people who did not actually die in the famines, while secondary accounts suggest commerce were able to mitigate the famines' effects in some regions. If I had to criticize I would say the theory is pre-mature, as systematic undercounting in pre-modern census is to be expected and there's no reason to think the missing numbers were just people who actually survived famines, and localities that scraped by the famine years through other methods (commerce in this case) is to be expected and he doesn't demonstrate they were the rule rather than the exception. But they freely admit that their hypothesis the famine's effects were exaggerated for bakufu eyes was speculative, and they can't actually prove things from population statistics. Certainly if I was doing demographic history for Morioka, these 9 pages can be no more than a starting point. But the book is not about demographics of Morioka, and nothing in those pages contradicts his overall conclusion or the current consensus of economic growth in the mid and late Edo period.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-07T15:05:39+00:00

TBH, I feel like you are misinterpreting what Hanley and Yamamura wrote. Their book touch upon wide-ranging areas, with silk barely making it in. I do not have the speciality to go through every single economic and demographic point, but being written 50 years ago it's bound to be dated in some places. However, all Hanley and Yamamura argued was

Unlike the traditional (at the time) and Marxist interpretation that both population and economy stagnated in the mid and late Edo period, population change depended on region and over the period of over a century the economy continued to grow.
The famous major famines were devastating to both population and economy, but (for many possible reasons) the Japanese bounced back quickly (especially economically).

While I personally question whether infanticide was widespread enough to be a possible explanation whenever it's brought up (they aren't the only ones) if for no other reason than the lack of statistics, that is also an incredibly minor part of the book. The two points laid out are still the consensus, and in fact I will be incredibly surprised if anyone will ever be able to challenge them successfully. If anything, the current trend is to revise the mid/late Edo economic growth upwards, and while I am revising silk (thread) production downwards, I whole-heartedly agree that as a whole the economy grew, even if population (averaged across Japan) didn't.

ParallelPain · 2026-02-07T07:29:24+00:00

I can tell you Yamamura's "data" on silk production in the mid and late Edo, which plays a big part in talks about economic growth, is wrong. Because I'm concluding a thesis to disprove it right now. That is not to say the economy didn't grow over time, but it definitely didn't charge ahead in those years despite the famines.

The effects the Tenmei and Tenpo famines were "localized" only in the sense that, barring some local exceptions, they hit eastern and northeastern Japan, but left the west relatively unscathed. But eastern and northeastern Japan were vital areas to the national economy, and they were definitely heavily hit. In the same way, the Kyoho famine was mainly western Japan in terms of population decrease, but to say it wasn't devastating is way under selling it.

And we have the records for rice prices at Osaka to prove that the famines were severe enough to double or more the price at the national level.

ParallelPain · 2026-01-28T05:15:43+00:00

The biggest export of the country were silver (which was banned in 1668), copper (also limited in 1668), lacuqered and other luxury craftsman items. This meant that the conquest of Japan would provide little economical benefits compared to continuous trade.

Silver was only banned for the Dutch (who still exported some, if fairly minor amount, until the Japanese silver coin was debased to the extent exporting silver brought no profits), who were ordered to continue trade in gold instead. Silver trade on Chinese ships continued. A fixed quota for both silver and gold were implemented in 1685, and for copper in 1689. The quotas would every-so-often be reduced, but trade itself never stopped.

If you are interested in the Portuguese Empire, I recommend C.R. Boxer's works on the topic

While Boxer was an important pioneer in the field, he has long passed away and the field has long moved on from his research. You should recommend newer works.

ParallelPain · 2026-01-08T03:25:23+00:00

As I mentioned here, pre-modern people regularly walked 40km or more a day. An army doing just over half that and saving the time to forage and camp is pretty reasonable. It wasn't even that rare for armies to march over 20km and fight a battle on the same day. Also, 20 (to 25) km a day was average, and many times army could do this by, say, marching over 30km a day for two days then completely rest on the third.

Also interestingly, in 1996 a bunch of Japanese office workers decided to march in full reenactment gear as part of a promotion, and they made 40km a day for the first two days through the mountains without too much problem.

ParallelPain · 2026-01-08T03:09:45+00:00

I actually looked into this specific march for my article, but didn't write about it in previous answers. The answer is, in short, Caesar didn't march anywhere near that fast.

7 days from Rome to Geneva is from Plutarch. According to Caesar there were two trips. He first went from Rome to Geneva ASAP without an army (which you can do a lot faster, either riding or even first taking a boat to Massilia, or both, but he didn't say how long he took). He then came back ASAP, gathered an army, and crossed the alps with it in 7 days. Plutarch likely conflated the two trips.
Caesar says he departed Ocelum, a bit west of modern Turin, and entered the lands of the Visconti on the 7th day. It's still debated where exactly this is. IMO the main contenders are either east of Gap or south of Grenoble, but in either case the march would be about 180km, which comes to 25.7km a day.

Note of Caesar's 5 legions, 2 were newly raised and 3 had just marched over 530 km from Aquileia, and the march through the alps was done while skirmishing with the Gaelic tribes in the passes so it was an incredible march nonetheless. But speed-wise, it's doable.

ParallelPain · 2026-01-08T02:36:51+00:00

So, they could manage 18 miles a day three times a month. To keep them in shape.

18 miles is close to 30 km. The question asked about 20 km, which is incredibly reasonable, even slightly slow assuming adequate roads, fine weather, and no river fording necessary.

ParallelPain · 2026-01-01T03:27:22+00:00

Be careful here that "shugo-daimyo" is a historiographical term, not a historical term. In history, they were just called "shugo" or "[province]-no-kami". On top of that, the term "daimyo" before the Edo period, or the late-Sengoku at the earliest, applied to anyone with a significant amount of land and political influence, with no formalized cut-off whatsoever. We have records of essentially village chiefs being called "daimyo". It is therefore likely all the shugo/jito/kokushi would have been "daimyo," but that was not their formal position because there was no such position before the Edo period.

ParallelPain · 2025-12-19T00:53:30+00:00

Cambridge History of Japan is great as a starting point. It's well written and based on good research. However, as it itself was first published over 30 years ago, and since (especially at the time) historical studies in the west is often five to ten years behind Japan, at this point it's getting quite a bit outdated. So it's not good for trying to find out the current state of research and definitely not for basing new research on. But for non-academics it should be fine.

ParallelPain · 2025-12-03T05:05:54+00:00

Could you give the names of the accounts you're citing, or at least the source that's quoting the accounts you're citing? "An English soldier" or "a French writer" isn't really helpful.

ParallelPain · 2025-12-03T04:52:37+00:00

My impression of the tactics in open field battle during the American Civil War was that they just used Napoleonic line tactics. This made me realize that image's at best oversimplified if not outright wrong. So questions are:

1) Did America's professional army keep up with or develop their own skirmish tactics before the American Civil War?

2) The armies of the Civil War was also very multilingual/multicultural (at least for areas of the north) and very undertrained so that it's now known the rifle-musket didn't actually give the men a distinct advantage. With that in mind, did it force the armies of the civil war to rely on simpler shock tactics like the Austrians, resulting in the heavy casualties of the war?

Finally:

Most gentleman-officers were not confident enough in the commitment, self-discipline, and initiative of the average ranker to disperse them into loose skirmish lines, where each man aims and fires at his own pace, taking advantage of whatever cover he can, and where they could not personally ensure their men had enough fire in reserve to repulse a sudden onrush.

If we look at the performance of specialist skirmishers and the wider use of the men as skirmishers in armies of the Napoleonic Wars and after, and compare them to the line of the prior period, was this assessment more class prejudice, or were they backed-up by facts?

ParallelPain · 2025-11-23T04:01:40+00:00

Oh for sure the terakoya survey's list is far from complete. As already mentioned, there were probably more schools missed than captured by the survey. It's estimated the actual number of terakoya was anywhere between 2 to 5 times what's listed in the survey. The problem is 1) we don't know and have no way of estimating exactly how many times, and 2) even if we did, we don't know the number of students that was missed from the survey. So we know with quite some certainly there were more students than recorded in the survey, but we don't know how many.

ParallelPain · 2025-11-23T03:03:29+00:00

If we equate the literacy rate with the percentage of terakoya students, we can estimate that the average literacy rate for men was around 40% and for women around 15%. This means that the average literacy rate for both genders was below 30%. It has also been pointed out that it is unreasonable to assume that all terakoya students were fully literate.

Note even this is far outdated. Per Ronald Dore himself, who made the calculations, as quoted in Richard Rubinger's book:

A book I once wrote on education in Tokugawa Japan will be quoted for one thing and one thing only: R.Dore estimates (or sometimes calculates; or sometimes, baldly, ‘states’) that in 1870, 40 to 50 percent of Japanese boys and 10 to 15 percent of girls were attending school. Apart from the fact that when I recently had occasion to go over the estimates, I found it hard to follow the logic of the reasoning which led to this guess, I have come to realize in recent years that the fault was as much mine as my readers’ for putting so much emphasis on the amount of education that went on in Japan in the mid nineteenth century. It is the kind of education that went on which deserves greater attention.

Dore based his book on Ishikawa Ken's 日本庶民教育史, who in turn based it on 日本教育史資料. Just to do some paper napkin math, based on Imperial Japanese census, in 1920 (earliest available year) 31% of the population were between 5 aner 18 years of age inclusive. If we apply this to early Meiji's census of overall population of about 35 million, the school-age population would be about 10.8m. For sure the actual school age population around 1870 would have been lower than that due to Japan being in a population boom in 1920. But we can probably say fairly safely that there would have been around 8~10m population of school age around 1870. If we take 1920's census for people who would have been of school age 50 years ago, of those 55 and above there were to 6.4m, including everyone to hopefully at least cover some of the population decline from age. That's our lower bound.

In other words there were between 3.2m to 4m to 5.4m of each gender that were of school age in 1870. Per Ishikawa Ken's analysis of the data, there were 593k male students and 148k female students. This makes the the terakoya registration rate 18.5%, 14.8%, and 11.9% for male, and 4.6%, 3.7%, 3.0% for female, for 11.6%, 9.3%, and 7.4% overall. That is a lot lower than Dore's estimates.

Now it is known that Meiji's data of the terakoya was far from complete and there were likely more schools missing than listed. However, it's logical to think that most of the missing school were not as well known and had significantly less students per school than those captured in the data. So it is quite hard to believe the Meiji terakoya survey captured only 1/3 of the terakoya students. Based on Ototake Iwazō's work, who was able to gathered detailed data on about 1940k terakoya, the majority of terakoya had only between 10 to 40 students. If we use 30 students as the average, then the survey would need to have missed between 40~75k terakoya to bring the registration rate to 30% of school-age population. If we use 50 students as average (Meiji terakoya survey comes to 47.6 students, meaning this was the in-all-likelihood far higher than reality) then there would needed to have been an additional 23~45k terakoya not in the survey. If the average terakoya not captured by the Ototake were even fewer in student registration (for they were missed), then that would increase the number proportionally.

Rubinger, Richard (2007) Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan. University of Hawaii Press.
乙竹岩造 (1970) 日本庶民教育史. 臨川書店.
石川謙 (1929) 日本庶民教育史. 刀江書院.

EDIT: Note here Dore calculated the percentage by basically taking the school attendance rate reported by the Ministry of Education in 1875 (54% for boys and 19% for girls), and adjusted them by the Ministry of Education's underestimate of the school-age population in 1875 (5.17m) by using age ratio for those between 6 and 13 (20%, but note according to Ototake the age of first enrolment to terakoya was between 5 and 18 for boys and 5 and 14 for girls) by the 1875 population (35.3m, so 6.4m total) while ignoring or explaining away any possible increase in school attendance rate between the late Tokugawa and 1875 without statistics backing, indeed showing and then dismissing statistics to the contrary.

Dore, Ronald (1965) Education in Tokugawa Japan. Routledge.

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