| Ieyasu Tokugawa |
Ieyasu Tokugawa (1542-1616) established his
government in 1603. Coincidentally, it is the same year that Queen Elizabeth
the First passed away in Great Britain. As is often the case, one has gone, and
one is born. His greatest achievement is that he brought an end to the age of civil
wars. He is often said to have only completed the ideas created by Nobunaga Oda
who is the most innovative and creative warlord in the Japanese history, but it
is not too much to say that he successfully built the foundation for the unity
of Japanese under the name of peace.
The Tokugawa government is associated with
the policy of national isolation, but we have to take note that it never used
the phrase national isolation. What the Tokugawa government tried to do was to
prevent Japanese from being affected by Christianity that was militant in those
days. That is why the Netherlands, a country of Protestants, was allowed to do
business with Japanese in Nagasaki Prefecture. Anyway, national isolation
helped the government last for such a long period of 265 years. And the
peace-loving mindset of Japanese can originate in the peaceful period under the
Tokugawa regime.
The Tokugawa government did not need
military force because of the lasting peace for the 265 years. This is because
it was so stunned by the arrival of four steam ships led by Matthew Calbraith Perry of the United States in 1853. Reflecting the easy-going policy of
being satisfied with peace, the Meiji government hastily built up military
strength to catch up with Western countries. The radical reform changed the
mindset of Japanese in some ways and resulted in the disaster in 1945, and now
Japanese proclaim the importance of peace. History repeats itself.
He is a great leader, but he failed to work
out measures for samurai warriors. In a sense, Ieyasu Tokugawa established his
government entirely thanks to the efforts of his samurai warriors. Nonetheless,
he sacrificed them for the sake of peace. However, abandoning samurai warriors
was the right policy to promote peace across the country, however ruthless and
merciless it was. To make up for the sacrifice of samurai warriors, the
Tokugawa government categorized Japanese people into four classes and gave the
samurai warriors the highest class of the four. The profession of samurai was
followed by agriculture, industry, and commerce in this order.
In the age of civil wars, samurai warriors
fought for a reward that was usually land. However, as population grew, land
for allocation to samurai warriors for reward grew smaller and there were
scarcely any more land for allocation around the time when Ieyasu Tokugawa
opened his government. Actually, the Tokugawa government had no way but to
sacrifice samurai warriors to promote peace throughout Japan. In any event, the
determination to promote peace seems to have affected the mindset of Japanese
seeking eagerly for peace, like it or not.
Reproduced cityscape in the Edo period
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