Season 11, Episode 9: The Righteous Reign of Tokugawa Tsunayoshi

As far as Tokugawa shoguns go, Tsunayoshi is considered something of a character. Before he succeed his late older brother Ietsuna in 1680, the Roju Sakai Tadakiyo had advocated placing an imperial prince on the shogunal throne rather than another member of the Tokugawa family. Thanks to the energetic support of elder Hotta Masatoshi, Tsunayoshi was installed as shogun instead and Sakai Tadakiyo resigned soon thereafter. Upon his elevation, Tsunayoshi promoted Hotta Masatoshi to the position of Tairo, ostensibly as a thank-you for his support.

His reign would last for nearly 30 years, making him one of the longest reigning shoguns of the Tokugawa Dynasty. Far from being a set-it-and-forget-it type of leader, he was constantly active in both areas of reform and day-to-day governance and seemed to be driven by a stone determination to reshape Japan into an idealized realm with happy subjects, incorruptible government, devout religious leaders, and also a safe haven for dogs. Lofty goals to be certain.

Before we delve too greedily and too deeply into Tsunayoshi’s radical policies and activities, we need to become more familiar with his background and upbringing. Historians generally attribute his unique character, charismatic personality, and somewhat wacky tendencies to his mother’s influence. While sometimes this manner of attribution is meant to cover over eccentric, destructive behavior, in this case we have good evidence that his mother really was a direct influence over this singularly fascinating shogun and not simply a convenient female to absorb blame.

His mother was known as Otama and was an adopted daughter of the Honjo family, a samurai family whose forebears had fallen on hard times as ronin during a period in which masterless samurai were treated with suspicion and severity by the Bakufu. They were fortunate enough to be connected with the Rokujo family, who were a well-off family of Kyoto, and Iemitsu pursued Otama as a consort. She gave birth to the future shogun Tsunayoshi in early 1646.

Although she had met with the good fortune of adoption into a samurai family, Otama’s natural parents were common merchants from Kyoto. Thus she felt a connection to the common people which most aristocrats were entirely separate from. Stories would later claim that Iemitsu noticed Tsunayoshi’s talents from an early age and, fearing a future usurpation by the young man, ordered that he should become a scholar and not train as a warrior. However, Iemitsu died when Tsunayoshi was five years old, and thus such stories of early-age perspicacity are believed to be fabrications. The only grain of truth they contain is that Tsunayoshi very eagerly pursued scholarship and education, being especially drawn towards the neo-Confucianism promoted by an earlier Chinese scholar named Zhu Xi.

The influence of Zhu Xi (CHU SHI) upon Chinese philosophy is difficult to overstate. His life spanned most of the 1100s, and he was active during the decline of the Southern Song Dynasty. While other prominent Neo-Confucians of his time focused on defining metaphysics using the I Ching, he focused instead on a group of works called the four books – specifically Great Learning, The Doctrine of the Mean, The Analects of Confucius, and the book of Mencius. The crux of his conclusions were that everything in the world has li, which means rational principle, and qi, which means something like “life force.” Together these two mutually dependent elements combine to form Taiji, or the “Supreme Creative Principle.” Although his commentaries on the Four Books were largely rejected during his lifetime by the scholarly establishment, they were eventually adopted by future scholars and philosophers and later formed the basis of the civil service examination, a status he would enjoy until 1905.

One thing we can say with a high degree of certainty regarding Tsunayoshi is that he was a man of strong beliefs and an equally strong will. Throughout the course of his almost three-decade-long reign, he would seek to implement not only neo-Confucian principles into the Bakufu but also a series of strongly-held religious beliefs inspired by Buddhism. In the immediate wake of his ascension, however, he had more immediate secular concerns to deal with.

His predecessor and older brother Ietsuna had spent much of the latter days of his reign trying to wrest power and authority back from the regents who had governed during his minority and even after he had managed to reacquire authority, he was very hesitant to actually use it. One of Tsunayoshi’s first actions, by a sharp contrast, was to order the seizure of a 250,000 koku fief from a disobedient shogunate vassal in the Takata Domain. This drastic action, which was usually avoided by the Bakufu in recent years, served to inform the rest of the samurai around the nation that the new boss intended to shake things up, and that they had better get in line if they didn’t want to be next. Such property seizures became almost routine during Tsunayoshi’s tenure, and by the end of his reign over 1,400,000 koku worth of land had been absorbed by the shogunate from allegedly disobedient samurai.

While re-establishing the shogunate in the national psyche as a bogeyman who targeted corrupt fief-holders was certainly an important accomplishment, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi was not content merely to seize domains. His understanding of Neo-Confucianism inspired him to try and reshape Japanese society from the top-down, not merely for the sake of strengthening the Bakufu but for the harmony and happiness of all his subjects.

He began by attempting to return the warrior class back to its more spartan roots. Like many reactionary shoguns before him, he noticed that the samurai of his day spent their free time indulging in the latest fashions, enjoying leisurely activities, and living in relative opulence compared to the common people under their authority. He placed strict embargoes against fine clothes, jewelry, and other luxury goods, hoping to remind the samurai that they should live simply in humility and not like wastrels and hedonists. While his intentions may have been roughly high-minded, most of the historical evidence suggests that these edicts did little more than spur the rapid growth of a black market for contraband goods.

However, in his rush to force the nation to accept his moral standards, he took more than a few drastic steps. He forbade tea houses from employing women as servers, a measure meant to preserve female dignity according to rather sexist Neo-Confucian standards. The same concern over the proper place of women within his perfect society led Tsunayoshi to ban prostitution as well.

In 1682, he read aloud from the book “Da Xue,” or Great Learning, a Confucian classic. The shogun reading aloud from a Confucian work to the various daimyo who were attending him became an annual tradition until the end of his reign. His passion for Confucian values and his desire to remake Japan into an ideal society would only grow more fervent as the years went by.

1682 was also the year that Tsunayoshi established a new type of Bakufu office called the Kanjoginmiyaku. The appointees to this position were drawn from the ranks of Hatamoto and Gokenin and although they were given the same rank as the Kanjo-sho, or Finance Bureau, they worked under the direct supervision of the Roju. Their primary function was auditing expenditures and guarding against financial irregularities, as well as exposing theft and corruption related to tax collection or revenue distribution.

During the early years of Tsunayoshi’s reign, his trusted advisor and champion Hotta Masatoshi enjoyed wielding power as the sole Tairo. However, in 1684, he was openly assassinated in Edo Castle by his cousin Inaba Masayasu, who was himself killed soon afterward by guards. Historians have posited nearly every possible motive for Masayasu, from jealousy to a sudden fit of madness, but his actual reasons remain unknown. It is something of a suspicious mystery how the Inaba Clan avoided receiving any collective punishment which such an incident typically inspires and it is possible that the entire affair was arranged by Tokugawa Tsunayoshi as a means for him to grab more power.

The evidence for Tsunayoshi’s alleged involvement seems damning upon first glance, especially considering the fact that he did not appoint another Tairo for more than ten years afterward. However, the evidence remains circumstantial and there are many other reasonable explanations for why the shogun did not punish the Inaba family and left the post of Tairo vacant for more than a decade. While he was quick to seize land from disobedient and recalcitrant samurai, he was not as committed to collective punishment as many of his forebears. As for not appointing a Tairo, he did eventually fill that office, and there is good reason to assume that many were reluctant to even be considered.

This particular shogun had very high standards and very little patience for those who failed to accomplish his designs. It was not unusual for even a high-ranking bureaucrat with a decently successful track record to be dismissed for even minor failures. During Tsunayoshi’s tenure, many promising administrators fell into the habit of politely refusing proffered promotions for fear that the shogun would cast them out of their new job, and out of the Bakufu entirely, at their first misstep.

Although he valued Neo-Confucian standards of good government, and while he no doubt considered himself the epitome of a Confucian philosopher-ruler, Tsunayoshi was said to have had little patience for the day-to-day grind of national administration, often leaving matters of revenue and expenditure in the hands of those he had appointed while he spent his days reading his favorite Confucian texts, composing poetry, and preparing lectures which he would deliver to all the daimyo who happened to be in town.

In the 1690s, Tsunayoshi expanded his policies further to include punishment for anyone caught harming or killing a dog throughout the nation. This is another realm in which his mother is said to have exerted her influence over him, but we have every reason to believe that he shared her rather extreme views on the sanctity of all living things. There is a story that he consulted a Buddhist priest after failing to conceive a male heir and that the priest informed him that he was being punished for killing someone in a previous life. The remedy for this bad karma was to protect living beings during his present life. Because he had been born in the year of the dog, according to the Chinese Zodiac, he decided to focus his efforts on canines and took measures not only to protect dogs from harm, but also give them comfortable lives.

He ordered a new construction project -- Edo would become a sanctuary for dogs where they could live their lives in comfortable kennels and eat nutritious state-funded meals of rice and fish. Those caught in the act of harming or killing a dog would be subjected to severe penalties, usually beaten or given some other manner of grim corporal punishment. This effort to protect dogs grew throughout the years until eventually Edo was said to have been overcome with an awful smell produced by the reportedly thousands of dogs who enjoyed state-funded existence. Hoping to alleviate this unpleasant problem, the shogun ordered the relocation of many of the kennels to the growing suburbs sprouting up around the Bakufu capital. Records indicate that over 50,000 dogs were moved into the suburbs at this time, and they continued to receive the best possible care available.

While Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s religious and philosophical eccentricities tend to receive the most attention, it is worth noting that in many ways he reversed the general course of the shogunate during his time at the helm, returning the government to a state similar to that under Tokugawa Ieyasu – an organ which existed solely for the purpose of executing his will while holding little, if any, real bureaucratic power of its own. The extended vacancy of the office of Tairo and the reduction of the power of the Roju was accompanied by the rise of an office whose holders had previously been little more than menial functionaries and messengers. This particular office was called Soba-yonin, which roughly translates to “chamberlain.”

In former times, the soba-yonin had basically carried messages back and forth between the shogun and the Roju and offered no opinion on policies and principles of governance. Tsunayoshi, however, seems to have been extremely uninterested in sharing power with the old guard and gradually empowered the soba-yonin to not only carry his words to the Roju, but to actually give orders to the Elders in the shogun’s name. One particular soba-yonin would eventually come to wield power equivalent to the Tairo. His name was Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu.

Yoshiyasu had the considerable advantage of being Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s childhood friend and wakashu, his lover. Although some historians would later attribute some of Tsunayoshi’s early policies to Yoshiyasu’s influence, most modern scholars reject this claim on the grounds that his mother and indeed his own self-assuredness more than explains the obsession with Confucian philosophy and Buddhist morality. However, Yoshiyasu did evolve from adolescent homosexual companion to the shogun’s favorite soba-yonin and toward the end of Tsunayoshi’s reign, as the aging shogun’s health gradually declined, Yoshiyasu essentially spoke with an authority that nearly rivaled the shogun’s itself. According to Arai Hakuseki, a scholar and shogunal advisor whom we will discuss further in a few episodes, (quote) “All the Rōjū did was to pass on [Yoshiyasu's] instructions.” (end quote)

Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu likely climbed into power partially by being a friend to the reigning shogun and also attending to some of his more intimate needs. It is said that he discreetly secured lovers for the shogun who were sometimes men, sometimes women, and sometimes famous Noh actors. This activity is not known with any certainty, but given Tsunayoshi’s relative position of supreme power, and given how little those who achieve such positions of power historically feel bound to follow the same rules they enforce upon their subjects, I am inclined to believe that it is likely at least somewhat true.

In spite of the trade restrictions and sumptuary laws, we have good reason to believe that life in Tsunayoshi’s Japan was not altogether terrible. In 1690, a Dutch botanist named Engelbert Kaempfer visited the trade outpost island of Dejima and joined with a delegation which traveled across the nation to Edo. An avid observer, his later writings paint a picture of a thriving nation full of relatively contented citizens and a bustling trade sector. The first part of his journey was by boat from Kyushu to Osaka, but from then on he traveled by land and marveled at the good condition of the nation’s highways, especially the Tokaido road which connected Kyoto to Edo along the southern coast. He wrote that he could scarcely believe the great number of people who traveled along that road in both directions every day.

Eventually the mission came to Edo and Kaempfer was presented to shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi himself. The shogun, through his ministers, requested that the Dutchmen should perform their national dances, converse with one another in their native language, and make other displays of normal “westerner” behavior while the shogun and his court observed them. They were asked to write sentences in Dutch so that the shogun could marvel at their alphabet and writing system.

Although they were treated politely, the whole affair sounds a little degrading to modern ears. However, such official visits had a larger purpose for the Bakufu, who could rightfully claim legitimacy as a government through such international recognition. Although the Dutch Embassy had passed through Kyoto, their primary point of official contact with Japan was through the Edo shogunate. While the somewhat humiliating-sounding displays requested of the Dutch officials served to pique the curiosity of the shogun, it was also probably a subtle reminder to the Dutch themselves that they only traded with Japan because it pleased the Bakufu. If the government wanted them to dance, they had better dance.

Engelbert Kaempfer would later pen many works about his travels throughout East Asia, including “The History of Japan.” This work was translated into many different European languages and its English translation is actually available online through archive.org. I will put a link to it in today’s supplemental blog post if you’d like to read it for yourself.

Toward the end of the 1690s, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi’s health began to severely decline. He came to rely more and more upon Yanagisawa Yoshiyasu for his regular day-to-day governance. In 1702, events were set in motion which resulted in one of the most celebrated and famous Japanese stories of all time. It begins with two daimyo, Kamei Korechika and Asano Naganori, who were performing their biennial service to the shogun in Edo. Their particular assignment was to assist in receiving an official visitor from the Emperor, for which they needed to learn the proper etiquette and protocol necessary to show respect to such an important guest. Their official etiquette instructor, one Kira Yoshinaka, at first treated both daimyo with great disrespect, mocking the gifts which they had offered him as pre-emptive thanks for his instruction. In truth, he was attempting to extort these daimyo into giving him more valuable gifts. Both were infuriated by his disrespectful treatment, and Kamei Korechika even spoke of his desire to kill the man but his clan officials intervened and gave the instructor more money. Upon receipt of the larger bribe, the instructor’s treatment of their daimyo improved and the situation was resolved. For Asano Naganori, however, the abuse continued and his humiliations accumulated daily.

For any samurai, being so rudely degraded was an intolerable state of existence and among equals, things would likely have come down to a fight to the death. Asano Naganori, however, was not just any samurai but a daimyo. The Asano family had a long, proud tradition as bold, impetuous warriors descended from the storied Minamoto Clan. He was not about to suffer such indignation from a greedy functionary whom he considered his inferior. Abused beyond his threshold for tolerance, he attacked Kira Yoshinaka in the halls of Edo Castle, drawing his sword and nearly succeeding in killing him. Unfortunately for Naganori, drawing one’s sword in Edo Castle was akin to taking up arms against the shogun himself, and he was ordered to commit seppuku as a result.

You may recall that in previous generations, retainers were expected to commit seppuku along with their liege lord upon his death, but that this practice had been forbidden since the time of Tokugawa Ietsuna. A group of Asano Naganori’s retainers, frustrated by the lack of punishment for Kira Yoshinaka and the harsh punishment meted out on their former master, decided that the best remedy for this situation was revenge.

After a year of planning, they attacked Kira Yoshinaka’s mansion one night after they were convinced that he had finally let down his guard. A fierce battle ensued within his residence’s walls and many of the forty-seven were struck down by those guarding Yoshinaka. However, they had divided their force and attacked from two sides, which allowed one of the groups to find Yoshinaka himself and behead him. They placed his head on the grave of their master and reported themselves to the Bakufu. The shogunate was outraged by this flagrant act of murder, regardless of its noble intentions, and ordered the forty-seven ronin to commit seppuku.

The tale of the forty-seven ronin spread far and wide afterward. Noh plays were written, details were added or modified, and the real-life story was swallowed up in the common storytelling and folklore of its day. For many decades afterward, the shogunate attempted to forbid the story from being performed or otherwise transmitted, but after seventy-five years they gave up and the story continues to be avidly spread today. It has inspired over half-a-dozen films over the years, including a recent box-office disaster starring the unfortunate Keanu Reeves and featuring demons and other bizarre, otherworldly elements not remotely present in the original tale.

The Bakufu’s response to the incident is generally considered adequate, and their desire to suppress the subsequent folk-tale-ification of the incident is understandable considering that their primary interest was preserving national harmony. Violence against daimyo, however justifiable, could certainly lead to violence against the national government.

In 1709, Tokugawa Tsunayoshi died. In somewhat predictable fashion, an apocryphal story later emerged that he was strangled to death by an angry courtesan after he tried to make one of his illegitimate children his heir instead of her son, but this is an appropriately dramatic fabrication. His health had been declining for the better part of a decade and he was 62 years old. Every reliable account indicates that he died of illness. He is sometimes referred to as “Inu-Kubo,” or “the dog shogun” because of his famous affection for man’s best friend. His nephew Tokugawa Ienobu was named as the next shogun, but we will discuss his reign in greater detail two episodes from now.

Next time, we will discuss the economics and other big-picture aspects of the early Edo Period and talk about why some books have begun referring to the Edo Period as “The Age of Merchants.”