Ohayou
January 2023

In 1615, Tokugawa Ieyasu, having become shōgun, quelled a rebellion at Osaka Castle led by the son of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. The latter was eliminated, along with all his supporters. The Edo period could definitively begin, and the legend of the samurai and bushidō could be written.

It was during this period, at the beginning of the 17th century, that the term samurai came to be reserved for the bushi, the warriors, and that the term bushidō, meaning “way of the warrior,” appeared in texts.

When a war lasting more than a century ends, one of the central questions is: what do you do with those who have known only war?

Tokugawa Ieyasu would take lessons from the past and seek, above all, to structure Japanese society on the basis of very strict Neo-Confucianism. Confucianism is one of the three pillars of Chinese thought; the other two are Taoism and Buddhism. Confucianism deals with the organization and structure of society. Neo-Confucianism, which became dominant in the 14th century in China, adds a metaphysical system to its moral teachings; it is no longer simply a system for the administration of the state and organization of society. The goal of this Neo-Confucianism, theorized in China in the 12th century by Zhu Xi, was to counter the growing influence of Buddhism.

Tokugawa Ieyasu’s great strength at the time was understanding that Japan needed a system of reference values that would also serve as a tool for state organization. One of Confucianism’s precepts is that to change a society, one must change the family and the individual. This is what he would initiate, and it is what the Tokugawa clan would develop throughout its domination of Japan.

The Confucian virtues are humanity, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, loyalty, sincerity, and conformity to social order. This was exactly what Japan was not during the Sengoku period and what Japan needed to become during the Edo period. This is what we would call today a true modern societal project.

Chinese Confucianism was introduced to Japan as early as the 3rd century, in 285, according to early Japanese texts that would be written more than a century later. This was long before Buddhism, which appeared around the end of the 4th century.

Confucianism and Buddhism both have schools and highly structured teachings. The former provides rules for the organization of the state and civil society; the latter offers a highly ritualized and demanding metaphysical framework. The two traditions competed with each other, whether in China, Korea, or Japan. In Japan, it was during the Nara period, in the 8th century, that the five major Buddhist sects, the 五山 (Gozan), gained dominance over Confucianism, whose importance in education declined until the beginning of the Kamakura period at the end of the 12th century.

五山
Gozan – five mountains.

Starting from this period, the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi, which is essentially a reinterpretation and rereading of Confucius’s fundamental texts, gave new momentum to this school of thought. It eventually became dominant in the 14th century in China and at the beginning of the 17th century in Japan.

One of the consequences of this Confucian revival in Japan was that the main Zen Buddhist sects were forced to study Neo-Confucianism to respond to the critiques it made of Zen Buddhism. This would ultimately prove ideal for Tokugawa Ieyasu’s project of political and social stabilization in Japan.

To achieve this, he relied on Hayashi Razan, a defrocked Buddhist priest dissatisfied with the philosophy and doctrine of this religion, who later turned to Neo-Confucianism. He would become the mentor of the first four Tokugawa shōguns and base his teachings primarily on Zhu Xi’s works. According to Zhu Xi, the essential mechanism of society is the individual—not in the modern Western individualistic sense, but in the sense of the role individuals play in a society, which necessitates a hierarchical organization of that society.

In Japan, at the beginning of the 17th century, this new social hierarchy placed the samurai at the top, followed by peasants, then artisans, and finally merchants, who would remain the lowest class throughout the Edo period. Alongside this hierarchy, Hayashi Razan introduced education tailored to these different levels of society, particularly for the upper class, ensuring they fully understood the obligations inherent to their status.

The concept of bushidō begins to emerge—the way of the warrior, which is no longer merely about learning the art of war but also about learning to live in society and understanding the obligations tied to the warrior’s status. The term bushidō appears for the first time in texts from this period, but no single work compiles the obligations of the bushi. Instead, the texts describe the roles, functions, obligations, and prohibitions of all levels of the new hierarchy.

An aphorism by Hayashi Razan stated: “No truth is learned without weapons, and there are no true weapons without learning.”

Hayashi Razan’s political theory was based on the idea that the samurai formed the literate ruling class of the shogunate, even though, at the beginning of the 17th century, most samurai were illiterate. The brilliant idea, which would prove successful, was to elevate the ruling class by encouraging self-education and providing the means to achieve it.

For Tokugawa Ieyasu, alongside this social organization, bushidō became the fundamental social myth to invent in order to control the warriors, now confined to enforced idleness, and maintain peace in the recently unified country. A mythical samurai would therefore be codified and standardized from scratch.

“A wild bushidō was undoubtedly necessary during the era of warlords in the 16th century when battles were frequent. However, with the establishment of a pacified society under the Tokugawa, many samurai vassal organizations had little choice but to transform themselves: from groups of professional fighters, they became bureaucratic structures for political control. In such a society, a wild bushidō that teaches one to draw the sword when insulted would be inappropriate. In fact, what spread during this time was shidō, the way of the literate. The two words, bushidō and shidō, resemble each other and would later often be confused. Shidō refers to the path of one who places at the center the notion of shi (gentleman, literate), which should be understood as the literate administrator well-versed in the teachings of Confucianism. The notion of shi is originally opposed to that of bushi in the sense of a combat specialist”.

^{Shin’ichi Saeki, Figures du samouraï dans l’histoire japonaise.
Revue Annale. Paris : Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, 2008/4.}

The codification of 大 小 is an example. These are the two swords that the samurai carries permanently, it is probably the most known emblem of the samurai with the bun,. The big one is the famous 刀 , the small one is the 脇 差.

大小
Daishō – big and little (sword).

刀
Katana – sword.

脇差
Wakizashi – little sword.

Before the Edo period, bushi often carried two weapons, but not necessarily these two. Furthermore, the weapons could also be carried by any class of society; they were only reserved for bushi by decree at the end of the 16th century. The samurai of the Edo period will have the obligation to carry these two swords.

The 丁 髷, the samurai chignon hairstyle that is still worn today by the sumotori, was originally a way to support the helmet during very hot summers in Japan. In the Edo period, it became an obligation: samurai must have it but never wear helmets again.

丁髷
Chonmague – topknot.

The Tokugawa thus shaped the image of the samurai that everyone could recognize and created his new personality through the education of neo-Confucianism. The fierce, ruthless warriors of the Sengoku era are transformed into models of virtue and dignity and will never be warriors again. They learn martial arts, possibly practicing them for duels of honor, but
They don’t fight anymore.

Such a transformation takes time to implement. But the education and theorization of the ideal samurai are not the only elements of the transformation of society. The Tokugawa also established a strict financial, administrative and geographical structure of the daimyō who were under their rule. The allies have of course been rewarded with territories, the former enemies deprived of a part of theirs; all this will be very precisely recorded by the new administration, and it will be necessary to report to the shōgun.

At that time, the wealth of a daimyō, or clan, was measured in rice. The 石 7 is the unit of measure and corresponds to the estimated quantity of rice eaten by a person in one year. To be a daimyō in the Edo period, you must have a minimum income of 10,000 kokus per year, This is enough to maintain a force of 250 soldiers plus all the personnel needed for rice production. The richest daimyō have up to 1 million koku, or an army of 25,000 men.

石
Koku – mesure de volume représentant 278,3 litres de riz avant 1891.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, the shōgun, has an income of 2.5 million kokus and can maintain an army of 60,000 men. In addition, he takes 6 million kokus from his daimyō out of a total production of 256 million koku.

All this is written, recorded and administered by an army of officials in the service of the shōgun who travel across the country to control and possibly sanction. And gradually, the great samurai will become administrators, accountants, business leaders in a certain way.

This is true for the more powerful, but many former bushi will soon see their income decrease as their expenses increase. The number of shogunate samurai will therefore decrease over time.

Bibliography

• Souyri, Pierre-François. Nouvelle histoire du Japon. Paris : Perrin, 2010.
• Souyri, Pierre-François. Les guerriers dans la rizière. La grande épopée des samouraï. Paris : Flammarion, 2017