Authors: Samuel Hawley
These recommendations would form the basis for
Korea’s postwar policy toward Japan. Contact between the two countries was confined to the limited trade access granted to the daimyo of Tsushima and to congratulatory missions dispatched in either direction to commemorate the ascension of each Korean king and each shogun in Japan. The Tokugawa shogunate welcomed the arrival in Edo of these occasional goodwill embassies—indeed, they requested them—for they could be portrayed to the public as tribute missions from a subservient Korea and in turn of the long reach of the shogun’s arm. The Koreans were likewise glad of the chance to travel to Japan, for it gave them an opportunity to gather intelligence about the country and ascertain whether it was preparing for war. The Japanese for their part, however, never sent formal missions in turn to Korea; the Koreans would not have received them if they had. All diplomatic correspondence from Edo arrived in Korea in the hands of envoys from Tsushima, the only Japanese the Koreans would allow to set foot on their soil. Once in Korea, moreover, every Tsushima delegate was confined to the immediate vicinity of Japan House, a walled compound just outside Pusan, and kept under constant surveillance. No one was allowed to travel north to Seoul.
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The Japanese would occasionally complain of these restrictions, and certain daimyo lords, eager to join the So family in trading with
Korea, would assert that Seoul should open itself more to commerce with Japan. But nothing ever came of it. The situation remained unchanged until the early nineteenth century when, after more than two centuries of stability and peace, the two countries allowed their infrequent diplomatic exchanges to cease altogether and their trade links through Tsushima to sink to new lows.
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At the onset of winter in 1614, Tokugawa Ieyasu led an army of 194,000 men against Osaka Castle to finish off Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s son and heir Hideyori, now a young man of twenty-one. The task proved more difficult than Ieyasu had foreseen, for Hideyori com
manded a force of some 90,000 men, most of them
ronin
(masterless samurai, literally “men of the waves”) led by dispossessed former daimyo, the vanquished detritus of Sekigahara who had gravitated to Osaka during the intervening years. After attacking the castle for one month and laying siege to it for a second, Tokugawa determined that the edifice would not fall to brute force, so he approached Hideyori and concluded a truce. Tokugawa promised to lift his siege and leave, while Hideyori agreed in part to allow some of the outer fortifications of his castle to be leveled as a sign of his desire for peace. With that the conflict seemingly came to an end, and Tokugawa’s army made a grand show of marching away.
But not everyone left. A contingent of Tokugawa’s men remained behind and set to work making the alterations to the outer defenses of
Osaka Castle, ostensibly as stipulated in the truce. It quickly became evident that their work was far exceeding anything Hideyori had agreed to. By the time his protestations reached Tokugawa and demolition work was halted, the outer and inner moats had been filled in and many key walls knocked down, severely weakening the once impregnable castle—just as Tokugawa had planned. Five months later, in May 1615, the wily old warrior returned to Hideyori’s now vulnerable stronghold with a second great army, and this time succeeded in destroying the place. Hideyori and his mother, Yodogimi, committed suicide in the flames. Hideyori’s eight-year-old son was subsequently beheaded to end his line.
With the destruction of
Osaka Castle and with it the house of Toyotomi, Japan fell completely under the sway of Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu himself, now in his seventy-fourth year and anxious to ensure a smooth succession, had already passed on the title of shogun to his son Hidetada and begun to work behind the scenes formulating the policies that would make the Tokugawa shogunate “the most enduring regime in Japanese history.”
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It would be enduring because Ieyasu, unlike his predecessors Hideyoshi and Oda Nobunaga, established the post of shogun rather than his own person at the center of the web of political allegiances binding the nation together. These allegiances, and in turn the peace they ensured, would therefore remain in place long after Ieyasu was gone.
The Tokugawa shogunate under Ieyasu’s son Hidetada and his successors became increasingly conservative in its drive for stability and peace. One of their first concerns was to keep the nation’s formerly restive daimyo obedient and in place. The confiscation and redistribution of fiefdoms that took place after Sekigahara and the fall of Osaka Castle—a process known as “smashing the daimyo”—had already done much to achieve this. The promulgation of new laws completed the task. Henceforth, for example, daimyo lords were prohibited from constructing new castles; even repair work on existing defenses had first to be reported and approved. Ieyasu’s heirs also had to come up with something for Japan’s samurai warrior class to do other than wage war. The answer was found in the Neo-Confucian ideas that had been filtering into the country for the past few centuries from the Asian mainland, most recently in the person of Kang Hang, the Korean scholar official taken captive during the Korean campaign. Over the following decades Japan’s samurai gradually came to be “civilized” into a political and intellectual elite similar to the scholar-official upper class of China and Korea. The nation’s social order meanwhile was frozen into an unchangeable hierarchy, farmers and merchants at the bottom lorded over by the privileged samurai class, with the shogunate at the top wielding absolute control. Had Hideyoshi been born into this Tokugawa world, he would have remained an unknown farmer from the cradle to the grave.
The growing conservatism of the Tokugawa shogunate also mani
fested itself in policies designed to regulate Japan’s contacts with the outside world, in particular with the West. Moves were taken starting in 1614 to stamp out Christianity, now viewed as subversive and a danger to the state. In 1635 foreign travel was prohibited on pain of death. Four years later the Portuguese were expelled and all contacts severed with the Catholic nations of Europe. Next to be prohibited was the ownership of oceangoing vessels. Henceforth the shogunate would pursue a policy of
sakoku
, or “seclusion,” a policy that would see foreign commerce rigorously controlled, and infrequent diplomatic relations maintained with just the neighboring kingdoms of Korea and the Ryukyu Islands.
With its emphasis on stability, peace, and seclusion, it was perhaps inevitable that the musket, the Western innovation that had played such an important role in the wars to unify
Japan and the subsequent invasion of Korea, would come to be rejected. It did not disappear from the scene as completely as is sometimes stated; there were an estimated 200,000 firearms in Japan at the start of the Tokugawa period and roughly the same number at the end.
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With no wars left to fight, the musket was simply placed in the closet, so to speak, copied and refined by generations of gunsmiths but not fundamentally changed—an instrument of technological interest and artistic achievement akin, per
haps, to the costly daimyo clocks that were then finding their way into the homes of the elite. The samurai, who had rarely carried muskets into battle to begin with, relegating them instead to lower-class foot soldiers, came once again to focus on the sword, bow, and spear, the preferred weapons of the past, when combat was a affair of honor fought by men standing face to face.
In an interesting footnote, when the American survey ship
Vincennes
landed in 1855 on Tanegashima, the island off the south coast of Kyushu where Portuguese traders first introduced the musket into Japan back in 1543, the vessel’s captain noted in his report to Washington that “These people seemed scarcely to know the use of firearms.”
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The Tokugawa period was a time of rapid urbanization, economic growth, and prosperity for
Japan. No longer burdened with supplying manpower and wealth for wars of national unification and continental conquest, farmers were left to their farming and merchants to their trade. The amount of land under cultivation doubled. Cities expanded, none more so than the shogunate’s capital at Edo, which exploded from an insignificant fishing village into a sprawling metropolis that would later be renamed Tokyo. Living standards improved, the population soared, and the nation as a whole grew increasingly rich, thanks to the shogunate’s emphasis on stability and peace.
Its policy of seclusion, however, would eventually prove its undo
ing. By the early nineteenth century ships from Europe and the United States were beginning to appear in Asian waters in increasing numbers—trade ships and whalers and survey vessels mapping the coasts. With all this sea traffic now in the area, ships inevitably began landing on Japan’s shores in search of water and fuel. The shogunate, alarmed by these incursions, issued orders in 1825 to all daimyo with coastal domains to drive away any foreign ship that approached the shore and to arrest and execute any foreign seamen who attempted to land. The incidents of hostility that followed angered the nations of the West, where offering aid to sailors in need was regarded as a fundamental duty expected of all nations and a basic law of the sea. Japan’s unwillingness to open itself to international trade was also considered unacceptable in the atmosphere of expansion that was then so pervasive in the West. In the end it was the Americans who came to kick down the door. In 1853 Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with a fleet of “Black Ships” in Edo Bay to demand that Japan open to trade and navigation. The Tokugawa shogunate, knowing that it could not resist the technologically advanced West with its own withered armed forces and sixteenth-century guns, had no choice but to sign a treaty with the Americans when Perry returned for an answer the following year.
The Tokugawa shogunate’s inability to stand up to American gun
boat diplomacy, its first sign of weakness in more than 250 years, caused nationwide humiliation, discontent, and agitation. Cries went up for change on two fronts: first the expulsion of all foreigners from Japan, and second the restoration of the emperor, since the twelfth century little more than a figurehead controlled by a succession of strongmen like Nobunaga, Hideyoshi, and now the Tokugawa shoguns. The movement eventually became a groundswell that brought the shogunate to an end and ushered in the Meiji era (1868–1912), named after the emperor who occupied the throne. It would be a time of reform and modernization under such slogans as “independence and self-respect.”
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Western educa
tion was promoted. Industries were set up and train lines built. Western fashions were adopted. Modern buildings were constructed. And modern armies and navies were established, equipped with the latest guns and ships.
From the beginning of the Meiji era the thoughts of powerful men began to turn to conquest overseas. This was something new for
Japan. Apart from the invasion of Korea in 1592–98, which was itself an aberration, the result of Hideyoshi’s personal agenda rather than a national desire to expand, Japan’s leaders had always been content to remain within the confines of their island domain. Why, then, the change? First, the Western powers that Meiji Japan was now striving to emulate were then in the midst of a period of colonial expansion of their own, one that would see a quarter of all dry land on the face of the earth seized and divided up between the late 1870s and the start of World War I. As part of its drive to become a great power, Japan became eager to claim territory for itself. The Japanese were also motivated by a desire to restore national self-confidence and prestige after their humiliating inability to resist the gunboat diplomacy of the United States. To assuage their pride, they needed to prove themselves equal to the West. That meant they had to modernize. They had to build up their strength. And they had to acquire colonial possessions, just like every other major power.
In 1869, after Tokyo’s first approaches to Seoul to initiate modern diplomatic and trade relations had been curtly rebuffed—it was still Korean policy to funnel all Japanese contact through Tsushima—lead
ing Meiji statesman Kido Takayoshi wrote in his diary that Japan “should determine without delay the course our nation is to take, then dispatch an envoy to Korea to question officials of that land about their discourtesy to us. If they do not acknowledge their fault, let us proclaim it publicly and launch an attack on their territory to extend the influence of our Divine Land.”
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Kido was not alone in his views. A punitive expe
dition against Korea was considered by many to offer several advantages. It would occupy Japan’s rebellious former samurai, who had lost their status with the demise of the Tokugawa shogunate; it would secure for Japan a foothold on the peninsula before the Western powers beat them to it; it would establish Japan as a leading Asian power; and it would avenge the failure of Hideyoshi’s invasion of Korea nearly three centuries before.
Nothing came of this initial expansionist talk. In 1871 fifty top Meiji government officials, including Kido Takayoshi, were sent on a two-year “learning mission” to the
United States and Europe, bringing back with them a deeper understanding of where Western power came from and how empire building worked. With these newly returned statesmen back at the helm, talk of invading Korea was deemed premature, a move that would set Japan against China and Russia before it had the industrial and military might to take them on. For its first expansionary step Japan instead opted for a less confrontational “formalizing of its border,” annexing the Kuril Islands in 1875 and the Ryukyu Islands in 1879, officially claiming those regions traditionally considered in Tokyo to be culturally, if not politically, Japanese. Renewed approaches were also made to Korea, but in a more sophisticated way. After the Koreans obligingly attacked a Japanese survey ship that approached Kanghwa Island in 1875—the vessel had been provocatively accompanied by gunboats—Tokyo sent an emissary to Beijing to request that it pressure its tributary state to accept the inevitable of opening to the outside world. China, which had itself been open to the West since its defeat by the British in the Opium Wars of 1839–42, was anxious to avoid any sort of international conflict and duly instructed Korea to enter into negotiations with Japan. The result was the Treaty of Kanghwa in 1876 establishing modern diplomatic and trade relations between Tokyo and Seoul—all carefully weighted to the advantage of Japan.