The Bakuhan System and the Expansion of Rice Cultivation During the Early Tokugawa Period

Fresh from victory over a coalition of rival warlords at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu Tokugawa and his allied warlords initiated a remarkable experiment in government designed to bring internal peace and harmony to a country that for centuries had been plagued with internecine warfare. The fruit of Tokugawa ingenuity was the bakuhan system, a dual system of government balancing limited devolution of power to fiefs (han ) and limited centralization of authority in the hands of the Tokugawa family and its feudal allies and retainers (the

bakufu , tent government, also known as the shogunate). Directly linked to the setting up and refinement of the dual system of administration over the first half of the seventeenth century were two other policies that had momentous implications for the economic and demographic development of Japan: the partial demilitarization of the country through the forcible relocation of the sword-bearing warrior class, the samurai , from the villages into the administrative center of the fief to which they were attached, the castle town; and a policy of isolationism designed to ensure that the balance of power achieved through the dual administration system and demilitarization was not disturbed by the intrusion and meddling of foreign powers and foreign religions serving as path breakers for foreign ideologies and customs. At its root the Tokugawa system was based on pragmatic divide-and-rule principles designed to keep the country from once again fragmenting, falling into the pit of internal civil war, as it had done so many times in the past. Given the tradition of local military control, complete centralization was impossible but continuation of local military control was out of the question. Hence the bakuhan system emerged and evolved as an ingenious experiment designed to forge a compromise between strong local war-lords and the preeminent warlord and his immediate allies bent on aggrandizing power for themselves. The most dramatic social and economic consequences of the forging of the bakuhan political compromise was a century of expansion in carrying capacity of the Japanese land area as exemplified by population increase and the amount of new land put under rice cultivation, coupled with rapid urbanization and the initial nourishing of a vibrant craft and protoindustrial economy in the region immediate to the Tokkaido route connecting the two most prominent bakufu cities, Edo (now Tokyo) and Osaka.^[2]

Under the system of dual administration developed during the early Tokugawa period the central bakufu authority claimed about a quarter of the land for itself and allowed the remainder to be divided up into roughly 250 fiefs, selecting rulers (daimyo) for these fiefs from the ranks of the warlords who at the battle of Sekigahara were either victorious or defeated. The idea was to create a balance of power through the creation of a crazy quilt pattern of local administrative control in which no major coalition of powerful daimyo, bent on forming a military alliance to defeat the bakufu, could arise. Moreover, to bring the potentially restive lower-level military class, the samurai, under control, the central regime required that samurai loyal to a daimyo take up residence in the administrative capital of the fief assigned to the daimyo, thereby separating

them from their economic and political base in the countryside where they engaged in farming. As a result, as the system became increasingly refined and formalized and samurai attempts at rebellion against loss of power were successfully quelled, the samurai ceased to perform active military duties, although they continued to be trained in military techniques, and they evolved into a bureaucratic class, responsible for managing the finances of the fiefs. In particular, they managed the collection of taxes in the form of volumes of rice from the villages under fief control. The samurai no longer collected rice, but they received rice stipends from the coffers of the fief to which they owed allegiance. And at least in the early Tokugawa period the amounts of these rice stipends depended almost exclusively on the rank of the samurai household within the pecking order established in the fief into which the retainer was born. However, many reform-minded fiefs found this type of ranking system overly rigid and abandoned it in favor of a competitive examination system in the latter Tokugawa (1720-1868) era.

Another act taken by the bakufu to weaken the centripetal force of local fief rule was the establishment of the sankin kotai system, whereby daimyo were obliged to reside in luxurious domiciles within the confines of the bakufu's capital, Edo, on a regular schedule. This policy not only forced the daimyo to make extensive expenditures that were potentially ruinous for his fief's coffers but also subjected the local rulers to scrutiny by the central authority. Because the samurai were paid in rice and the daimyo were pressured to build magnificent estates in Edo and to maintain splendid castles within their castle towns, a market grew up for buying and selling rice and craft products and other goods demanded by the elite. Osaka, which was Japan's traditional merchant center, began to experience explosive growth in demand for its marketing services, and as a result the entire region contiguous to the road connecting Osaka to Edo began to flourish.

The isolationist policy was also aimed at reducing the ability of fiefs to establish independent political and military prowess. In 1639, the bakufu announced a policy of national seclusion (sakoku ) whereby diplomatic relations with foreign powers other than China and Korea were effectively terminated. Contact with Europeans was limited to a tiny island, Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor, on which a small community of Dutch people was allowed to reside. The bakufu was determined to squelch any attempts by daimyo at forming alliances with foreign powers. As part of its sakoku policy the bakufu outlawed Christianity, which it viewed darkly as a vehicle for the foreign policy of powers like

Spain and Portugal, and to ensure that the peasantry did not adopt Christian practices, it forced all peasant households to register at the local Buddhist temple (the shumon-aratame-cho registers from which contemporary historians estimate vital rates for individual village populations are a by-product of this registration policy). One important consequence of isolationism was an end to the periodic outbreaks of epidemic diseases brought by ships from the Eurasian mainland. This worked to reduce mortality and hence stimulated population growth.

The direct consequence of these policies was the extensive development of riparian works bringing water for irrigation into lands that hitherto had been unsuitable for rice cultivation. Before the establishment of the bakuhan system military clashes between local villages over the diversion of water from one to the other and hence over rights to regular use of water at a stipulated time of the year had prevented the spread of rice cultivation to many reaches of the country. A classic example of how bakufu control removed this constraint is the development of the Kiso River basin in the area running across central Japan and into the ocean near Nagoya. After the bakufu brought in military retainers from a remote fief in southern Japan to stop warfare from breaking out at the confluence of three major rivers near the mouth of the Kiso River, the process of developing dikes and irrigation ditches along the river and hence of opening up new fields for rice cultivation (shinden ) gathered momentum.^[3] As the number of rice fields that could sustain households increased, so did the number of villages. As a result the demand for labor increased, and potential costs of having a large number of children were reduced since children who could not as adults be sustained on the lands farmed by the parental household could now find opportunities for branching off and starting their own families in newly established villages. Hence between 1600 and 1720 when this process of expansion in villages seems to have come to a halt at the national level (however, some regions declined and some expanded thereafter), the population expanded at a brisk pace. It is difficult to be precise about population totals in Tokugawa Japan because the samurai were not counted in any of the estimates and counts for the country as a whole are not available before 1721 (see Hanley and Yamamura 1977: 36 ff.), but the most widely accepted figures seem to put the 1600 population at around 18.5 million and the 1720 population at 26.1 million, yielding an annual increase in numbers of about 0.3 percent per annum. In any event, there does not seem to be doubt about the fact that the population expanded at a fairly vigorous pace between the bat-

tie of Sekigahara and 1720 and that it did so in large measure because of the expansion in rice cultivation.

There was an additional factor stimulating population growth during the early Tokugawa period: urbanization. As we have seen, urbanization was stimulated by two bakufu policies: the forcible removal of samurai from the countryside and hence the expansion of castle town populations; and the sankin kotai policy that give a decided fillip to development of Osaka and Edo and to cities like Nagoya along the Tokkaido route between the two great metropolitan areas. ^[4]

In sum, the political solution to stopping internecine strife hammered out at the beginning of the seventeenth century—centered around dual administration, partial demilitarization, and isolationism—set in process economic and demographic developments that were not, and probably could not be, foreseen by the architects of the system. These developments would eventually cause the system to atrophy during the period known as late Tokugawa, that is, from 1720 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868 when the shogunate disappeared. A detailed examination of this process of decay is not of interest here. Rather, our interest is in the development of health-enhancing entitlements and in those market forces that were intimately connected to the maintenance and promotion of the standard of living in terms of work capacities and capabilities during the late Tokugawa period. We now turn to these issues, beginning with the household and the market and then turning to community and entitlements.