Samurai city

Cities are often centers of agglomeration, places where people gather to collaborate with one another. But this is not the only reason they exist. Sometimes, cities are chiefly centers of consumption, where elites gather to devour resources extracted from the rest of the country. And occasionally, they are something like prisons, where troublesome social groups are concentrated so that the authorities can keep an eye on them. Many premodern cities, like Versailles, Naples, or Imperial Rome, were a little like this. But perhaps the greatest example was Tokugawa Edo.Between 1600 and 1868, Japan was dominated by the Tokugawa family. The Tokugawas had prevailed over their rivals after a series of civil wars, establishing a sort of dictatorship known as the Shogunate. They developed a remarkable social system, crafted to preserve their power, and with it, the peace and social stability of Japan. At the apex of this system was the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo), at times the largest city in the world, and one of the strangest urban structures in history.

Get the print magazine Subscribe for $100 to receive six beautiful issues per year. Subscribe In early modern Europe, most people were tenant farmers, who paid rent to landowners. The state sometimes taxed landowners, sometimes tenants, and sometimes both through consumption taxes. In peacetime, however, the early modern state did not do very much, so taxes generally ran at just a few percent of national income.The picture in Japan was profoundly different. The peasantry was directly taxed by the government, at rates varying from 15 to 70 percent of the harvest, with 40 percent as a rough norm. The authorities distributed most of their tax receipts to the samurai, a hereditary, quasi-noble class making up about six percent of the population. In both cases, the agricultural surplus ended up in the hands of a leisure class, but the Japanese system was structured very differently, with the surplus reaching the leisure class only through the funnel of public taxation.

Only a minority of Japan was directly ruled by the Shogunate.

Most of the country was administered by various classes of daimyo: shinpan (collateral branches of the Tokugawa family), fudai (longstanding Tokugawa vassals) and tozama (formerly independent daimyo families who had submitted after the Tokugawa victory in the civil wars). Image Adapted from a map by Fabian Drixler, based on a 2015 exhibit at Yale's Peabody Museum. Measured by agricultural output, about 15 percent of Japan fell under the direct control of the Shogunate. These were areas that had always belonged to the Tokugawa, or that had been conquered by them during the civil wars. About a tenth of samurai were Tokugawa retainers, who received their stipends directly from the Shogunate.In about three quarters of Japan, the tax authorities were a different group, the daimyo. The daimyo had originally been the territorial nobility, and in the pre-Tokugawa era, the breakdown of central authority had left them as the effective rulers of their domains. After 1600 the surviving daimyo submitted to the Tokugawa and were rewarded with a role somewhat akin to that of regional governors. There were about 260 daimyo, and about nine tenths of samurai were their retainers.Urban design as a panopticon for the nobilityThe city of Edo played a crucial role in this system. The daimyo were required to maintain mansions in Edo, in which their families were obliged to live permanently. Any act of disloyalty by a daimyo would thus place his family in the gravest peril. Most women of the daimyo class passed their lives as effective hostages of the state, never visiting the domains that their husbands, fathers, and sons governed. The daimyo themselves were also required to spend alternate years or half-years in Edo, bringing with them great crowds of samurai retainers. Edo thus had a dual nature: on the one hand, it was the apex of Japanese society, in which the country’s agricultural surplus was consumed; on the other, it was a kind of prison, in which Japan’s potentially dangerous elites were contained and monitored.

Edo was zoned for social class centuries before the development of zoning in the West. Samurai and daimyo districts were concentrated on the higher ground to the west, while commoners were crowded between Edo Castle and the Sumida River. Image André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty-First Century. Sorensen's map was adapted from another drawn by Okata Junishiro in 1981, itself based on Tokugawa originals. This gave Edo a peculiar demographic and economic character. For one thing, it was enormous. Japanese rice agriculture was extremely productive by premodern standards and generated a huge surplus for the capital’s benefit. Edo’s population seems to have been over a million by 1700, which would make it the largest city in the world at the time: London reached a population of a million only around 1800, while New York did not reach it until 1880. It was also extremely top-heavy socially. Unlike the knights of the European feudal system, Tokugawa-era samurai were usually required to live in cities. The Shogun’s own samurai were permanently concentrated in Edo, while each daimyo brought hundreds or thousands of his samurai with him during his years of residence in the capital. This meant that almost half of Edo’s population at any given time were samurai.

Samurai, photographed in around 1880. While these men were dressed for the camera rather than for battle, samurai in fact made little use of the new military technologies developed after the pacification of Japan by the Tokugawa. In some ways, the Japanese army regressed technologically in the peaceful Tokugawa period, with gunpowder weapons displaced by less effective but more high-status equipment. Image The samurai were theoretically a warrior class, but since Tokugawa Japan was at peace, there was little real soldiering to do. Most non-military work was seen as degrading, with the exception of gentlemanly occupations like civil administration and tutoring in calligraphy.

Most samurai thus lived as pensioners of the state, deriving the bulk of their income from hereditary government stipends assigned to their families at the start of the Tokugawa era. Stipends were generous for high-ranking samurai but very modest for the majority: in 1876 the Japanese state calculated that only 5.1 percent of samurai had stipends worth more than 100 yen, equivalent to a little over $4,000 today. The result was that most samurai lived in dignified but extreme poverty. It is a testament to the primacy of status among human ends that, although some samurai surreptitiously took on side jobs to supplement their tiny incomes, very few abjured their rank to take up more gainful occupations openly. Interclass marriages were forbidden, and there was theoretically no process for ennoblement, though some wealthy commoners worked around this by arranging to be adopted into impecunious samurai families.The High CityEdo was zoned according to social class, probably the largest-scale use of zoning before modern times. Samurai neighborhoods made up a large minority of the total surface area, concentrated in western areas that came to be known as the High City. Higher-ranking samurai had substantial homes, but most lived in extremely austere conditions: the median family lived in a tiny, two-room rowhouse with no garden and communal latrines.The samurai shared the High City with the daimyo. Each daimyo was expected to maintain several estates in Edo, including a more compact estate near the Shogun’s castle and a more spacious garden estate further out. These were made up of single-storey buildings connected by covered walkways, set amid exquisitely landscaped gardens. Each estate was surrounded by a perimeter wall broken by just one or two richly ornamented gates. The great expense of all this was, from the Shogunate’s perspective, part of its appeal: the more resources daimyo expended on maintaining mansions and circulating between them, the less remained for fomenting trouble.

The inner High City of Edo, photographed in 1865 or 1866. Walled daimyo compounds present austere facades to the public street.

Most daimyo would also have had more spacious mansions in suburban areas of the High City, with extensive gardens. Image These samurai and daimyo neighborhoods made up a substantial majority of Edo’s surface area. In some ways, they foreshadowed affluent American suburbs, though they would have felt quite different at street level. Physically, the closest modern parallel might be elite neighborhoods in countries like South Africa or Brazil, where fear of crime has driven the wealthy behind high walls and electric fences. In fact, however, Edo seems to have been an unusually safe city, a fact that often struck early Western visitors. Most people had no locks on their front doors. The English writer Isabella Bird wrote that a solitary foreign woman could travel in Japan in ‘perfect safety’ and that she had never encountered ‘a single instance of incivility’, though at home she would often have been ‘exposed to rudeness, insult, and extortion, if not to actual danger’. The walls and gates of the High City may thus tell us more about elite culture and status display than they do about any distinctive security needs.The Low CityMuch of the rest of Edo’s surface area was taken up with religious complexes and institutional buildings belonging to the Shogunate. The commoners were crowded into the remainder, mostly in riverside areas known as the Low City. Though most commoners were very poor, some were richer than most samurai, and even richer than minor daimyo. Some of the greatest artistic legacies of Tokugawa Japan, like ukiyo-e prints and the kabuki theater, arose from the patronage of this class. However wealthy they might become, however, commoners’ status was axiomatically lower than that of the samurai.

A daimyo and his retinue process through the High City, as depicted by the ukiyo-e artist Hiroshige in 1863. Daimyo traveled across Japan with hundreds or even thousands of retainers, often marching single- or double-file along Japan’s narrow roads in columns that could stretch for kilometers. Note the gardens visible behind the hard external shells of the daimyo compounds, and the commoners prostrating themselves as the procession passes. Ukiyo-e pictures were mass-produced using woodblock printing and sold widely among the urban middle classes.