250 Years of Peace, and the Culture Boredom Built

How the Peace Was Enforced Tokugawa Ieyasu won at Sekigahara in 1600 and his successors spent the next century making sure nobody could repeat it. The mechanisms were ingenious and thorough.

Sankin-kōtai required every daimyō to spend alternate years in Edo and to leave his family there permanently as hostages. The processions to and from the capital were ruinously expensive, which was the point — a lord bankrupted by ceremonial travel cannot fund an army. Class was fixed by law into a hierarchy with warriors at the top and merchants at the bottom, movement between classes was restricted, and the country was largely closed to foreign contact, with trade confined to a small Dutch outpost at Nagasaki and controlled channels elsewhere.

It worked. Japan had two and a half centuries without significant internal war, which is close to unmatched anywhere.

The Class System Inverted Itself The merchants, placed at the bottom of the official hierarchy on the reasoning that they produced nothing, ended up with the money. A commercial economy grew, the samurai — salaried in rice and increasingly indebted — got poorer, and the formal ranking and the actual distribution of wealth drifted completely apart.

Sumptuary laws tried to hold the line, restricting what merchants could wear and display. The response was to move expenditure into things the law could not easily reach: theatre, restaurants, publishing, the pleasure districts, plain outer garments with extravagantly expensive linings. An entire urban culture developed as, among other things, a way of spending money discreetly.

Ukiyo, the Floating World The word ukiyo originally carried a Buddhist sense of the sorrowful transient world. Edo townspeople repurposed it into something closer to the floating world of pleasure — live for the moment, because it passes anyway.

Ukiyo-e, pictures of that world, were mass-produced woodblock prints sold cheaply: actors, courtesans, sumo wrestlers, ghosts, and eventually landscapes. Hokusai's wave and Hiroshige's road stations are now among the most reproduced images on earth, and they were commercial products for ordinary buyers. When they reached Europe in the nineteenth century they had a decisive influence on Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting.

Kabuki grew in the same environment — loud, popular, spectacular, repeatedly regulated by authorities who considered it disreputable. The geisha profession as it is now understood also took shape here, as entertainers and artists distinct from the licensed courtesans of the pleasure quarters.

The Food You Are Eating Sushi in its familiar form is an Edo invention. Nigiri — a slice of fish pressed onto vinegared rice — was developed as fast food sold from street stalls, using fish from the bay, and the size has shrunk considerably since. Tempura and soba stands were the same phenomenon: a large urban population of single working men needed feeding quickly and cheaply.

Edo also became, by the eighteenth century, plausibly the largest city in the world, with an infrastructure of water supply, fire brigades, waste recycling and lending libraries that impressed later foreign visitors considerably.

Where to See It Nikkō Tōshōgū, the mausoleum of Ieyasu, is the period's political statement in built form: extravagantly carved, coloured and gilded, in deliberate contrast to the restraint of Japanese religious architecture elsewhere, and calculated to overwhelm the lords required to come and pay respects.

Kawagoe, north of Tokyo, preserves streets of kurazukuri clay-walled merchant warehouses and gives a much better sense of ordinary Edo-period commercial life than anything in Tokyo itself, where almost nothing survived the earthquake and the war. And the Nakasendō post towns preserve the road infrastructure that sankin-kōtai ran on.