TOKUGAWA JAPAN Ethos of the Social Classes |
Henry D. Smith, II :: The development of this idea, that a samurai was a particularly moral being, became highly pursued in the Tokugawa period. The result of this on the rest of Japan, that is the non-samurai class, was basically that they all wanted to aspire to similar values to the samurai. This is one part of what has been called the long-term samurai-ization of all Japan, which perhaps is in many ways continued to this day. That is, whether they were villagers, or whether they were merchants, everybody wanted to essentially aspire to the same high moral and cultural code that the samurai proposed. This sort of aping of one's betters is something that is by no means unique to Japan, but was particularly at work in the Tokugawa period. Carol Gluck :: The merchants would say that we are the merchants of the realm, we serve the realm in our own way, and they developed an ethic of that service that was called "the way of the merchant. " So, you have a movement upward and downward of social values in the Tokugawa period, where each of the statuses develops an ethos, or a morality, or a self-identity, which both asserts its value — the paddy fields of the realm for the peasants, the buying and selling, the profit, for the merchants, the governance and rule for the samurai — using a shared common language, which is very important. It doesn't mean that the peasants stopped farming. It means that they described their farming in terms of social utility, or social value that drew from the samurai value, which was, at the beginning of the Tokugawa period, limited only to the samurai. |
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