The second half of the Tokugawa period is characterized by continual political reforms made by the samurai overlords in response to this ongoing economic crisis. Such reforms began with the Kyōhō Reforms instituted by the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (ruled 1716–45). Yoshimune proved adept at personnel matters. He swept out officials favored by his two predecessors and appointed new officials to posts in finance and rural administration in order to increase government efficiency. In general, he reaffirmed the influence of the fudai daimyo, the traditional stalwart supporters of the regime, whose power had been undercut under Tsunayoshi and Ienobu. Besides consulting a group of about 20 personally selected advisers, he periodically set up a complaint box to gain new information, especially on such matters as corruption and bribery. The thrust of his reform efforts, however, came in the area of general economic policy and the bakufu’s own finances. As an emergency policy, Yoshimune ordered the daimyo to make rice contributions (agemai), which he then allotted to the hatamoto to supplement their stipends. More characteristic was his effort to increase tax yields by opening new lands to cultivation and revising the method of taxation. His attempt to control the falling price of rice earned him the name of “the rice shogun.” But when the price of rice rose sharply in a great famine in the 1730s, the common people of Edo attacked the wholesale rice dealers who had cornered the market. This was the first such riot in Edo. Yoshimune’s reforms focused heavily on currency reform. He successfully revalued and standardized the currency and also brought regulation into the chaotic and disruptive world of Edo’s money changers. His economic reforms enjoyed no small success. By 1744, the year before his retirement, the receipts of the bakufu both in total land taxes and in tax receipts reached their highest level for the entire Edo period. Yoshimune’s reforms also expedited the legal process, ameliorated punishments, and were published in a collection of laws (Kujikata osademegaki). For such reasons, Yoshimune was regarded as the restorer of the bakufu. His success, however, was possibly due to the fact that the urban and rural disturbances had not yet become that grave, while the coercive power of the bakufu was still quite strong.

Under the rule of Yoshimune’s son Ieshige, control of government by attendants of the shogun—which Yoshimune’s strong personal rule had prevented—was revived. Chamberlains (soba-yōnin) who handled communications with the senior councillors (rōjū), gained strong powers of authority as his spokesmen when they won the shogun’s confidence. One such man was Tanuma Okitsugu, who rose from chamberlain to be senior councillor under Ieshige’s son, Ieharu, the 10th shogun. Tanuma and his associates accepted bribes, and he was criticized by an opposition group for corruption. But Tanuma was nonetheless an active reformer who further developed some of Yoshimune’s programs. Though cognizant of the problems posed by merchants and the spread of a commercial economy, Tanuma chose not to suppress the activities of big-city merchants but rather used them to promote production; while advancing the development of the commercial economy, he sought to control it. His decision to force commercial and industrial guilds, or kabu nakama, into monopolistic associations and to demand licensing fees seems to have been aimed not so much at gaining contributions for the bakufu treasury as much as to establish control over the circulation of commercial goods, linking the city guilds with village producers. Tanuma, too, was concerned with a monetized economy, especially the problem of money lenders. He tried—unsuccessfully—both to control the issuance of unbacked promissory notes and to issue a new silver coin, the value of which was calculated in terms of gold. He was widely criticized by the people for issuing large amounts of debased coinage that caused a rise in prices; yet it was a rational attempt to establish a gold standard in place of the confusing practice of using silver in western Japan and gold in the east.

Tanuma’s rational and progressive political attitude is best revealed in his attempt to develop Ezo (present-day Hokkaido) as a bulwark against the southward advance of the Russians; he even considered trading with Russia. Various natural disasters occurred in his time, however, and peasant protests rose to more than 50 per year during the 1780s. A great eruption of Mount Asama in 1783 was followed by a widespread famine during the Temmei era (1783–87), in which large numbers of people starved to death. An uncommon number of crop failures, fires, epidemics, and droughts reconfirmed peoples’ sense of divine displeasure with the performance of the ruler. The protests of the farmers were now most often directed against wealthy members of the village community. In 1787 large-scale riots threatened Edo, Ōsaka, and other major cities. Tanuma had already been dismissed as senior councillor the previous year, and Matsudaira Sadanobu, grandson of Yoshimune and the daimyo of Shirakawa domain (in modern Fukushima prefecture), was selected as his successor. But Tanuma’s supporters in the bakufu sought to prevent Sadanobu’s appointment, and for more than six months the political situation remained a complete vacuum. The outbreak of peasant violence, however, was enough to drive Tanuma’s supporters from office, and Sadanobu was appointed senior councillor.

Sadanobu is renowned as the initiator of the Kansei reforms (1789–1801). He rejected Tanuma’s administration and instituted a policy of retrenchment in the spirit of Yoshimune’s reforms half a century earlier. To combat the frustration against Tanuma’s regime, Sadanobu sought to restore morale, revive the economy, and reinvigorate the social system. He set out to reduce the high prices in the great cities and had a fund established in Edo called shichibu tsumikin (70 percent reserve fund); knowing that land and house rents were high in the shogun’s capital because of the heavy taxes levied on its landlords, he reduced this tax and set aside 70 percent of it for relief for the poor. To relieve the hardships of the bakufu retainers, he took emergency measures to cancel the debts of the hatamoto to the Edo merchants who handled the exchange of their stipends. Again following Yoshimune, Sadanobu—himself skilled in several martial arts—urged the samurai to devote their energies to practice of the martial arts. The farming villages, which were the foundation of the bakuhan system, had been devastated in the Temmei famine of the 1780s. Sadanobu encouraged officials to bring land back into cultivation and to increase the population of the villages by such measures as granting parcels of land to vagabonds. Those who had left villages for seasonal work in cities were given money to return to agricultural productivity. Infanticide and abortion were widely used as means of limiting family size, both to maximize wealth and to avoid starvation, and pregnant women were thus watched over in order to increase the farming populace—so that tax revenues from that sector would rise. But effective control of agriculture depended largely upon competent officials, and, despite heroic efforts to root out incompetence and avarice, Sadanobu had recurrent problems dealing with corrupt and ruthless local officials.

Sadanobu was a firm admirer of Chu Hsi studies, and he believed that government must be conducted on the basis of Confucian benevolent rule. In the mid-1790s, he prohibited all teachings except those of the Chu Hsi school at the Shōheikō, the bakufu official college headed by the Hayashi family. He even instituted a five-level examination system for promotions among bakufu officials who were trained at this shogunal academy.

While Sadanobu was senior councillor, a Russian envoy, Adam Laxman, landed at Nemuro in 1792 and requested trade relations. Although the bakufu rejected the Russian proposal, Sadanobu ordered that plans be drawn up immediately for a coastal defense system centered on Edo Bay (now called Tokyo Bay), while he himself inspected the coastline of Izu, Sagami, and Bōsō. At Sadanobu’s resignation in 1793 these plans were scrapped, but the bakufu councillors of this era were the first to react to the threat of foreign nations advancing on Japan, which now could be heard through the wall of national seclusion. Sadanobu’s reforms appear to be an overreaction to Tanuma’s administration, and, whereas people at first welcomed them, antipathy gradually increased. Within the bakufu Sadanobu had his enemies. Some Tanuma supporters remained in bakufu posts through his early years; in addition, the ōoku (women’s quarter, the shogun’s harem), disliked him since he had purged some women who had become involved with Buddhist priests. Ultimately, he lost the confidence of the shogun Ienari and resigned.

In conjunction with the bakufu programs, reforms were carried out within the various daimyo domains. A distinctive feature of han reforms at this time, however, was that they tried to apply stronger regulations and control over the commercial economy of the farmers.

Ienari was restrained by Sadanobu’s strict political reforms, but, when the latter left the bakufu council, the shogun was able to relax. Even so, Ienari was not completely free while the councillors who had supported Sadanobu’s reforms were still alive. During the period 1804–31 these men died one after another, and the bakufu government became lax once again. Mizuno Tadaakira, a senior councillor with acute business acumen, rose to power as a personal attendant to Ienari. But he and other high officials seemed as addicted to bribery as earlier regimes, and the corruption of the bakufu increased considerably. On the surface things seemed peaceful, but underneath the stagnation of the feudal system became even more grave. Even in the villages of Kantō, the seat of the bakufu, disturbances continued apace. The bakufu therefore set up an office called the Kantō Torishimari-deyaku (“Supervisors of the Kantō District”) to strengthen police control of the area, and it ordered the villages of Kantō to form associations to assist this office. But the impetus to reform had faded, as almost a century of bakufu efforts to deal effectively with vastly changed socioeconomic conditions had proved ineffective: many samurai “rulers” lived in poverty, while officially despised merchants became incredibly wealthy; the number of tenants soared as the gap between rich and poor farmers widened; commercialization proceeded far beyond the understanding as well as the control of the regime; rural and urban unrest threatened the stability of society; and now the ominous spectre of a foreign threat loomed on the horizon.

The growth of the northern problem

In the early 1800s foreign relations, which national seclusion policies had been designed to avoid, became a pressing problem for the bakufu, and the situation in Ezo became especially worrisome. In 1804 another Russian envoy, N.P. Rezanov, visited Japan—this time at Nagasaki, where the Dutch by law were allowed to call—to request commercial relations. The bakufu refused Rezanov’s request, and during the next three years Russians attacked Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Earlier in 1804, the bakufu had taken eastern Ezo away from the jurisdiction of the Matsumae domain in northern Honshu and placed it under its direct control, and in 1807 the bakufu also took direct control of both eastern and western Ezo for defensive purposes. In 1808 the English warship Phaeton made an incursion on Nagasaki, and three years later the Russian naval lieutenant V.M. Golovnin landed on Kunashiri Island, where he was arrested by bakufu authorities. When these various incidents were resolved, peace continued for a time in the northern regions; the bakufu relaxed its precautions, returning all Ezo to the control of the Matsumae domain in 1821. In the south, English ships often appeared in Japanese waters after the Phaeton incident, and the bakufu failed to adopt a consistent policy. In 1825, responding to a proposal by Takahashi Kageyasu, Edo authorities promulgated the Order to Drive Away Foreign Ships (Ikokusen uchiharairei), which also enjoined coastal authorities to arrest or kill any foreigners who came ashore. This was also known as the ninen nashi or “no second thought” law. It was never fully carried out because of opposition by a number of officials, including Matsudaira Sadanobu. In 1842, upon hearing the news of China’s defeat in the Opium War, the bakufu responded to foreign demands for the right to refuel in Japan by canceling that order and adopting the Order for the Provision of Firewood and Water (Shinsui kyūyorei). While attempting to preserve the iron law of seclusion to the bitter end, bakufu policy was thus inconsistent, driving foreign ships away at one point and treating them with leniency at others. And it proved to be utterly powerless when it was faced with the full weight of foreign pressure later in the 1840s.

New learning and thought

Underlying this weakening of the bakuhan political system was an ideological crisis, the result of many new movements that took place in scholarship and culture. The mid-Tokugawa period, roughly the 18th century, as discussed above, was a time of considerable unrest. Samurai leaders of bakufu and han alike sought to grapple with the disturbing fact that the great peace envisioned as resulting from policies of rigid class separation, national isolation, and agricultural self-sufficiency was being undermined by unintended economic changes released by those policies themselves. In the area of thought, the ideological foundations of Edo rule—orthodox Chu Hsi philosophy—came into question. Ironically, the ideal of “the investigation of things” inherent in Chu Hsi philosophy encouraged speculation that inevitably led to questioning Chu Hsi orthodoxy itself. And many of those who were led into such speculation were not samurai but commoners.