Tokugawa Quotes

At the moment of victory, tighten the straps of your helmet.

Find fault with thyself rather than with others.

It's no good to want to win still more when you have already won.

The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience. Patience means restraining one's inclinations. There are seven emotions: joy, anger, anxiety, adoration, grief, fear, and hate, and if a man does not give way to these he can be called patient. I am not as strong as I might be, but I have long known and practiced patience. And if my descendants wish to be as I am, they must study patience.

The first buildings had been erected in 1603, to serve as the Kyoto residence of the first shogun of the honorable Tokugawa family,

Takamasa Saegusa: 'Seigen, a mere member of the Toudouza, had the effrontery to sully the sacred dueling ground. For that reason, our lord had already decided to subject him to tu-uchi before long. Cut off his head immediately, and stick it on a pike!' Gennosuke could hardly believe his ears. Such an insult to Irako Seigen was unwarranted. It was pride. For Gennosuke, Irako Seigen was pride itself. Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke! It is the way of the samurai to take the head of the defeated enemy on the battleground. Do not hesitate! If you are a samurai, you must carry out the duty of a samurai!' Samurai... Saegusa, Lord of Izu, continued shouting, but Gennosuke did not attend. That word 'samurai' alone reverberated through his body. If one aims at the juncture between the base of the skull and the spine, decapitation is not that difficult, but Gennosuke could muster no more strength than a baby. He grew pale and trembled with the strain. He could only hack with his sword as if he were sawing wood. He felt nauseated, as if his own cells one after another were being annihilated. But this... Lord Tokugawa Tadanaga: 'I approve.' Takamasa Saegusa: 'Fujiki Gennosuke, for this splendid action you have received words of thanks from our lord. As a sign of his exceptional approval, you shall be given employment at Sunpu Castle. This great debt will by no means be forgotten. From this day forward you must offer your life to our lord!' Prostrating himself, Gennosuke vomited.

the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu concluded that Europeans and Christianity posed a threat to the stability of the shogunate and Japan. (In retrospect, when one considers how European military intervention followed the arrival of apparently innocent traders and missionaries in China, India, and many other countries, the threat foreseen by Ieyasu was real.)

One might say that Japanese faith developed as negative space around the forbidden faith of Christianity. So while the Tokugawa era successfully purged Christians from Japan, an unanticipated outcome was that in banning Christianity they created an imprint of it, a negative space within culture. In a culture that honors the hidden, the weak and the unspoken, Christianity became a hidden reality of Japanese culture.

The great tea masters were concerned to make of the divine wonder an experienced moment; then out of the teahouse the influence was carried into the home; and out of the home distilled into the nation. During the long and peaceful Tokugawa period (1603-1868), before the arrival of Commodore Perry in 1854, the texture of Japanese life became so imbued with significant formalization that existence to the slightest detail was a conscious expression of eternity, the landscape itself a shrine. p144

At a national level this particularly so when those others seem to have something stronger or better than Japan does. It adopted, adapted and frequently improved, making the strengths of a potential competitor or foe intro own strengths. This is not just a case of "know your enemy": it is a case of knowing what makes thy enemy a threat and then using his own strengths against him. More than a 1000 years ago Japan learned much from China, to the point where it was no longer a vassal nation but considered itself a superior one. It repeated the process some extent in the Tokugawa period, learning the use of firearms from the west. In the Meiji period iit furiously studied western imperial powers till it became one itself. After the war it learned much from America - admittedly with little choice to start with - but went beyond its compulsory lessons to the point where it reversed roles and became widely recognized as the master.

Leur apparition remonte à la fin du IXème siècle et au début du Xème siècle. Ces guerriers (bushi) s'emparent du pouvoir politique à la fin du XIIème siècle et créèrent un système monarchique particulier dirigé par un shogun qui tenait sa légitimité de la reconnaissance impériale. Ce gouvernement fut mis en place dès 1180 à Kamakura dans l'est du Japon, avant d'être transféré à Kyoto au XIVème siècke, puis à Edo (future Tokyo) au début du XVIIème siècle. Trois dynasties shogunales (toutes descandant, réellement ou fictivement, du clan Minamoto) se sont succédé entre le XIIème et le XIXème siècle. On distingue un premier bafuku (gouv. de la tente) à Kamakura (1180-1333), celui de la famille Ashikaga, qui se constitua en 1336 et qui fut installé à Kyoto dans le quartier Muromachi en 1378. Ce deuxième bafuku s'éteignit en 1573 avant qu'un nouveau régime militaire n'émergeat à Edo en 1603. Dans l'intervalle 3 seigneurs hégémons, Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, et ensuite Tokugawa Ieyasu travaillèrent à réunifier le pays sous leur domination. Les samouraï ont pendant un bon millénaire joué un rôle central dans l'histoire du pays par leur rôle politique, leur poids démographique (environ 5% de la polulation au milieu du XIXème siècle).

Tokugawa also valued Hideyoshi's policy of domain (han) redistribution. The shogun himself owned about 1/4 of cultivated land, along with major cities, ports and mines. The remaining land was strategically divided between the 275 or so daimyo on the basis of whether they were shinpan (relatives), fudai (traditional retainers) or tozama (outer daimyo of questionable loyalty). Thought numbers fluctuated, typically there were around 25 shinpan, 150 fudai and 100 tozama.

One of the government edicts passed shortly after the founding of the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan’s last great shogunate dynasty (1603–1868), made it legal for any shogunate samurai warrior to execute on the spot and without trial, any commoner found breaking a law or behaving in a disrespectful manner toward a samurai. This regulation was known as kirisute gomen (kee-ree-sue-tay go-mane), which means something like “kill and toss in a ‘sorry about that’ comment and walk away.” The samurai warriors of the some 270 clan fiefs that existed during the Tokugawa Period were quick to adopt the same practice.

While the English aggressively turned outwards, laying the foundations of what can justly be called ‘Anglobalization’, the Japanese took the opposite path, with the Tokugawa shogunate’s policy of strict seclusion (sakoku) after 1640. All forms of contact with the outside world were proscribed. As a result, Japan missed out entirely on the benefits associated with a rapidly rising level of global trade and migration. The results were striking. By the late eighteenth century, more than 28 per cent of the English farmworker’s diet consisted of animal products; his Japanese counterpart lived on a monotonous intake, 95 per cent cereals, mostly rice. This nutritional divergence explains the marked gap in stature that developed after 1600. The average height of English convicts in the eighteenth century was 5 feet 7 inches. The average height of Japanese soldiers in the same period was just 5 feet 2½ inches.46 When East met West by that time, they could no longer look one another straight in the eye.

The Zen sect had been favored by the Ashikaga shogunate and had, during the Ashikaga (Muromachi) and the earlier Kamakura periods, supervised commercial and cultural relations with China through the famous Tenryūbune (Tenryūji ships) sponsored by the Tenryūji branch of the Rinzai school in Kyoto. Zen temples played an important cultural role with their schools, the so-called terakoya, and they controlled the celebrated Ashikaga College (referred to by Xavier as the "University of Bando"), a major center for classical Chinese learning. At the beginning of the Tokugawa period, the temples still had important administrative and diplomatic privileges, for instance in the issuing of passports (Boxer 1951, 262). Only later in that period did Zen suffer a setback owing to the rising tide of Confucian orthodoxy.

Tokugawa Iemitsu increased Japan’s isolationist policy by passing a series of edicts between the years 1633 and 1639

The Edo period, or the Tokugawa period, lasted from 1603 to 1868.

Compared to the kata for sword fighting or jūjutsu, karate kata are longer. They are a sequence of scenes designed like a little drama. A long karate kata can include more than 70 different actions. Sword fighting or jūjutsu kata, however, are only single attack or defense actions. They are not dynamic forms like karate kata but static models. In fact, for the two kata types even different kanji are used. This specific character of karate kata must be well understood. Karate was created and developed in the Tokugawa period and was not protected and promoted by the ruling system like sword fighting. Instead it was highly suppressed by the officials. The technical and the psychological and spiritual knowledge could not be put down in a sophisticated language as it could be done for sword fighting. In order to explain the techniques to the students by using kata, to demonstrate what was to be observed in particular and what was not done correctly, one needed rather long sequences of actions. The old masters could not describe the techniques with written words or pictures and had to express them in the kata. This needed a lot of time, brains and effort. Furthermore, the kata had to become a means to teach without words not only the technical aspects but also the psychological and spiritual abilities to turn the methods of killing into methods of saving lives.

The three main takeaways you should learn –   1. You should be able to identify Classical and Romantic Play in other people, and their natural motivations. It has immense predictive power.   2. You should be able to identify what situations you are playing Romantically, and what situations you are playing Classically. You should always know which is which.   3. If you’re playing Romantically, you absolutely must learn when to stop and shift gears to Classical. Contrast George Washington, Otto von Bismarck, Mustafa Kemal, Deng Xiaoping, and Tokugawa Ieyasu with Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Alexander of Macedon, etc. Choosing “Romantic Play indefinitely” has, historically, a very predictable outcome.   Please study this thoroughly. This concept is incredibly useful, and potentially life-changing.

Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology. This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful.

Furthermore, Tokugawa policies were not based on some dictate of unreason, such as excessive nationalism or blind expansionism. They were Confucian in inspiration, and Confucianism held that actions should spring from reason rather than impulse.

The most significant cultural development in the Tokugawa period was the culture of the townspeople. The creative energy of the townspeople was manifested in all areas – prose fiction, haiku poetry, kabuki theatre, woodblock printing, and ceramics.

The life of austerity and frugality that was the old samurai ideal was not adhered to in the years of Tokugawa peace. The samurai’s income was fixed in terms of rice stipends but their expenses grew as they adopted a less austere lifestyle. They tended to live in fine houses and wear quality clothes. Many pursued hedonistic lives attending kabuki performances or frequenting expensive brothels and patronizing “geishas.

The Sumitomo Group, the aforementioned copper mining company established during the Tokugawa era,

The Mitsui corporation, which also found its origins during the Tokugawa period,

rather than a shogun, like Tokugawa Ieyasu or Tokugawa Hidetada, holding the power.

End of the Tokugawa Shogunate

They realized that the traditional approach of the Tokugawa shogunate was ineffective in the 19th-century world.

Tokugawa shogun,

From a Western standpoint, one could have expected that the apocryphal nature of the works attributed to the "founders" Bodhidharma and Huineng, let alone the quasi-mythical nature of such figures, would considerably weaken a tradition that drew its legitimacy from them. Such was not the case, in part because the impact of historical demythification was attenuated by the shift that had already taken place, during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, from a "hieratical" tradition relying on the ritual transmission of the Dharma and of its regalia (patriarchal robe, text, relics, portrait, transmission verses), to a more philosophically minded tradition, one therefore more detached from its human or material carriers.

Forging Mettle In popular depictions of Musashi’s life, he is portrayed as having played a part in the decisive Battle of Sekigahara on October 21, 1600, which preceded the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. A more likely hypothesis is that he was in Kyushu fighting as an ally of Tokugawa Ieyasu under Kuroda Yoshitaka Jōsui at the Battle of Ishigakibaru on September 13, 1600. Musashi was linked to the Kuroda clan through his biological birth family who were formerly in the service of the Kodera clan before Harima fell to Hideyoshi.27 In the aftermath of Sekigahara, Japan was teeming with unemployed warriors (rōnin). There are estimates that up to 500,000 masterless samurai roamed the countryside. Peace was tenuous and warlords sought out skilled instructors in the arts of war. The fifteen years between Sekigahara and the first siege of Osaka Castle in 161528 was a golden age for musha-shugyō, the samurai warrior’s ascetic walkabout, but was also a perilous time to trek the country roads. Some rōnin found employment as retainers under new masters, some hung up their swords altogether to become farmers, but many continued roving the provinces looking for opportunities to make a name for themselves, which often meant trouble. It was at this point that Musashi embarked on his “warrior pilgrimage” and made his way to Kyoto. Two years after arriving in Kyoto, Musashi challenged the very same Yoshioka family that Munisai had bettered years before. In 1604, he defeated the head of the family, Yoshioka Seijūrō. In a second encounter, he successfully overpowered Seijūrō’s younger brother, Denshichirō. His third and last duel was against Seijūrō’s son, Matashichirō, who was accompanied by followers of the Yoshioka-ryū school. Again, Musashi was victorious, and this is where his legend really starts to escalate. Such exploits against a celebrated house of martial artists did not go unnoticed. Allies of the Yoshioka clan wrote unflattering accounts of how Musashi used guile and deceit to win with dishonorable ploys. Meanwhile, Musashi declared himself Tenka Ichi (“Champion of the Realm”) and must have felt he no longer needed to dwell in the shadow of his father. On the Kokura Monument, Iori wrote that the Yoshioka disciples conspired to ambush Musashi with “several hundred men.” When confronted, Musashi dealt with them with ruthless resolve, one man against many. Although this representation is thought to be relatively accurate, the idea of hundreds of men lying in wait was obviously an exaggeration. Several men, however, would not be hard to believe. Tested and triumphant, Musashi was now confident enough to start his own school. He called it Enmei-ryū. He also wrote, as confirmed by Uozumi, his first treatise, Heidōkyō (1605), to record the techniques and rationale behind them. He included a section in Heidōkyō on fighting single-handedly against “multiple enemies,” so presumably the third duel was a multi-foe affair.

The Tokugawa shogunate established a nationwide system consisting of about 270 domains, each ruled by a daimyō. Although the shōgun led the country, each domain in this feudal system had its own political, economic and social structure. In effect, each functioned as a small country or principality that paid homage to the shogunate. Each domain also maintained a rigid class system. At the top, of course, were the daimyō, served by their samurai warriors, who were the only Japanese allowed to carry swords. Beneath them came the farmers and peasants who produced food, followed by artisans who made clothes, swords and other goods. Almost at the bottom were the merchants, segregated and ostracised because they made money from others’ labour. Underneath everyone else were the Eta: leather-tanners, undertakers and executioners, who dealt with animal slaughter and death.

The problem is also not, as suggested by the technosphere concept, that human beings are incapable of controlling systems that have a larger range of behaviors than they do themselves. The problem rather lies in the question of what 'control' means in the first place. The stewardship of technological systems and infrastructures always depends on their specific nature (in particular, the way they are embedded in natural and cultural environment) as well as on their representation in knowledge and belief systems. Human cognition is always embodied cognition. There are historical examples showing that humans have been able to manage and sustain extremely complex ecologies and infrastructures of their own making over the long term. The systems' potential behaviors always far exceeded those of their human components, but these were typically ecologies and infrastructures in which the relevant regulative structures of human behavior had themselves been coevolving over long periods, including in their representation by knowledge and belief systems. As recent work on Japanese ecologies during the Tokugawa period (between 1603 and 1868) shows, age-old traditions had accumulated knowledge on how to sustainably manage a complex landscape providing humans with food, shelter, clothing, and energy. The knowledge was implemented through a complex system of governance and material practices ranging from sanitation to publishing.

Having reviewed diverse theories and hypotheses on the waning of the Age of Enlightenment in Central Asia, it is now time to step back and raise a larger question: does it really require an explanation? The assumption behind our search for causes is that if one or another factor had not come into play, the movement of thought would have continued. But that great period of intense cerebration, that age of inquiry and innovation, had lasted for more than four centuries. If more information on the centuries preceding the Arab invasion had survived, we might confidently extend that period of flowering even further back in time. Even without this addition, the Age of Enlightenment was five times longer than the lifetime of Periclean Athens; a century longer than the entire history of the intellectual center of Alexandria from its foundation to the destruction of its library; only slightly shorter than the entire life span of the Roman Republic; longer than the Ming or Qing dynasties in China and the same length as the Han; about the same length as the history of Japan from the founding of the Tokugawa dynasty to the present; and of England from the age of Shakespeare to our own day. As they say in the theater world, it had a long run. It is well and good to speak of causes of the decline of the passion for inquiry and innovation, or of some supposed exhaustion of creative energies. But just as we feel little need to discover the cause of a nonagenarian’s death, we need not inquire too urgently into the cause of the waning of this remarkable age. Of course, the question of why the region as a whole remained in a state of backwardness from the end of the Age of Enlightenment down to recent times is vitally important, but it involves many factors besides those that came into play in the intellectual decline. It should form the subject of another book.

The strong manly ones in life are those who understand the meaning of the word patience.

Perhaps the most significant of these are two related aspects characteristic of Japanese urbanisation: the intense intermixture of differing land uses, and the extensive areas of unplanned, haphazard urban development. Mixed land use is so prevalent in Japanese cities that it may be hard to believe the government Figure 0.1 The “busy place” (sakariba) of Ueno is one Japan’s most enduring central city entertainment and shopping districts, and was already famous in the Tokugawa period for its theatres and nightlife.

Weber’s thesis is now more than a century old and nearly all of the introductory sociology textbooks (but not mine) take it to be a settled fact that the rise of industrial capitalism took place initially in predominantly Protestant countries and that within nations having both Protestants and Catholics, the Protestants dominated the capitalist economy. Moreover, a number of sociologists have attempted to account for the modernization of various non-Western societies by ‘finding’ an equivalent of the Protestant Ethic in their local religions12 – Robert Bellah claimed that such an ethic existed in Japan’s forms of Buddhism, Confucianism and Shinto during the Tokugawa era.13 Nevertheless, it’s all a myth!

NEVER IN the history of man had one barbeque been so torturous. There’d been other feasts that ranked up there in the crimes against civilization—any dinner invitation from Vlad Tepes came to mind—but sitting at a picnic table groaning with food while directly across of Ichiro Tokugawa sucking on a rib bone had to qualify for at least waterboarding, if not bamboo slivers under his fingernails.

She told him of a poem that described the three most prominent shoguns in feudal Japan and their methods of dealing with a bird that refused to sing. If it doesn’t sing, kill it, the first said. If it doesn’t sing, make it sing, was the second’s philosophy. The third, and most successful shogun, Lord Tokugawa had said: If it doesn’t sing, wait for it. It will.