Katsu Kokichi’s autobiography, Musui’s Story, gives the reader a concrete example of a samurai during the Tokugawa era. Katsu manifests, up-close, the effects his social status has on his daily life – a social status that was rapidly becoming, if it had not already become, an anachronism.
The samurai arose as a social class during the Kamakura era (1180 – 1333), although the roots of a military class certainly go back to earlier years. The process that led to the formalization of the samurai class is unclear in its earliest years. Historians entertain at least three distinct hypotheses about this earliest phase of a military social class. Significant is the fact that already in its infancy, there is some ambiguity about this group. Patricia Ebrey, Anne Walthall, and James Palais write:
The samurai plays such a central role in Japanese history from the twelfth to the nineteenth centuries that he appears almost timeless. Where he came from is a matter of debate.
If the origin of the group is ambiguous, its history is one of metamorphosis. Membership in this class was seen – by its own members and by the rest of society – as something being continually redesigned.
His connections with monarchy and court, and what it meant to be a samurai, changed over time. Historians once thought that the aristocracy reneged on its responsibility for maintaining peace early in the Heian period when it stopped executing criminals, allowed the conscript army to deteriorate, and permitted provincial governors to hire deputies rather than forsake the capital. By the tenth century, the countryside had fallen into disorder. Men in the provinces active in land reclamation projects armed themselves in local disputes and turned to warfare to protect their interests. A substantial warrior class arose, and in the twelfth century it turned on an effete and ineffectual monarchy.
A samurai’s self-concept was thus fraught with uncertainty. We see Musui wrestling to harmonize the inconsistent messages that he receives about his status. On the one hand, there is a Confucian sense about the necessity for honorable behavior, and the consequences for the lack of such honor: he reflects about “brave warriors who disregarded the laws of Heaven … and who came to grief.” On the other hand, the aristocracy views the samurai, who emerged from the lower classes, as not quite the equals of the nobles: internalizing the lower expectations placed on him, Musui recounts a drunken binge with no trace of shame, regret, or repentance. In such loutish behavior, Musui lives down to image projected by the upper classes onto the warrior class from which the samurai had emerged. As Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write about the samurai:
They dressed in iron armor and animal skins rather than silk, and many were illiterate. In the eyes of the Kyoto aristocrats, they were rustic boors, hardly more civilized than the Emishi they were called to fight.
Yet the samurai also saw themselves, and others saw them, as being above other social classes:
The verb samurau means to serve; the first samurai were warriors who held the sixth court rank along with scholars, scribes, and artisans. Other terms for fighting men did not carry the connotation of service to the court. By acquiring court rank and offices, such as guard at the left gate, samurai distinguished themselves from commoners. Warriors either sought rank themselves or accepted the leadership of someone who did. When royal scions or Fujiwara descendants moved to the provinces in search of careers that eluded them at court, their qualifications for rank based on their distinguished lineage helped them attract followers. In political terms, the need to have success at arms legitimized by court approbation, rank, and title always limited warrior autonomy.
Accordingly, as Musui recounts his activities as fundraiser for a temple, he speaks of recruiting ‘merchants’ and ‘peasants’ in way that indicates that they are not of the same class as ‘my fellow swordsmen.’
Given this equivocation about his niche in society, in Musui’s daily life, activities that hint of an aristocratic life of leisure, like practicing fencing in his spare time, alternate with more practical pursuits hinting of a more direct interest in sustenance. He writes:
I now had to earn pocket money. I tore around doing favors for people and racked my brain thinking up moneymaking schemes.
Musui is living in a social structure that emerged centuries earlier. Between the Kamakura era in which the samurai were first clearly categorized as a class distinct from warriors in general, and the Tokugawa era in which Musui lives, Japanese society continued to modify the social status of the samurai. Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write that, in 1588, Hideyoshi
tried to insist on a rigid status distinction between samurai and commoners by forbidding all but samurai from wearing two swords, one long and one short. Thereafter, commoners might own swords, but they could not put them on display. Hideyoshi issued a series of decrees prohibiting samurai from leaving their lord’s service to become merchants or cultivators and preventing farmers from deserting their fields to become city folk. Although it proved impossible to make clear distinctions between various statuses and some domains such as Satsuma or Tosa continued to recognize rustic samurai (goshi), Hideyoshi’s intent remained the law of the land until 1871.
Although this move was intended to elevate the social status of samurai, and seems to have done so to some extent, it also left it with its original ambiguity, and added a second layer of ambiguity because the very fact of social change creates ambiguity. This uncertainty would affect both the values which the samurai internalized, and the values which they exemplified to those around them – i.e., the values which society at large imputed to them.
So we see Musui remind his brother, in a heated moment in which they nearly come to blows, that he, too, is “an honorable retainer of the shogun.” What is Musui’s concept of ‘honor’ – what are his values? Again, with no remorse or chagrin, he reports that he spent his “days carousing to” his heart’s content, and that
I had some bills at the brothels, but instead of paying them, I got hold of six ryo and invited Masanosuke and one of his father’s retainers to the Yoshiwara.
Even if the reader makes allowances for the possibility of different sexual ethics – although Musui’s behavior might be vulgar even by those standards – his choice to squander money in the ‘red light district’ when he has financial obligations still violates the sense of honor which we can reasonably attribute to the Tokugawa society. Musui has, then, a nominal honor by virtue of his birth into the samurai class, but he visibly fails to embody the ethics associated with this honor.
The larger Tokugawa culture, in which Musui and his fellow samurai of the 1800’s found themselves, was characterized largely by consumerism and advancing education.
Consumerism typifies especially the urban areas – Musui’s Edo is modern Tokyo. The city had large shopping districts, a wide variety of products available, and specialization in professions (e.g., an emerging class of lawyers). A “fixed price system for cash” began to be more common, and commercials were incorporated into theatrical plays. Celebrities endorsed products, and enterprising showmen developed products named after themselves, engineering product placements in their own stage dramas, and featuring them in woodblock prints – an early form of junk mail. Edo hosted a high degree of commercialization and consumerist culture – all by the year 1800, before Musui was born.
Tokugawa’s popular culture enjoyed a high literacy rate. A strong educational system was in place, allowing for study of Confucian and Buddhist classics for the aristocrats; but for the masses, the chief significance of this educational boom was the ability to read, along with abilities in mathematics. Written materials fueled the front end of this consumer society – the ‘user interface’ – and calculation powered the other side, both in terms of financial accounting and ‘product design.’ The fact that we can use these startlingly anachronistic terms reveals exactly how modern Tokugawa society had become – and with that modernization, how far removed the medieval origins of the samurai class appeared to that society. The samurai seemed like something that didn’t quite belong.
Musui found a way to adapt. He engages in the Edo economy: he “went about learning to appraise swords.” Appraisal is recognized as a specific and distinct professional skill, a sign of a developed economy. Later applying this skill, Musui enters into the world of entrepreneurship and the startup of a small business:
I also had to make ends meet, so I tried my hand at dealing in swords and other military accoutrements. In the beginning I lost money – fifty or sixty ryo the first month and a half – but I got used to the business little by little, and by attending the second-hand goods market every night, I found I could really bring in profits.
Musui has become integrated into the commercialized Tokugawa urban culture. Likewise, he is a product of its higher levels of education. Reading and writing letters is a regular feature of the narrative, and the business transactions into which he enters require proficiency in calculation.
Musui’s life in the context of the larger Tokugawa culture is colored by an ambivalence about his place in society as a samurai. This equivocation manifests itself in his everyday life: a mixture of aristocratic leisure and middle class concerns for income. It manifests itself in his self-contradictory values and ethics, which have added aristocratic rhetoric about honor as a veneer over the original coarse behavior of the warrior class. And it makes the entire samurai class, this inconsistent mix of oafish soldiers with titled airs, an anachronism as its individual members try to navigate their way in the waters of an educated consumerist society.
