ABSTRACT
SO A WRITER of the seventeenth century1 describes. the low ebb which Japanese cultural life had reached by the beginning of the Tokugawa period. It was not a literary society and hardly even a literate society which emerged when Tokugawa leyasu2 had finished his campaigns and completed the process whereby a nation of warring baronies was pacified and forced to accept the overarching
authority of the Tokugawa house. The nearly three hundred fiefs into which the nation was divided were ruled by men who had gained or kept those fiefs on the battlefield. Their recreations were warriors’ recreations; falconry, hunting, feasting and ceremonial pomp and circumstance. Their religion was a mixture of Zen selfdiscipline and the salvationist consolations of the more popular sects. In administering their territories they relied a great deal on verbal commands; only their more crucial and binding decisionsand the all-important records of land-holdings-were committed to paper. Their codes and edicts were brusquely straightforward and unconcerned with legal subtleties. The people whom they ruled were largely illiterate.
