Japanese Costume & Makers by Helen Minnich

Author:Helen Minnich
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4629-0894-3
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing

CHAPTER NINE

EARLY TOKUGAWA

(1615-88)

A NEW CAPITAL AND

A NEW ORDER

TOKUGAWA, THE ERA OF JAPAN'S ISOLATION FROM the world, lasted from 1615 to 1868. It was a comparatively uneventful period except for the continuous deepening and narrowing of the channel which such a solitary society digs for itself when no wide horizons beckon.

Quite in contrast, Europe during the same two and a half centuries was busy exploring and exploiting other worlds, both old and new. Even China and India, before falling under the blight of European colonialism, knew days of greatness under monarchs who were comparable as well as contemporary with Louis XIV and his grandeur at Versailles.

While revolutions cost the heads of European kings—in England several decades after the beginning of the era and in France nearer its close—Japan's emperors continued to play their unimportant though divine role, all but ignored by the shoguns, whose chief concern was to keep submerged at all costs, even of assassinations and compulsory suicides, the disruptive power of provincial overlords.

Hideyoshi had suspected the Christian missionaries of political ambitions, and his feeling for them was by no means cordial. His unfriendliness was tempered, however, by his desire to foster commercial relations with Europe. To his Tokugawa successor, ever new grounds for suspicion presented themselves, and he finally determined upon a relentless and terrible persecution of the new religion.

This distrust of the foreigners, designs upon the nation's integrity entailed a distrust also of the commerce which brought them to Japanese shores. The absolute ban on foreign shipping did not come for yet some twenty years, but in 1609 the shogun ordered that no more large ships should be built, and this was the first great blow to Japan's overseas trade.

Whether the evil outweighed the good that came of this isolation is hard to assess. Cut off from outside contacts, Japanese art, like Japanese life, turned more and more in upon itself, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse. At least the policy was successful in averting the foreign domination of which the shoguns were so wary, and not without reason, as other Asian nations learned to their sorrow.

There were a few chinks in the "curtain," such as the port entry intermittently permitted to the Dutch at Nagasaki, and the trade that continued for some time with the south, with Spain's outpost in the Philippines, and especially with Siam, where a large Japanese colony had been established by religious and political refugees, Christian converts and followers of Hideyoshi. Through these chinks some outside influences did seep in, and these were the more significant because of their rarity. This was especially true—and especially important for our story of costume decoration—of the examples of batik dyeing that came in from Java.

Tokugawa Ieyasu was one of the nearest counselors and the foremost of the generals to whom the dying Hideyoshi in 1598 entrusted the welfare and succession or his young son Hideyori. Nevertheless that same Ieyasu readily accepted the office of shogun offered him by the emperor, and when he perceived that

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