Global Crisis by Parker Geoffrey

Author:Parker, Geoffrey [Parker, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780300153231
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

16

Getting it Right: Early Tokugawa Japan1

The Pax Tokugawa

EARLY IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY, THE FOREMOST JAPANESE CHRONICLER of his day rejoiced that ‘In this age, there are none even among peasants and rustics, no matter how humble, who have not handled gold and silver aplenty. Our empire enjoys peace and prosperity; on the roads not one beggar or outcast is to be seen.’ A few years later one of his colleagues went even further: ‘What a marvellous age! Even peasants like me enjoy tranquillity and happiness… They dwell in the land of bliss. If this is not a [Buddhist Paradise], then how is it that I and other men could meet with such great fortune?’ Admittedly, a few of their contemporaries elsewhere also expressed confidence in the immediate future: an English ambassador who gloated in 1618 that everywhere ‘the gates of Janus’ had shut, which ‘promised Halcyonian days’ to ‘the greatest part of Christendom’; the Italian preacher Secondo Lancellotti (scourage of ‘whiners’) five years later. But whereas Europe suffered wars, revolution and economic collapse for the rest of the seventeenth century, Japan experienced the Pax Tokugawa: rapid demographic, agricultural and urban growth – and no wars.2

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