| Chapter 1: | From Ōoka Tadasuke to Hozumi Yatsuka |
|
|
These local militias kept martial law among their own ranks, but the peasants living under these military dictators continued, for the most part, to deal with one another based upon longstanding custom.4 While custom varied from village to village, the iriai, or commons, were an important feature of most farming communities. The commons reflect the communal nature of village life—in the end, everyone was in it together. In times of desperation, usually when a crop had failed or some other natural or epidemiological disaster had befallen a given area, the peasantry might rise up against their overseers seeking a redress of their grievances. The leaders of these rebellions were typically executed, but the battle lost was oftentimes the war won because a local ruler, terrified of losing control of his fiefdom should his higher-ups be forced to intervene, could be persuaded to cede to the peasants’ demands.
As the warlords vying for control of the Japanese archipelago passed through a long period of brutal internecine fighting, centralized power became ephemeral at best and each daimyō, or feudal satrap, became a law unto himself. The samurai whose fealty he commanded were bound to him by a moral code—heavily Neo-Confucian and increasingly imbued with a Zen Buddhism-inspired resignation to the instant death that might be demanded of a warrior at any moment—that transcended any form of written law. Eventually, Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616) ended the long period of civil war and fossilized the samurai code in the new Edo peace in 1603. The Tokugawa state was an accretion of samurai-centric administrative customs and rules of order meant to prevent underlings from rebelling (or having the resources to consider it) and was as blind and deaf to the peasantry as it had been under the post-Heian samurai jurisprudence (and even, before that, the Heian aristocratic oligarchy). Still, bakufu rule was largely free from ideological ligaturing, and the broad breezeways for maneuvering between law and society ran through the ritsuryō era to the nineteenth century.
Such was the divorce between law and practice in the Edo Period, for example, that Luke Roberts has understood the Pax Tokugawa as,