Nobody ever told me that Japanese history
could be so much fun!
I studied history at university, and have
lived in Japan for around ten years, so perhaps I should have found an interest
in Japanese history much sooner. But
until now I didn’t investigate it much except to decide that I would rather
have been a samurai than a ninja.
I would have come to it much earlier if I had known about
the shogun who was as eccentric as any modern day leader of Pyongyang. I have been reading recently about Tokugawa
Tsunayoshi, the fifth Tokugawa shogun, who ruled from 1680 to 1709.
He was raised as a scholar, rather than a
samurai, and was deeply interested in Buddhism and neo-Confucian Chinese
writers. He was also, apparently a bit
of a mummy’s boy, and relied heavily on his mother’s advice.
He is famous for his “edicts on compassion
for living things”, which have a lovely title but seem mostly to have been a
list of things that people could be executed for doing. In particular the edicts made it an offence
punishable by death to harm a dog.
Tsunayoshi had been born in the year of the dog and his mother always
impressed on him the need to be kind to those animals. This edict earned Tsunayoshi the pejorative
nickname of the dog-shogun.
At this time the capital city Edo already
had a number of stray dogs living off scraps and what they could scavenge. Many were sick and half starved. It sounds like a lovely and compassionate
thought to let these poor creatures live, to give food to them and protect
them.
But as Tsunayoshi must have read in his
studies of Buddhism, life is suffering.
If you give extra food to a group of wild animals, and protect them from
being killed, they will not enjoy the ease and comfort for long. Instead, their numbers will rapidly increase
until they are half starved again, but at a much higher population density.
This is exactly what happened in Edo. The city became filled with wild dogs, which
sometimes banded together and attacked children and other weak pedestrians. By 1695 there were so many dogs that they
caused the city to stink horribly.
Tsunayoshi’s solution was to gather up 50,000 of the dogs and move them
to special kennels in the city’s suburbs, where they were fed rice and
fish at the taxpayers’ expense.
Tsunayoshi died at the age of 62 and the
terror of his compassion ended. Some
sources say that he planned to pass the shogunate on to his young male lover,
and his appalled wife may have assassinated him. According to this theory, quoted on
Wikipedia, fearing that Tsunayoshi’s plan would cause so much scandal and
division that it would ignite a terrible civil war, she killed him and then
herself. The mighty shogun killed by his
own wife? Didn’t I say that he was a
mummy’s boy?
Vocabulary:
a dog’s life – a miserably unhappy
existence. For example: He has been
living a dog’s life since his wife left him.
to be eccentric – to be unconventional and
slightly strange
to be neo-Confucian – to be later works, based on Confucianism,
or revivals of older Confucian ideas.
Confucianism – The system of beliefs
based on the writings of Confucius, called 孔子 in
Japanese.
a mummy’s boy – This is a slang term,
meaning a boy or man who is overly influenced by or reliant upon his mother
an edict – an official order or command,
given by someone in authority
compassion – sympathetic pity or concern
for the suffering of others
to execute – to punish by killing
to be pejorative – to be meant or used in a
negative way
to scavenge – to hunt for food or materials
discarded by others
to stink – to smell terribly
a kennel – a man-made home for dogs
to be appalled – to be shocked and horrified
to assassinate – to kill by deliberate
plan, especially of important political figures
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