Dr Chris Harding
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
One is that the Tokugawa shogunate, born back in 1600 with this epic battle at Sekigahara in October 1600, great Western army, great Eastern army, Eastern army is the Tokugawa army, they win.
The feudal lords who make up the Western army don't just go away and think, never mind, didn't work out for us, let's forget about it and move on.
In parts of the west of Japan, for decades and decades and decades, mothers will put their children to sleep with their feet facing Edo as a kind of rebuke.
Others have this yearly sort of ritual where they'll all gather, the top leaders of the domain will gather and they'll say, is it yet time to go and crush the Tokugawa?
The standard response is, no, not yet.
Maybe not yet, lads.
Wow, so the West remembers.
They have very long memories.
And I think that's one thing that's there in the background.
This becomes crucially important.
The other thing is that what looked like quite a good idea in 1600, which is having a very highly stratified society,
samurai at the top then merchants i'm sorry no samurai at the top um and then uh artisans and peasants because they're producers merchants actually at the bottom because they're not considered to produce anything they kind of deal in the produce um of others that made a great deal of sense and to have that be quite rigid was smart because japan had been through so much turmoil before actually what has happened by the middle of the 19th century is a lot of samurai officially still at the top but actually impoverished classic yeah penniless
of warrior aristocracy.
Yeah, exactly.
They're trying to put on a good show.
Often the facade of their homes will look good, but if you go inside the tatami matting, this rice straw matting, is in a terrible state.
They might have sold off some armour, even a daughter to a merchant to try and make a bit of money.
There's one domain in Japan, I think it's Morioka, which actually goes as far as produces a price list for merchants, saying, for this amount of money, we'll give you a sword.