Page 30 - Edo: Art in Japan, 1615–1868

society. One small district intendant who shared the supervision of a mere twenty-five villages with
two colleagues (some intendants were in charge of more than a hundred villages) kept a detailed
record of the flow of presents in his office. In a single year, 1851, he gave 188 gifts and received an aston-
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ishing 596, a few of them from village headmen. A good part of the economy was literally a gift econ-
omy, and not only in the sense that an elaborate, priceless exchange of goods took place. Functional
articles like writing boxes (cats. 6, 7, 27, 28, 36, 37) were also produced artfully and priced expensively
so that they could serve as tokens of a disinterested self, loyal and respectful — tokens that a discrimi-
nating eye could undoubtedly gauge for the purity of their symbolic alloy.
The ritual prescriptions attached to status that aimed at a politically correct distribution of
material goods were premised on two assumptions in the eyes of the rulers. Wealth, it was thought,- 29
could be accumulated only through coercive means: military force (prevalent in the sixteenth century) or
taxation, that is, levying tribute (the Tokugawa method). Second, the economy was assumed to be a
zero-sum game. Wealth was the result of "robbing the people," as Ando Shóeki (1703 -1762) put it bluntly
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in the eighteenth century. Goods that someone had in excess must have been taken from others who
had been forced to give them up: wealth could only be redistributed, not created.

N O U V E A U X R I C H E S , As it turned out, wealth was created through a new mechanism, namely the market. Although peri-
A R T S N O U V E A U X odic markets where people went to buy daily necessities had always existed, the development of a
national market affecting just about everyone was something new, a distinctive Tokugawa phenome-
non. Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, the economy kept expanding
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at a slow but steady pace, while population growth came to a virtual standstill. The result was a
surplus that did not flow where the rulers had expected all surplus to flow.
The samurai class, locked into the cities and towns by official decree, had to deal with the costs
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of city life and creeping inflation. Meanwhile, a significant number of merchants grew richer as they
gradually reaped the benefits of market expansion. Thus new wealth was generated that, by the turn of
the eighteenth century, had started to celebrate itself in novel cultural forms.
The upper fractions of the warrior class were still very much patterning themselves on the
courtly traditions, and China remained a source of cultural attraction for them. The townsmen, how-
ever— blocked from possible political or administrative careers by the samurai — while not averse to
emulating the nobility or things Chinese, nevertheless created a vibrant new culture, the likes of
which were not to be found anywhere else in East Asia. In China, for instance, rich merchants sought

cultivation as Confucian gentlemen and did not produce a culture distinctively fashioned by their
class tastes, preferences, and values.
Although the authorities certainly were far from encouraging this development, the Tokugawa
social and institutional setup must have been such that it did not, or could not, prevent this histori-
cal change from occurring. It is noteworthy that the Tokugawa rulers consecrated the establishment
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of pleasure quarters in big cities; noteworthy because such public endorsement of sexual indulgence
would be utterly unthinkable in a society that took Confucian teachings seriously. In Japan, however,
a variegated, proliferating culture of play sprang up on the periphery of these pleasure sites.
Tokugawa society was an urbanized society to a large extent. Urban customs and fads spread
throughout the land, traveling with daimyo and samurai as they returned from their attendance duties