When being invested with the title of daimyo, a subject of this, the highest rank in the buke class under the shogun, had to submit written oaths and swear personal fealty to the shogun. This ritual, and the registration of the oath in the records of the bakufu in Edo, was repeated by each daimyo every time a new Tokugawa leader assumed the title of shogun. With this oath, the daimyo obligated himself to perform a series of duties. Primary among these were his military obligations, such as maintaining his quota of warriors in active service and ready to move into battle at the shogun’s command, whenever needed; he also had to provide troops for guard duty at any station specified by Edo, such as the thirty-six gates of the shogun’s castle, the imperial court at Kyoto, various coastal sites, the barriers and checking points along the highways, and as shogun’s envoys on official missions. Duties of a more administrative nature were those of keeping peace within the territories under their direct control and providing funds, materials, and workers for public projects devised and assigned by the shogun (tetsudai).
In relation to their fiefs, each of these feudal lords “was a paternalistic but absolute monarch. . . . Aiding him in his rule over the soldiers, peasants, and merchants of the principality was a class of officials and military officers, who formed the little court at the central castle of the daimyo and lived on the hereditary salaries he assigned them and their families” (Reischauer1, 77).
He exercised judicial and administrative control over his subjects and supervised them through the use of cohorts of warriors that, while belonging to one or more military clans, were pledged to him as the uji-no-osa and as the rightful representative of the shogun. Very seldom, however, was a military governor sent to rule over military clans not related to him, either directly or indirectly, by ties of blood, territory, or sworn oath.
The warriors who served under the daimyo in his fief were also organized into a vertical system of categories and ranks which varied from clan to clan, from region to region. Some of his retainers, called tachikaeri, followed him anywhere he went or resided, whether in his fief or in Edo; others (jofu) remained permanently in Edo with their lord’s and their own families, as guards of his mansion in the capital; and still others (kimmuban) were rotated periodically to fill the various clan offices in the provinces and in Edo.
One example of a large and complex clan ruling in the provinces after the Tokugawa’s rise to power is provided by the clan of Yamanouchi Kazutoyo, who was sent by Ieyasu to rule as daimyo over Tosa in the Shikoku Islands. This province had formerly belonged to the Chosokabe clan, whose members (unfortunately for them) had opposed the Tokugawa and had subsequently been dispossessed of the estates they had taken from the Ichijo clan. Following the classic pattern of vertical hierarchy, the Yamanouchi clan was structured like a pyramid (see Chart 6). At the top was the daimyo, with his advisory and administrative cabinet of superintendents (bugyo). He owned the best and most productive land (kura) in the province. This land was divided into large classes of territories such as honden, prime, original land which had been cultivated for ages, and shinden, land cleared for cultivation after his appointment as governor of the province. He also supervised and granted tenure to new but secondary lands, such as the yaguchi, cleared by retainers of samurai rank, and the ryochi, cleared by retainers of goshi rank. All these lands were variously classified as central lands of the clan or “house-lands” (yashiki); as rice-fields (ta); as up-lands (hata), usually reserved for the cultivation of wheat, barley, vegetables, etc.; as pasture or grasslands (hara); as virgin-lands, forests, woods; and so on.
Under the provincial governor of Tosa were two classes of retainers. The first was the class of the karo or Elder Councillors. These retainers were semi-independent, owned their own lands, ruled over their own villages and farmers who paid taxes directly to them, and commanded their own warriors. The karo, whom Grinnan rightly qualified as “under-lords,” were very powerful and usually paid no taxes to the daimyo. Although they were required to provide the governor with troops when he needed them, this was done only after they had cleared the daimyo’s request with the central government (bakufu) in Edo. Naturally, they were “the subject of jealous concern to the daimyo,” but their effectiveness in checking his political ambition and power within the boundaries of his assigned province proved itself again and again during the Tokugawa period.
The second class of retainers consisted of warriors who owed allegiance directly to the provincial governor. They were called shihaku or samurai, and their cohorts were also divided into several ranks, each with its own prerogatives, privileges, duties, and income. In the first category of direct retainers were the churo, who had the right to wear the two swords (daisho) and to ride on horseback “in time of peace and of war.” They were not paid in rice but in prime land from the honden or shinden of the daimyo—land which was capable of producing the quantity of rice their position entitled them to. These lands, known as chigyo, gave to their owners the title of jikata-tori. In the second category of direct retainers were the uma-mawari warriors, some of whom were paid in land and some in rice, while in the third and largest category we find the koshogumi, who were paid in rice produced on the daimyo’s kura, according to the rice system of income (kokuso). All these warriors had the right to wear the two swords, but only some of them were permitted to ride horses. In the third category were also those retainers who were paid in rice but not according to the rice system of income; their emoluments were usually referred to as fuchi-kippu.
The provincial governor of Tosa also commanded the loyalty of two other classes of warriors, known as goshi and keikaku. The goshi, or “country-warriors,” were ancient retainers (kerai) of the defeated Chosokabe clan who were left “in undisputed possession of the lands they had received from their former masters” because they had submitted “gracefully” to the new masters appointed by the Tokugawa. Grin-nan qualified the position of these goshi as being “unique in the annals of Japanese feudalism,” and their number, naturally, was quite limited. They also owned lands and horses (which they had the right to ride), wore the daisho, or two swords, fought in wars, could dispose of their own property—although if they sold all their lands they lost their titles, and in any case could transmit their titles only to a firstborn heir. It is interesting to note that after the Meiji Restoration, while most of the daimyo appointed by the Tokugawa had to return their estates to the new central government of the emperor, the goshi were allowed to retain their holdings because their titles had not been granted them by the Tokugawa. Below these country warriors, finally, was a class of retainers known as keikaku, or “country gentry,” who were paid in rice, wore two swords but possessed no horses, and generally lived far from the provincial castle at the outskirts of cities or country towns, “within a day’s call” of the daimyo’s main residence.
Describing the Okudaira clan of Nakatsu, Fukuzawa gives us an idea of stratification of functions and denominations in an average-size clan (see Chart 7). The Okudaira clan, in fact, consisted of about 1,500 men entitled to wear the daisho, or two swords. They were divided into two categories, upper and lower—the former being “about one third the size of the latter.” In the upper category of warriors (kyunin) were included the chief minister, chamberlain, steward, Confucian scholars, physicians, and retainers of first rank (koshogumi), as well as “a body of attendants on the daimyo consisting especially of boys who had not yet