Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan: Buddhism, Anti-Christianity, and the Danka System (review)

In 2000, Nam-lin Hur published a study of Asakusa's Sensoji temple and its prominent place in Edo's urban culture.¹ During the research phase of that project, he also amassed extensive data on the Buddhist clergy's role in the creation of early modern mechanisms for social governance and on the impact of that activity on Buddhist temple practices. Although Hur referred to some of this material in his first book, he gives it his fullest attention in Death and Social Order in Tokugawa Japan. With some qualifications, the result is a helpful addition to our understanding of Edo-era Buddhism.

The crux of the study is Hur's argument that the Tokugawa baku-fu's suppression of Christianity and the subsequent expansion of funerary Buddhism were the primary catalysts for the creation of the early modern social order. This singular emphasis on the religious origins of the Tokugawa social structure is problematic. Status ideals, economic relations, gender politics, and regionalism surely exerted as much, if not more, influence over the politics of social identity. Nonetheless, Hur's claim does ask us to rethink certain common assumptions regarding Tokugawa social history. Scholars have long recognized the impact of Neo-Confucian and nativist figures on the development of Edo-era Japan. In contrast, Buddhist clerics usually play only a minor role in scholarly examinations of this period or their presence is altogether ignored. Hur counters this marginalizing tendency by illuminating the high degree of active Buddhist participation in certain social processes. Although Buddhist institutions were subject to warrior regulation and oversight from the onset of Tokugawa rule, Hur contends that the clergy was able to exploit ambiguities and ambiva-lences in the bakufu's religious policies to create extensive networks of household-based patronage for the priests and their temples. Through the resultant "patron-household" (danka) system, the clergy gradually yet relentlessly extended its influence over nearly every family in early modern Japan.

This expansion was not without cost, however. The patronage system created opportunities for abuse, because clerics used the system to demand unquestioned financial support from their danka. Eventually elements among the laity developed deeply cynical perceptions of clerical activities. Warrior administrators and Confucian ideologues also came to distrust Buddhist intentions and envy temple wealth, and Shinto priests and other religious figures struggled against Buddhist dominance. By the end of Death and Social Order, Hur shows how early modern Buddhist institutions were undermined by their own success.

Hur traces these events through a four-part analysis. The contents of individual sections may be familiar to scholars of this period, as there are extensive bodies of previous research on these topics. Hur's contribution to the field of Edo religious studies, and to our understanding of Edo historiography, is his ability to master and synthesize these disparate fields of scholarship into a single cohesive narrative. Part 1 details the incipience and evolution of the danka system during the seventeenth century. Even though the Tokugawa house and other domains implemented policies to restrict Buddhist influence and activities, the samurai increasingly relied upon Buddhist auspices to implement the bakufu's anti-Christian policies. Tokugawa administrators did not give the clergy an explicit mandate to oversee every household's adherence to these laws, but by the end of the century the clergy had enrolled most of the population into the temple registration system (terauke seido). This process thereby affiliated every household with a local temple. Three domains—Mitō, Okayama, and Aizu—strove to reduce the Buddhist clergy's regulatory authority and the financial windfall that accrued to the temples from the expansion of their donor bases. These efforts largely failed in the face of implicit bakufu support for the clergy's role in its anti-Christian campaign, and the danka system became a cornerstone of daily life and social supervision.

Households (ie) were a core structural unit of Edo society...