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Chapter 1 The Geography of Politics
- University of Hawai'i Press
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19 1 The Geography of Politics The Japanese have a word for all of the things carried out in secrecy—that is, as insider secrets. They call it naibun, which is translated into the Dutch as binnenkant (inside). This is because the laws are so severe that they cannot be applied to the letter, as actually carrying out the law would cause things to become great incidents. The word that means the opposite of naibun, inside, is omotemuki, which means outside. When an incident is made public and treated as omotemuki, then the legal case must be treated according to the public rules and then it becomes impossible to lessen punishments. —j. f. van overmeer fisscher (1833), clerk in the Dutch Factory on Deshima1 The above quotation comes from a book written by the Dutchman J. F. van Overmeer Fisscher in 1833, a clerk who had lived in Nagasaki for about nine years in the 1820s. Here he describes the operation of the legal system of the Tokugawa period and reveals that the rulers themselves considered their laws too severe to regularly implement, but rather than changing the laws, they instead manipulated the metaphors of “inside” and “outside” in a way to keep the peace and prevent incidents in the realm. Secrecy and knowledge were formal in character and were tied to an anxious management of political, geographical , and social space. If things were mishandled and appeared in omotemuki, then everyone was bound to follow omote formal prescriptions, and this might be disastrous for all concerned. This pattern was indeed basic to the operation of not merely law but also the geography of politics 20 of politics and identity in the Tokugawa period. The containment of disorder and “incidents” was managed through a political system that delegated generally heritable authority over people and/or territory to powerful individuals in return for their service. The entrusted “inside” spaces existed in such institutional forms as domains, houses, occupational organizations, and villages, and the heads who ruled or represented them were such people as daimyo, samurai, village headmen, outcaste group leaders, and monopoly merchants. The leaders of such units were preoccupied with benefiting from their own position; performing duty, which meant funneling wealth up to their superior; and ensuring that they prevented disorder from breaking out of their spaces of authority and becoming, as Fisscher notes, omotemuki, outside knowledge. Such disorder brought higher authority inside and negated internal authority. This pattern was repeated down a branching hierarchy of leaders and institutions, creating spaces within spaces within spaces, such that some historians have described the political order as a “compound state.”2 Although at its governmental heights this order was primarily a set of what we think of as feudal relations between samurai, it existed in varied similar manifestations extending throughout society, interrelated with a social culture invested in inside/outside dichotomies of behavior.3 The goal of the political order was not centralized direct control, and so the Tokugawa government in charge would, for example, assist daimyo in the containment or suppression of disorder if possible, but it would also hold daimyo responsible for any egregious breaches in their authority. Those lower down in the hierarchies were treated similarly by their lords. All leaders were beneficiaries of, and hostages to, the Great Peace. This tension gave a character to the politics and disorder of the period. The politics happening in the Tokugawa period are easy to overlook because , in general, duties to superiors were clearly spelled out and rights of inferiors were at best revocable privileges or appeals to precedent. It is possible with a modern sensibility to mistake the authoritarian despotism of the Tokugawa as leaving an inferior little legitimate recourse for resistance against a higher authority. Certainly the omote claims of superiors seem limitless, and it is possible to consider the regime to be markedly centralized and absolutist if judged on those formal claims. But asserting “rights” was not the common mode of resistance. Inferiors regularly resisted higher omote claims without denying their validity, and furthermore resisted unwanted burdens and control sometimes with the full complicity of their superiors, in a pattern of behavior that held not only in the years of supposed decline but also in the midseventeenth century when the Tokugawa regime was in its moment of power [34.235.150.151] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:08 GMT) the geography of politics 21 most ripe. This chapter introduces the discursive structure of a complex network of political...