No alcohol, no quarrels and no sumo wrestling: at the beginning of the Edo period in Japan in the early 17th century, there were strict rules of behavior for the subjects of the feuding princes. This is revealed in a 1608 document in which the head of the Hosokawa clan lists 13 rules of behavior. These were supposed to ensure that no quarrel broke out with members of other clans during the construction of the Sunpu Castle, as ordered by the Shogun.
The beginning of the Edo period in 1603 marked the transition from a bitter power struggle between various princes to the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns. The first shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu, re-divided the domains of the militant princes (daimyos) and devised several measures to maintain the fragile peace in his empire. This included the relocation of the capital from Kyoto to Edo, but also a building program through which the infrastructures and castles destroyed in the war were rebuilt throughout the country.
Construction projects as an agreement strategy
For this construction work, the princes had to send construction crews to a certain location and provide material on the instructions of the Shogun. On the one hand, this prevented the daimyos from amassing too much wealth, and on the other hand, the men of different clans were forced to work together on these projects. The government tried to repair the wounds of the civil war and improve relations between the clans, as the historian Tsuguharu Inaba of Kumamoto University explains. The shoguns engaged rival clans for the same national project in order to discipline them, but also to create common ground.
Strict rules of behavior were necessary to prevent disputes or even armed conflicts between the warring clans. The clan leaders gave these to their construction crews and soldiers on the way. What these rules contained is now revealed by a document from 1608 discovered by Inaba and his colleagues. In this document, Tadaoki Hosokawa, the daimyo of the Hosokawa clan in the northeast of the island of Kyushu, lists 13 rules for his people. These were assigned in January 1608 to help with the reconstruction of the Sunpu Castle near what is now Tokyo.
13 rules for conflict avoidance
The first item in the list of rules instructs the posted Hosokawa workers to obey the overseer’s orders in all matters. The second point puts all fighting within the clan under severe punishment. The following articles in the list are about avoiding conflicts with members of other clans. This was particularly important because the two clans involved in the construction, Hosokawa and Mori, had only been bitter opponents in the civil war a few years earlier, as Inaba explains. Point 3 of the rules already forbids watching the fights of another clan, point 4 stipulates that fugitives from foreign clans must be sent back to their clans after the project has been completed. Article 5 regulates the form in which fees are to be paid.
The second half of the code of conduct mainly comprised instructions for the behavior of soldiers and workers in everyday life. They were allowed to bring their own provisions, but alcohol consumption was limited to a maximum of three shallow bowls of sake. When visiting the city, official permission from the magistrate first had to be obtained, according to Article 7. Meetings with members of other clans or the shogunate were strictly forbidden, as were hot baths in the bathhouses of another clan. During the construction project, sumo wrestling and watching such a fight were also prohibited. In order to ensure compliance with the rules, the workers were also only allowed to travel in groups between Kokura and Sunpu.
As the historians explain, these rules of behavior are very similar to those that two other clan leaders gave their construction crews with on the way back then. This suggests that these rules of conduct go back to a central code of conduct imposed on the princes by the shogunate, according to the researchers. “This document provides us with valuable information about the policies and measures with which the shogunate mobilized and controlled the clan princes for reconstruction,” says Inaba.
Source: Kumamoto University