The symbol was no longer the katana, but the toothpick

Edo. A winter evening in a side alley on the east bank of the Sumida River. The room is cold, because there was no money for charcoal this winter. A man finishes his meal – a handful of barley with a little rice, a slice of pickled daikon, a bowl of hot water in which a last bit of fermented soybean paste has dissolved. He sets down the bowl. He reaches for a toothpick.

Now he does something no one ever taught him outright. He learned it watching his father, his father watching his own father, and so backwards through many generations. He stands in the doorway, where he can be seen from the street, and slowly, with care, picks his teeth. This is how a well-fed man behaves. Someone who has just been served fish, rice with vegetables, and warm soup, and who now has a moment to set himself in order in peace. The neighbour behind the thin wall is to draw one conclusion from this – in this house, people eat their fill.

But this man has not eaten his fill. In truth he has barely eaten at all. And yet he belongs to the country’s ruling, privileged class – to men with the daishō, two swords at the belt, before whom the peasant prostrates himself and the merchant lowers his voice. By the end of the rule of the Tokugawa house, in the shadow of two hundred and fifty years of enforced peace, most of those who carried those two swords were desperately poor. Not symbolically. Literally – they could not afford rice.

The scale of this is, at first, almost unbelievable. Take Katsu Kokichi – grandson of a samurai who still remembered the battles of Sengoku – who roamed the alleys of Edo as a small-time hustler, took protection money from shopkeepers, and staged a theatre of seppuku to force peasants to pay a debt. In another household of old samurai tradition, a wealthy peasant paid an impoverished samurai family to “adopt” his son and give him the right to wear two swords. With that money the samurai could pay off part of his debt to a merchant. And the merchant was officially the lowest caste in the social hierarchy of Edo Japan – the caste to which samurai were heavily indebted, the caste that financed what we today call the golden age of Japanese culture: kabuki theatre, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the silks of Yoshiwara – while the elite, the samurai warriors, sat behind closed shutters by night gluing paper onto umbrella skeletons that they would then sell in secret. Because their salaries were not enough to live on.

And yet the most astonishing thing here is not the paradox – that the hierarchy had turned upside down. The most astonishing thing is the perfidy of the system. By the end of Edo, samurai were forbidden to work, and at the same time required to display wealth – on a starvation salary they were legally barred from supplementing. Each of these rules, taken alone, could have been borne. Together they formed a closed cage in which the ruling class quietly died over more than a hundred years, defending the very order that was starving it.

The toothpick raised high above an empty stomach was the gesture of this cage. At once dignified and false, proud and tragic. Let us try to see who these people were and how they lived – because this is not only a story about Japan, and not only about the nineteenth century.

Rice Instead of Money

To understand how a ruling class can have no money for dinner, one must begin with how it was paid. The samurai did not receive a salary in coin. He received rice. The unit of his worth, his rank, and his fate was the koku (石) – a measure of volume, about one hundred and fifty kilograms of grain, the amount theoretically needed to feed an adult for a year. A lord had as many koku as his land could yield; a samurai had as many as his lord chose to grant him. That number decided everything: where he lived, whom he could marry, how low others bowed to him.

And here is the first basic fact: that rice was, again and again, desperately scarce. The range of incomes within the warrior class was enormous, and the overwhelming majority of retainers sat at the very bottom. Fewer than twelve in a hundred reached a hundred koku a year. Around seventy in a hundred lived on forty koku or less. The poorest had officially fixed tiers: fifteen koku with food rations for three persons, thirteen koku with rations for two, ten koku with rations for one. And there were those who received still less, paid out in a handful of copper coins.

What did this poverty mean in the figures of daily life? Lower-ranking samurai and retainers of provincial lords might have an income of around three ryō (両) a year and a modest rice ration – roughly a thousand copper mon (文) a month. A fistful of mon bought one bowl of hot soba noodles at a street stall; a night in a shabby inn cost a few dozen mon, in a better one over a hundred. From such an income one had to feed a family, pay for a roof, dress according to rank, and still keep up the pretence of being able to afford more. The gap between income and appearance was patched with debt or with night work no one could see.

This rice – kirimai (切米), “cut grain,” paid in instalments – did not flow in an even stream through the year. It came in three payments: spring, summer, and winter. Worse, whenever the bakufu paid part of the stipend in cash rather than grain, it converted the rice at the so-called official price, harigami-nedan (張紙値段) – the price written on a posted tablet, almost always below the market rate. The samurai lost twice: once because he was paid in a commodity rather than money, and again because the commodity was valued below its worth.

There was yet another cruel paradox in this. Since the samurai received rice and had to exchange it for cash, his real income depended on the price of rice. And in good years that price fell. A bountiful harvest, a blessing for the peasant and for the country, meant a thinner purse for the warrior – he was selling the same grain more cheaply. Drought, flood, good year, bad year: the income of the man with a sword hung on a string held by someone else. In Osaka, in the Dōjima district, merchants traded rice that had not yet been harvested – in the 1730s, one of the world’s first futures markets emerged there. The fate of the warrior class was being turned over on an exchange run by people theoretically set at the very bottom of the social hierarchy – the merchants – whom the samurai had the right, indeed the duty, to despise.

Here lies the heart of the trap. The warrior’s income was frozen – in a rice denomination, in a number set down generations earlier, inherited along with the family name. Meanwhile life around him resembled less and less the village and more and more the city, where everything – a roof, charcoal, lamp oil, a bowl of hot noodles at a street stall – cost cash. Edo was growing. Shops, theatres, tea houses, fashions changing from season to season. Prices were rising. And the number in the register stood still.

And it was not only the poorest. Most of the shōgun’s direct retainers with the rank of hatamoto (旗本) had, on paper, between five hundred and a thousand koku – a seemingly substantial fortune. In practice it was eaten up by obligations: maintaining the proper number of attendants, horses, and armour, making appropriate appearances on service, gifts and ceremonies due to one’s position. The higher the threshold, the higher the cost of holding it. Poverty in this class was therefore not just the lot of the bottom – it was a gravity pulling almost everyone downward. Even daimyō were ground down by the law of sankin kōtai (more about it here: Ten ri a day and not a moment of silence: the lives of ordinary people in daimyō processions under the Edo shogunate ).

Of course, many of us are tempted by the obvious reply: “Well, let them go to work, like everyone else, the loafers.” Could he have earned more? He had no way. Trade was the business of the merchant, manual labour the business of the craftsman, and law and custom forbade the warrior both. The law forbade him to work, while at the same time forcing him into a poverty from which, without work, he could in no way escape. Could he have spent less? Not really, either. Being a samurai cost money: he had to keep the retinue prescribed for his rank, provide clothing for official occasions, look after his weapons, present himself when his lord summoned him. The higher the stipend, the higher the demands – and many higher-ranking warriors used up their entire income merely on maintaining their position, and then began to fall into debt. The ruling class was designed in such a way that it could neither earn more nor spend less. This was the Tokugawa method (beginning with Ieyasu) for keeping peace in a country of warriors who, for generations, had lived in a state of permanent war “of all against all” (Sengoku). And in the seventeenth century it was a brilliant method. But by then more than two hundred years had passed, many generations of ever poorer samurai who had never seen a war or a battle in their lives. The Edo of the nineteenth century was an entirely different world from the Edo of the seventeenth.

Honjō. The Man Who Never Got a Post

His name was Katsu Kokichi, and we know him well, because at the end of his life he wrote everything down – candidly, openly, and bluntly. He was born in 1802 into the Otani family, and as a child was given in adoption to the Katsu house – a gokenin (御家人) line, the lowest among the shōgun’s (将軍) direct retainers. A gokenin had no right to appear before the lord, but he was still his man, entered in the registers, hereditarily bound to service. In exchange he inherited a stipend. And he waited for a post.

He waited in an organisation called the kobushingumi (小普請組 – literally, “the group of minor works”) – a pool of retainers without assignment. Anyone who failed to obtain an office landed there, and sometimes remained for years, decades, an entire life, in hope of nomination. Compulsory and lifelong unemployment. Let us pause for a moment over what such a life can do to a man’s mind…

Nominations came rarely. For the mere privilege of waiting one even paid a small contribution. Kokichi never got his post. His whole adult life was sustained by a system that found no work for him, while paying him a stipend too meagre to live on.

So he lived otherwise. He lived in Honjō, on the eastern, poorer side of the Sumida, in a district of cramped samurai houses slowly slipping into ruin. He dealt in swords – appraised them, brokered sales, sometimes pushed a buyer a blade better in description than in steel. He took money from shopkeepers for “protection.” He lent, schemed, used his fists and his wits. At the age of thirteen he ran away from home and wandered the road between Edo and Kyoto as a beggar. At twenty he criss-crossed the country, passing himself off as the envoy of some dignified, mysterious lord. He was a brawler, a liar, and a petty con man – and he wrote it all down without a trace of remorse.

In Honjō and the neighbouring Fukagawa there were many such houses: samurai residences with crumbling plaster, gardens grown wild because there was money neither for a gardener nor for tools, sliding screens patched with paper. Kokichi moved through this world like a fish in murky water. He knew the prices of blades and the weaknesses of men. He knew whom to lend to, whom to frighten, where to put someone in his place with a single glance. The honour of his caste was for him not so much a sanctity as a commodity – and he knew exactly what it was worth and how to monetise it.

He wrote this down in old age, after handing over the role of head of the family to his son, in the work “Musui dokugen” (夢酔独言), roughly “the solitary mutterings of Musui.” He had then taken the name Musui (夢酔) – “drunk on dreams.” This was not high literature. It was the voice of a man from the very bottom of the lords’ class, saying what the lords did not say about themselves: that he had stolen, cheated, brawled in alleys and barely scraped by.

One scene he describes says more about his “trade” than any treatise. He had been sent into the countryside to collect a debt – six hundred ryō, an impossible sum for a village. The villagers stalled. Kokichi ordered a chest brought in from Edo – the chest meant for a severed human head. He took off his kimono, handed his sword to one of his men, wrapped the hilt of his dagger in a strip of cloth, and announced that they were about to see how Katsu Kokichi cuts open his own belly. “Watch how a samurai dies.”

The villagers threw themselves to their knees, begging him to stop. Because the death of a samurai in their village, on the threshold of their house, would have been a catastrophe for the whole community. The blood of a shōgun’s retainer on their mat would have drawn an official investigation, the possibility of collective punishment for driving the lord’s man to seppuku, an eternal disgrace upon the place where it had happened. Kokichi was not threatening them with his sword – he was threatening them with his death and with the consequences they would bear. That same day they paid five hundred and fifty out of six hundred ryō. The whole horror had been theatre. Kokichi had no intention of killing himself – he was selling the villagers the spectre of samurai honour, monetising the only capital he had left: the terror inspired by a man ready for death. A poor warrior from the back alleys of Honjō had taken the most sacred gesture of his caste and turned it into an instrument of debt collection. And it is hard even to hold it against him – he was the product of a system that, from birth to death, had placed him in an impossible situation.

And now something that gives pause for thought. Do you know who this petty con man’s son was? The boy growing up in poverty in the house in Honjō was called Katsu Kaishū. It is he who, as a grown man, would negotiate in 1868 the bloodless surrender of Edo Castle and help Japan move from the age of the samurai into the modernity of Meiji without a massacre in the capital. Out of a wretched stipend on which it was impossible to live, there grew one of the architects of the new state.

The Lowest Caste Holds the Purse of the Highest

The official social order of the Edo period was simple, and presented as eternal, inscribed in the very nature of things.

At the top, shi (士), the warrior (samurai).

Below him, nō (農), the peasant, because he fed the country.

Below, kō (工), the craftsman, the maker of things.

At the very bottom, shō (商), the merchant – someone who produced nothing himself and merely lived off the circulation of others’ labour. Useless.

(There was also a caste excluded from the official hierarchy – more about it here: Songs from the Eta-mura – The Lives of the “Non-Humans” Erased from the Maps of Shogunate Japan).

Four estates, shi-nō-kō-shō (士農工商), arranged from the most to the least respected.

In reality this order stood on its head. The further the Tokugawa peace ran from Sengoku, the clearer it became that it was the despised merchant who sat on the money and the venerated warrior who sat on debts. And to turn his rice into cash, the samurai had to go – yes – to the merchant.

A separate profession mediated this. In Edo such a man was called the fudasashi (札差), the rice broker, and his world was concentrated in the Kuramae (蔵前) district of Asakusa – literally, “before the granaries.” The mechanism was clever. The stipend came in rice three times a year, and the samurai needed cash all the time, and certainly did not want to cart away or sell sacks of grain himself. So the fudasashi collected his portion, sold the rice, paid the warrior in coin – and took a commission for the service. And since he was already holding future stipends in his hands, he began to lend against them as well.

Edo had its fudasashi, Osaka its own. There, the lords’ brokers were the kuramoto (蔵元), warehouse managers handling the rice of whole domains. And it was from this world that something astonishing for its time arose: paper circulating as money. A receipt for rice stored in a warehouse, komekitte (米切手), passed from hand to hand in place of the grain itself. The estate that official doctrine placed lowest was, in practice, laying the foundations of modern banking – bills of exchange, credit, futures trading – while the highest estate still counted its wealth in sacks of rice.

The merchant lent dearly. Interest reached around fifteen percent, but it did not stop there – various fees and surcharges could push the real cost of the debt considerably higher. The samurai, formally the lord and master, came to the fudasashi to ask for an advance on rice that had not yet been harvested, bowed, sought to extend a deadline, and listened as a man from the lowest estate set out his terms.

Poverty did not spare even those who kept order. The lower city officials in Edo were the dōshin (同心), subordinate to the office of the city magistrate, machi-bugyō (町奉行). They lived in the Hatchōbori district, and their pay – a few dozen koku with food rations – was meagre for the scope of their duties. So they lived off what was not in the register: “gifts” handed over by merchants, small fees, arrangements. So sparse was the machinery of the state that its own watchmen earned on the side from those they were meant to watch over.

The fudasashi grew fabulously rich. They became some of the greatest spendthrifts of Edo – patrons of the kabuki theatres, the most generous guests in the Yoshiwara pleasure quarter. When the city counted off the eighteen greatest tsū (通) – connoisseurs, men of taste, dictators of urban style – most of them turned out to be rice brokers from Kuramae. The warrior’s money, passed through the merchant’s hands, returned to the city as the courtesan’s silk and the box-ticket at the theatre.

The contrast could be grotesque. A rice broker could spend in a single evening in Yoshiwara what more than one of the shōgun’s retainers saw in a whole year. Rich merchants dressed modestly in the street, because sumptuary laws forbade them silken ostentation – but the linings of their kimono were sometimes worth more than the entire estate of the samurai whose promissory note they held. The world pretended that the warrior was the lord. Money knew better (more about the sumptuary laws that, for example, forbade merchants to wear expensive clothing: Sumptuary Laws in the Time of the Shogunate, or How Prohibitions Stirred the Defiant Creative Genius of the Japanese).

And one more thing. The whole colourful culture of the “floating world” – kabuki theatre, ukiyo-e woodblock prints, the fashions of Yoshiwara, romances printed on cheap paper – grew out of the money of the despised merchant estate. The townsman of Edo, growing rich, was creating a culture. The warrior, growing poor, watched from a box he could sometimes barely afford. The golden age of urban art and the quiet ruin of the class of lords were two sides of the same coin.

A certain anonymous samurai watched this with disgust, hiding behind the pseudonym Buyō Inshi (武陽隠士), “the hermit of Edo.” In 1816 he wrote down a bitter, meticulous picture of the entire society – from the dignitaries of the bakufu to the outcasts – under the title “Seji kenbunroku” (世事見聞録), “Records of the things of this world that I have seen and heard.” The warriors, he wrote, were up to their ears in debt to the merchants, and often also to the blind moneylenders of the zatō (座頭) guild, known for murderous rates. The class of the sword lived on the indulgence of those it despised.

After Dark, by a Single Lamp

We do not know this man’s name, because there were thousands of him. We can only piece him together from what has been left in the records of daily life of the period – and place him by a single lamp, after dark, when the outer shutters have already been closed.

The door shut. The shutters drawn not for warmth – so that no one from the street could look in. On the floor, in a circle of dim light, lie thin strips of bamboo, sheets of oiled paper, a little bowl of paste made from boiled rice. The man sits bent over, doing something his hands were never trained for. He is pasting paper onto the skeleton of an umbrella.

This is naishoku (内職) – piece-work, side work done at home, in secret. The repertoire was familiar and recurring: pasting paper onto umbrellas, kasa-hari (傘張り); replacing worn paper in lanterns, chōchin hari-kae (提灯張り替え); growing morning glories asagao (朝顔) for sale; breeding goldfish; whittling toys and toothpicks. Simple tasks, performable with one’s own hands and a simple tool. And all of them “shameful.”

Shameful because manual work belonged to the craftsman, to the kō estate. For a warrior it “was not done.” To make umbrellas openly would mean confessing to the whole street that the family could not live on the stipend – and that shame, haji (恥), was avoided more than hunger. So the umbrellas were pasted at night, behind closed shutters, sometimes by the whole family: wife, daughters, all of them bent over the bamboo and the paste. And above them, on a stand against the wall, lay the two swords of the family’s honour – useless markers of a status the paste was paying for.

Such work could at best barely sustain a household. For each pasted umbrella one was paid pennies; one had to hand over hundreds to gather the equivalent of a single ryō. The women carried most of it – wife and daughters. Custom forbade them complaint as sternly as the men, and quietly they kept the house alive with skilful fingers. They are not in the official chronicles. They remain in small records, in the purchase prices of umbrellas, in the memory that the honour of a clan was held together at night by paste made of boiled rice.

In the morning the man would get up, wash the remains of the paste from his fingers, slip both swords behind his sash (大小, daishō – more about it here: Wakizashi – The Smaller Cousin of the Katana That Bore the Full Weight of Samurai Honor), and walk proudly out into the street as if the night had given him excellent rest. With a straight back, with the face of a man whose income flows from land and service, from honour, not from oiled paper. And if that morning he had a toothpick in his mouth as proof of a plentiful breakfast – he had perhaps whittled it himself the evening before.

Honour Without Bread

There is a Japanese proverb that holds this whole scene within itself:

武士は食わねど高楊枝

(bushi wa kuwanedo takayōji)

“The samurai, even when he has not eaten, picks his teeth with a high-held toothpick.”

A well-fed man, having finished his meal, cleans his teeth slowly, without haste, the toothpick raised in a gesture of satiety. The hungry warrior was to do exactly the same – so that no one would notice that beneath the sash with two swords he carried an empty stomach.

Read one way, it is even a beautiful gesture. It says: I will not show weakness, I will not complain, poverty has no right to decide who I am. The stoic core of this posture was real, and more than one of these men bore his poverty with a dignity that compels respect. To show hunger was to give an opponent a foothold, and the samurai had been learning all his life to give none.

But the same proverb has, in Japanese, a second, mocking edge. It is also used to name yase-gaman (痩せ我慢) – “thin endurance,” a forced toughness, the pose of a man pretending to a strength he does not have. And here it becomes bitter. Because the toothpick raised over an empty stomach is not only pride. It is also a lie – a small, daily one, performed for the benefit of a neighbour who is probably gluing umbrellas behind his own shutters. One could say this somewhat resembles our own time, where neighbour preens before neighbour with wealth bought on credit that he will spend decades paying back to the bank. But the resemblance is only partial. In late Edo, samurai were forbidden to work while simultaneously being compelled to display affluence, on a starvation salary that they were legally forbidden to supplement.

There is yet another, less edifying possibility. The warrior’s contempt for money – that whole ethic placing duty and honour above gain – may have been, in part, what Aesop’s fox felt for grapes hanging too high. A class deprived of access to wealth turned that deprivation into a virtue. “I don’t count money, because counting money is beneath me” sounds proud, until one sees that the man simply cannot afford to count any. This does not mean that samurai restraint was merely a pose. It means that the ideal and the necessity were braided so tightly together that even those concerned could not always tell them apart.

Beneath this gesture lies something deeper than poverty. The warrior’s identity had come loose from its foundation. Through two hundred years of peace, the samurai had no war to wage – his profession, combat, had become a profession without content. And now it turned out there was no money either. What remained was status alone: a role for which the world had stopped paying, performed nevertheless, every day, for an audience that had also stopped looking. The toothpick is the prop of this role. The man plays the well-fed, because he plays the samurai, and the samurai is never hungry – at least not before the eyes of others.

Buyō Inshi, that bitter observer of 1816, saw in this a decay not only financial but moral. The warrior in debt to the merchant loses, he wrote, more than money – he loses the justification of his superiority. How is he to give orders to one to whom he owes payments? How is he to believe in an order that places him at the summit, when the summit is begging at the foot? Appearances still held strong, the swords still sat behind the sashes, but the core – the conviction that this arrangement was right – rotted from within, house by house, generation by generation.

What does such a role do to a man over a lifetime? Many things. It hardened some – and out of that school of restraint there came men of steel character. It broke others: it pushed them into resignation, into sake, into the petty rascality of the alleys, like Kokichi. It enclosed still others in a stiff, sour virtue, in contempt for a world growing rich which they could not catch. There is no single edifying lesson here. There is a man stretched between what his name commands him to be and what he sees in an empty rice chest – and each bore that tension differently.

Adoption

There was one way to turn destitution into cash once and for all. One had only to sell the last thing the samurai still had – himself. More precisely: his name, his rank, his place in the lord’s register.

It was called gokenin-kabu (御家人株) – “a share in the dignity of a gokenin.” It worked through adoption. An impoverished samurai family, without cash and without prospect of rescue, would “adopt” the son of a wealthy merchant or a well-off peasant – for payment. The adoptive son inherited the samurai name, the right to two swords, and the stipend. The family got money, sometimes enough to pay off debts or secure the old age of its elders. By the end of Edo the practice was widespread enough to have its own quiet market price.

This was no marginal phenomenon. By the end of Edo the dignity of a gokenin or a minor hatamoto could be the object of an open bargain, with brokers and established rates. A wealthy peasant or merchant, ready to pay, would introduce his son into the class of lords; an impoverished samurai, ready to sell, would walk out of debt. Both sides pretended this was an ordinary adoption, an act of family kindness. Everyone knew it was a transaction – and no one said so out loud, because to name the thing aloud would have stripped it of its last covering of decency.

Imagine the moment. The intermediary, the tea, the low bows. On one side, the old gokenin in a worn but carefully folded kimono. On the other, the merchant in silk, a man who could afford anything except one thing – except a name that would give his son entry where his money did not reach. On the mat lies a scroll: the genealogy. A list of forebears, warriors, reaching back to battlefields of several centuries earlier. The old man slides it across the mat toward the merchant. And takes the money.

Here is the warrior selling the merchant the one thing the merchant lacked. The sword passed into the hands of a man whose father had counted coins. The highest estate was relinquishing its identity to the lowest – and doing so not under the compulsion of a sword, but under the quieter, more effective compulsion of an empty stomach.

The System Devours Itself

The bakufu saw the problem and tried to cure it. The cure was called kien-rei (棄捐令) – the debt-cancellation decree. It was issued three times: in 1719, in 1789, and in 1843. Each time it meant more or less the same: a unilateral cancellation by the samurai of part of their obligations to the rice brokers. A general wiping out of debts, imposed by order from above.

The loudest of the decrees came in 1789, as part of the stern Kansei reforms led by Matsudaira Sadanobu. Then an enormous part of the shōgun’s retainers’ debts to the Kuramae brokers was struck off. Among the samurai there was joy; among the fudasashi, panic, and then cool calculation. Credit dried up, because no sensible man lends to one whose debt the state can annul with a single piece of paper. Half a century later, in 1843, during the Tenpō reforms, the scenario repeated itself almost word for word. The medicine, each time, treated the symptom and deepened the disease.

On the day of its proclamation the decree was popular among the warriors. Within a few months it would turn out to be a disaster. Because once a debt has been voided by command, lending to samurai stops being safe. The brokers who survived the cancellation drew the common-sense conclusion: terms had to be tightened. Interest went up, collateral was demanded more firmly, part of the merchants withdrew from the business altogether. And after each “rescue,” the samurai borrowed more dearly than before, from a smaller and more ruthless group of moneylenders.

And here we come to the most important point. The bakufu could not solve this problem, because the problem was the system itself. The ruling class had been designed not to trade and not to work with its hands; was paid in a commodity losing value against money; was made to perform a costly status; and was set down in an economy in which only money counted. Each of these rules, on its own, could have been borne. Together they formed a closed cage. The warrior did not grow poor because he was lazy or extravagant – though such there were. He grew poor because that is how he had been positioned.

And it was no small number. The warrior estate counted hundreds of thousands of families – an enormous body of people trained in letters, etiquette, and the sword, for whom the country no longer had wars, posts, or money. Some lost even their lord and became rōnin (浪人) – “men of the wave,” samurai without affiliation, drifting from one occupation to another. Others held on to meagre stipends, teaching swordsmanship, copying scriptures, practising medicine, instructing children – anything not to admit that the sword at the sash no longer meant what it had once meant.

By the end of the Tokugawa rule the class of the sword was a vast, impoverished, and discouraged estate, defending the very system that was starving it. When the Meiji Restoration came in 1868, and in the following decade the new state converted stipends first into salaries and then into bonds, for many minor samurai this was not so much a blow as the end of a fiction. At last one could stop pretending. One could lay down the swords there had been nothing to back up, and seek the kind of work that honour had until then forbidden.

This is not a story about Japanese weakness or about some foreign, exotic folly. It is a story about what happens when a society freezes its elite in a role and takes away the means to perform it. The Tokugawa caste system was not toppled by a single blow from outside. For decades it devoured itself, from within – bowl by bowl of cold barley, toothpick by toothpick.

A Life Made of Fiction

Let us return at the end to that alley, to the threshold where the man with the toothpick is standing. We already know he has not eaten. We know that he may have spent half the night pasting umbrellas, that he bows to a merchant whose station he is supposed to despise, that his name is worth today only as much as the rice dealer’s son is willing to pay for it.

And yet he stands. And picks his teeth slowly, with dignity, as if he had just eaten a feast of fish, vegetables and rice. The same gesture is invoked in Japan to this day in two ways: as a praise of endurance, when someone bears poverty without complaint, and as a mockery of those who cannot admit they are sinking.

For the toothpick raised over an empty stomach is a gesture that is double-edged and unsettlingly close. In it one can see the strength of a man who will not let poverty define him. One can also see the price paid for a whole life performed on display – for a satiety feigned so long that one ceases to know whether one is hungry. And there remains a question that every age answers in its own way, ours included: how long can one live with the toothpick raised high before one begins to believe the narrative about oneself that the system is trying to sell? The system of the last generations of Edo was cruelly designed against those people. But, honestly, sometimes it seems the system of the twenty-first century is by orders of magnitude more cruel. Only it is far more skilfully staged, more subtle, less obvious. Perhaps.

SOURCES

1. 武陽隠士『世事見聞録』(Buyō Inshi, Seji kenbunroku), 1816.

2. 勝小吉『夢酔独言』(Katsu Kokichi, Musui dokugen).

3. Katsu Kokichi, “Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai,” trans. Teruko Craig, University of Arizona Press, Tucson 1988.

4. Mark Teeuwen, Kate Wildman Nakai (eds.), “Lust, Commerce, and Corruption: An Account of What I Have Seen and Heard, by an Edo Samurai,” Columbia University Press, New York 2014.

5, Eiko Ikegami, “The Taming of the Samurai: Honorific Individualism and the Making of Modern Japan,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1995.

6. Kōzō Yamamura, “A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship,” Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1974.

7. Conrad Totman, “Early Modern Japan,” University of California Press, Berkeley 1993.

"Strong Japanese Women"

see book by the author

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    未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

  Mike Soray

   (aka Michał Sobieraj)

未開    ソビエライ

 An enthusiast of Asian culture with a deep appreciation for the diverse philosophies of the world. By education, a psychologist and philologist specializing in Korean studies. At heart, a programmer (primarily for Android) and a passionate technology enthusiast, as well as a practitioner of Zen and mono no aware. In moments of tranquility, adheres to a disciplined lifestyle, firmly believing that perseverance, continuous personal growth, and dedication to one's passions are the wisest paths in life. Author of the book "Strong Women of Japan" (>>see more)

Personal motto:

"The most powerful force in the universe is compound interest." - Albert Einstein (probably)

Mike Soray

(aka Michał Sobieraj)

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