Discuss the social order of the Edo period in Japan.

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plans, qualities not usually associated with demoralized or desperate people. What proportion of families used the practice of infanticide to seek some or all of these goals, which tended to overlap, we cannot say. Given the degree of agreement in subgroups on completed family

size, the percentage may have been substantial. Most important, we do not know how common in Tokugawa society this pattern of infan-

ticide was. It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Nakahara was a

village with a population that never exceeded three hundred, one of

thousands of that size, and possibly highly deviant. No general signi6- cance can be attributed to our findings until, in some respects at least,

they have been duplicated elsewhere. At a time when the design of spades and mattocks differed from

one village to the next, it would be folly to expect in villages practicing infanticide that the patterns of family limitation and sex selection would be closely similar everywhere. It does not seem improbable, for

example, that there were villages that discriminated overall against

males in aborit the same degree that Nakahara discriminated overall

.against females. Nor is it unlikely that the sex bias changed from one

period to another in the same village, or that different strata in the same village discriminated against different sexes or against the same

sex to a significantly different degree. lt will be important in looking

for patterns, therefore, to disaggregate data as much as possible to pre-

vent contrary tendencies from canceling one another to give an overall

appearance of normality And if such differences may be reasonably expected within and be-

tween villages, we should not expect continuity from one region, his-

torical background, ecolog5 or economic structure to others. If vari-

ety on the basis of these variables was as great as we believe, it will

take a great amount of ingenuity and patience to uncover the preva-

lence of infanticide, and at every stag€ efforts will be hampered by the

small size of villages. But if in time systematic differences do appear,

we may begin to be ablc to identify various kinds of reproductive be-

havior and their social correlates in preindustrial Japan.

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R E V O L U T I O N

"An aristocracyr" Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, "seldom yields [its privilelesl without a protracted struggle, in the course of which impla- cable animosities are kindled between the different classes of society." Despite our democratic partialities, most of us would add, "And why should it?" To know the exalted pleasures of power and the grace of refined taste with the means of satisfying it; to believe oneself superior on the only evidence that gives conviction-the behavior of others; and to enjoy all this as birthright, with no vitiating struggle, nor any doubt that one's privileges are for God, king, country, and the good of

Given as thc Hume frcrure at Yalc Universiry in 196o; reprinted from the yale Re- uiew 5o, no.1 (Spring r96r).

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one's fellowman-what happier human condition, for a feq have men devised? :

Yet not all aristocracies have behaved as one fancies they must. Japan's warrior class, a feudal aristocracy even though it differed from European arisrocracies in crucial resp€cts, did not merery sur- render its privileges. It abolished them. There was no democraric revo- lution in Japan because none was necessary: the aristocracy itself was revolutionary.

Consider the bare outlines of the case. Until r86g Japan was ruled by a class of samurai who alone had the right to hold public office and bear arms and whose cultural superiority the rest of the population acknowledged. A party within this aristocracy of the sword (and swag- ger) took power in r868 and embarked on a series of extraordinary reforms. lwhere there had before been little more than a league of great nobles, they created an immensely powerful central government: they abolished all estare distinctions, doing away with warrior privileges and throwing office open to anyone with the education and ability ro hold it; they instituted a sysrem of compulsory military service at- though commoners had previously been forbidden on pain of death to possess arms; they established a sysrem of universal public education; and much else. The result was a generation of sweeping and breathless phange such as history had rarely seen until this century. I believe, al- though of course I cannot prove, that these decades brought greater changes toJapan than the Great Revolution of r789 brought to France. . ,f(/hy was the Japanese aristocracy-or parr of it-revbtutionary? JWhy did it abandon the shelter of its historic privileges for the rigors of .TreE

competition, which many warriors did not survive? Its behavior, like that of a man who takes cold baths in the morning, requires a spe- pial explanation.

Two general lines of explanation have been offered; although no 'bald summary can do them justice, even on fuller account they leave'much

unexplained. One might be called the prescienr parriot theory. That is, the for-

eign crisis-to be quite specific, the unamiable Commodore perry and the Americans, English, and Russians who followed him-stimulated the patriotism of the warriors and demonstrated to them the inade- quacy of existing institutions, prompting them to make revolutionary

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innovations in the 4ame of national salvation. This'I believe is quite true in a way. But it takes for granted what most 4eeds explaining.

Communities in danger do not necessarily seek safety in innovation;

commonly they reaffirm tradition and cling to it more resolutely. This

was the first response to th€ challenge of the modeln West in China and Korea; it also had intelligent and patriotic spokisnren in Japan.

The other explanation may be called the \festern analogue theory. It emphasizes (in the century b{ore Perry's arrival) the improvement

of transport, the growth of towns, the development of trade, and the rise of a wealthy merchant class-all important developments that add

much to our knowledge of premodern Japan. But suggestive as they are, these developments would better explain-keeping the Western analogy in mind-an aristocracy being overthrown or reluctantly forced to share power with a rising new class than an aristocracy con- ducting a social revolution.

Differences, rather than similarities, would seem more to the point. The man who takes cold baths is made of different stuff from most of us, and the Japanese warrior differed from the European aristocrat in ways that throw light on his seemingly odd class behavior. I wish to discuss three such ways that any satisfactory explanation of the aristo- cratic revolution, as I will call it, would have to takeinto account. One has to do with the.relations of the warrior to the merchant class, an- other with social ahd economic distinctions withinthe warrior class, and the third with fhe relations of the warrior classig land and politi-

cal power. .i ; My earlier statement that there was no democratic revolution in

Japan because the aristocracy was revolutionary hai,in important cor- ollary: had there bgen a democratic revolution, the.aristocracy would not have been revolutionary. Nothing unites an arisngcracy so quickly and firmly in defdnse of its privileges as an attack from below by classes in which it tan perceive neither distinction rior virtue.

Unlike the Western bourgeoisie, townsmen in'Japan never chal- lenged aristocratic privileges, either in practice or theory. They were seemingly content with a secondar)' political role, finding aPParent satisfaction in moneynraking, family life, and the delights of a racy and

exuberant city culture. This political passivity is puzzling. It is not to be explained by numerical weakness (Tokyo was a city of a million

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people in the late eighteenth century, and osaka was armost harf that size) or by poverty or illiteracy or poritical innocence. Least of ail is it to be understood as reflecting an absence of resentment

"t ,h" *".-

riors' smug and struffing pretensions. There was resentment aprenry and there were many i'stances of private revenge; but for some reason resentment never reached the pitch of ideorogy, ne*er raised petry pri- va.te hurts to a great principle of struggle between right and *rong. fo,wharever reasons, rownsmen acknowledged the pitiri.ri p.ir"".y

"rthe warrior, leaving him free to experimlnt without the fear that to change anything would endanger everything.

.nu-r, ola may suppose, no ruling group ever launches on a career of

radical reform merely because it ls fiee to do so; rf,rr.,r"i. p*i_ tive incentives as wet. In the Japanese case these incentives were inpart born of differences within the aristocracy. such differences were not unique to Japan, of course, but they can rarely have been more pronounced.

On the one hand were a few thousand families of superior lineage and very large income, with imposing retinues and magnificent houses, wlo in practice, although no, i' i"*, rnonopolized the important offices-of government; some offices in effect became hereditary. On the other hand was rhe burk of the warrior crass, numbering severil hun- dred thousand famiries who were cut off from high officJ and rived on very modest incomes; many lived in real poverty, pawning their armor and-family heirlooms, doing industriar pieceworl ,t hon,. ro eke out small stipends, and reso.ing rosuch pirifur tricks as sewing,iripr.r white cloth to the u.dersides oi their collars so people might take them to be wearing undergarments. As warrior mothers proudly taught their children, a samurai might have an eTpty belly but h;

";;; "toorhpick all the same. But it was not so much the contrast between his own and the styre

of life of his superior that moved the ordinary warrior to fury. It was the impropriety, rather, of the merchant's wealth. Surely it w;s; pe,- version of social justice that the warrior, who gave his tife ,o pubri. service, should live in want and squaror while men who devotedih..n- selves to moneymaking lived in ease and elegance, treated him with condescension and even rudeness, and in tt. end not inr..fu..,,ry found favor with the lord.

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The merchant himself was not to blame since he merely followed his nature. He was feared and hated for his actions, but ultimate re-

sponsibility lay with the effeminate high aristocrats who, because of idleness or incompetence, failed to use their inherited power for the proper ends of government. No secret was made of the failure, either. Political writings were full of charges of the incompetence and corrup- tion of government, of the fecklessness and indifference of princes; and the only remedy, it was said, lay in giving Power to new tt16n-msn of lower rank, who were close to the people and whose characters had been formed by hardship. This was no revolutionary doctrine: it called for a change of men, not institutions. But the men it helped to power were in fact radical innovators.

This brings me to the final differenc€-or rather to two differ- ences-between the Japanese warrior class and the Eurcipean aristoc- racy. Japanese warriors did not own land, and their political power was to a greater extent bureaucratic. I want to say more on these points, but first it will be helpful to see how a once-feudal aristocracy had come to be without private economic or political power.

We must go back to the late sixteenth century. At that time war- riors were scattered over the land in villages where the.;r were over- lords, levying taxes, administering justice, and keeping the peace. To defend their territories and lessen the hazards of life, they had long since banded together into regional military organizations consisting of a lord and his vassals. The normal state among such groups was war or preparation for war, the most direct means of increa'sing territory and thereby increasing strength and security.

Then, about the turn of the centurh Tokugawa liyiasu (l|4z- fir6), a man of authentic genius who had the remarkably good for- tune of having wo brilliant predecessors who had alre4dy half done what he intended, succeeded in conquering the country. Instead of de- stroying the feudal leagues or groups, however, he chose to use them to govern, taking care only to establish his own firm control over them. Seemingly a compromise befween order and chaos, the resulting politi- cal structure kept the peace for two and a half centuries.

These long years of orderly government, which favored economic growth and urban development, brought profound changes to the warrior class, altering not so much, however, the fact of warrior power

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(which remained uncontested) as the nature of it. I would like to men- tion three such changes in particular.

The first was a change in the relation of warriors to the land. The lord, in order better to control his vassals and to achieve greater uni- formity of administration within the territory he dominated, gradually restricted his vassals' power over their domains. He forbade them to administer local. justice; he moved them from the land into the town that had grown up around his castle; he decreed what raxes rhey might collect and at what rates, then decided to collect the taxes himself and in return to pay them stipends in money or kind from his treasury.

There were local exceptions to the rule, but taking the country as a whole, fiefs in land disappeared. Land and rhe seignoriar rights associ- ated with it, once widely dispersed rhrough the warrior class, were now consolidated in the hands of a few hundred noble families. The typical warrior had become a townsman living on a salary paid him by the lord, with the townsman's disdain for the country and country people. Both his juridical and social ties with the land were gone. If his fief was still an identifiable piece of land at alt, it was rarely more than

-1 a unit of accounr, with other land, under the lord's administration. The second was the resulting bureaucratization of government.

" The lord, having taken into his hands his vassals' political"and iudicial

. functions, now governed an average population of about one hundred thousand. To police so large a population, to collect its taxes and regu-

. late its trade, to give it justice and maintain its roads and irrigation

. works, required a considerable band of officials and clerks. The lord, of course, used his vassals to perform these functions, to man the ex- panding and differentiating bureaucracy un{er him. The warriors who manned the bureaucracy exercised far more power over the rest of the population than warriors ever had befoii, but it was a new kind of power, Formerly power was personal and territorial: it pertained to a piece of land and belonged to a man as inherited right. Now it was impersonal and bureaucratic: it pertained to a specialized office to which the incumbent had to be appointed and from which he might be r,3tllOV€d.

There is unmistakable evidence of the increasingly bureaucratic nature of power in the more and more irnpersonal criteria for selecting officials. However writers on government might differ on other mat-

; J A P A N ' s A R I s r o " * o " r " R E v o L U T ' o N

ters, by the late eighteenth century they were in agrJ.m.rrt that ability and specialized knowledge should take precedence over lineage and family rank in the appointment and promotion of offcials. To this end they devised tests for office, iob descriptions, fitness rbports, official al- lowances, salary schedules, and pensions.

Ir was only in the lower ranks of officials that ih'e ideal of imper- sonaliry came close to realization. Nevertheless, men of low rank were sometimes promoted to high office; mcrchants and occasionally even peasants with specialized qualifications were ennobled that they might hold office; and promotion in the bureaucracy became for warriors an important means of improving status. If the highest offices usually went to ceftain well-placed families, this was looked on as an abuse rather than a proper recognition of rank, and an abuse that struck at the very foundations of good government. Moreover, many families of high rank were without office, and office rather than rank or wealth gave Power,

Thus a group of young samurai who met iuqt after Perry's 6rst alarming visit to Japan, to consider what they might do for their coun- try were exhorted by their leader to do what they could eum thoagh none held office. One cried out, "But what cetn we do without office!" No one, it seems, complained of the lack of age, wealth, or high rank in the group.

The third change I would like to mention followed very largely from the second. The relationship berween vassal and lord was slowly, silendy, and profoundly transformed. It had been an intimate, intensely emotional relationship, based in no small part on the personal quali- ties of the lord, a relationship that existed between men who had fought side by side and grieved together at the loss of comrades, whose safety and families'safety depended on their keeping faith. During the centuries of peace and urban living, however, the relationship lost much of its emotional significance. It became distant and formal; it was hedged by ceremonies and taboos; the vassal came to look on his lord less as a leadpr in war (for there was no war) than as an adminis- trative head.

One sees tlis change in the changing concept of the ideal warrior. Once a strong, stouthearted fellow, quick and warm in his sympathies, generous to the weak, unyielding to the strong, he becomes a man

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whose native intelligence has been disciplined in the classroom, who gets on harmoniously with his colleagues, who deals with marrers within his jurisdiction without fear or favor. Loyarty is still the highest virtue for him; but where once it had meanr willingness to folloi the lord to death, now it meant disinterested advice to the lord and per- sonal conduct reflecting credit on the lord's administration. eualities of the ideal bureaucrat had come to be viewed as the very .rJ..." of the warrior.

lvloreover, the power of the lord as administrative head increas- ingly became merely symbolic; actuar power passed to lower echelons of officials. Pardy this transrerral resulted from the growing comptex- ity of government, but in greater measure it occurred because the lord's position was hereditary and as time passed fewer and fewer of his breed were men of force and intelligence, fit for the top job. Vassals who still looked on the lord with awe were likery to be men who re- garded him from a distance; despite all outward deference, those who saw him closer could often scarcely conceal their contempi.

.Indeed some hardly tried. An anonymous author, writing about r86o, calls the lords of his day timeservers. Brought up by women deep in the interior of palaces where no sound or tn. outriae world penetrated' surrounded from childhood by luxurS and indulged in every whim, they were physically weak and innocent of both learning and practical experience. But it was not revolution that was called for, only better education for rulers, that they mighr choose better officials. "The secret of good governmentr" the writer confidently declared, "lies in each official discharging his particular office p.op.ri6 which in turn depends on choosing the right man for thedght job."

To summarize up to this point: the two and a half centuries of peace after r5oo brought great changes to ih. warrior class. They brought a change in the warrior's relarionship to the land, whrih be- came purely administrative; in his relationship to political power, which became bureaucratic; and in his relationship to his lord, which became distant and impersonal.

I should like now to show, as concretely as I can, the connecdon between these changes and some aspects of the economic and social transformation of the country after rg6g-my so-cailed aristocratic revolution.

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Consider the creation in the years immediately after 1868 of a highly centralized government. This was a brilliant achievement, which permitted the new leaders who came to power to formulatg for the first time a national purpose and to call up energies that did not before exist. Political power had lain scattered in fragments over the map, each lord collecting his own taxes, maintaining his own army and navy, even following an independent foreign policy. Then with as- tonishing speed the fragments were pulled together, a central govern- ment created, the entire country subjected to a single will. Feudal lords and their miniature kingdoms were swept away and one bureaucratic empire emerged in their place.

This change was possible in part because warriors had long since been removed from the land and stripped of seignorial rights. Had these interests remained, the warrior must first have been dispossessed of them-the base of his power and source of his pride. rtr(hoever

might eventually have succeded in this feat would not likely himself have been a warrior, nor would he have accomplished it without a long and bitter struggle. As it was, only the great lords had to be de- prived of power, and the deed was sooner done because power had com€ to be exercised by officials who saw the possibiliry of trading them for similar powers within a vastly larger organization.

But what of the vaunted loyalty of the samurai? One would think this must have prevented the liquidation of the great territorial lords by their own vassals. The unconditional loyalty to the lord as war leader, however, had shrunk to the conditional loyalty of the administrative subordinate to his chief-a loyalty valid only so long as the chief per- formed his duties efficiently. That the great lords had long ceased to was known to all. Meanwhile a new and higher loyalty emerged sanc- tioning the transfer of all power to a central government: loyalty to the emperor, in whose name the aristocratic revolution was'carried out. Nor was the emergence of this new loyalty unconnected with the de- cline of the older one. One suspects that men brought up in the cult of loyalty to the lord, as an absolute obligation and the noblest of human ideals, needed some escape from the disloyalty they felt in their hearts.

Second, consider how the new central government used its power to liquidate the four estates of which society was legally composed. Each estate-warrior, peasant, artisan, and merchant-was theoreti-

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cally closed; it was subject to detailed restrictions concerning occupa- tion, residence, food, and dress peculiar to itself. The new government swept away such restrictions and endowed men with extensive civic, although not political, rights. Henceforth anything that was legally permissible or obligatory for one was permissible or obligatory for all; moreover, a system of free public schools very soon gave this new, legal dispensation concrete social meaning. The warrior lost his privileges and immunities and was forced ro compete in school and our with the sons of tradesmen and peasants. Even his economic privileges were don.

"*"y with. r0(/arrior stipends were commuted into national bonds

redeemable in twenty years; at the end of that time warriors, as such, had no claim on the national income.

Now how is one to explain a ruling class thus liquidating its privi- leges and not by a series of forced retreats but at nearly a single willing stroke? Surely part of the answer lies in warrior privileges' not being bound up with the ownership of land. To restrict or even abolish them, therefore, did not arouse fears for the safety of property or stir those complicated emotions that seem to attach peculiarly to land as a sym- bol of family continuity and an assurance of the continuing deference of neighbors. Few ruling classes have ever been so free of economic bias against change. Warrior power was based almost exclusively on officeholding, and this monopoly was not immediately in danger be- cause no other class had yet the experience, education, and confidence to displace warriors in administration. The striking down of barriers between estates, on the other hand, opened up to warriors occupa- tional opportunities formerly denied them, a not insignidcant gain in view of the large number of warriors who, with more than normal pride but neither property nor important office, were nearly indigent.

This brings me to a rhird aspect of the ievolutionary rransforma- tion of Japanese society after r858: the explosion of individual ener- gies that followed the sudden abolition of sratus distinctions. Before, opportunity was very limited: men looked forward to following the occupations of their fathers and living our rheir lives in the same vil- lages and towns and houses. Afterward, everything seemed suddenly changed, and young men strove with leaping hope and fearful deter- mination to improve their characters, to rise in the world, to become something different from their fathers.

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For warriors the abolition of status restrictions meant finding new occupations and new roles in society. Few had enough property after

the commutation of stipends to live without work, and not all could continue in the traditional occupations of soldier, official, policeman, and tcacher. A very large number were forced either to suffer social eclipse or to become merchants, industrialists, lawyers, engineers, sci-

entists; or they saw in these occupations exciting new opportunities for wealth and fame. I ^

In any case th€re was a grand redirection of warribr talent and am- bition. Despite the traditional warrior aversion to rioneymaking and the merchant's love of it, many of the first generation of modern entre- preneurs, above all the earliest and most daring, came from the war-

rior class. Nor is this to be explained merely by the occupational dis- placement of the warrior. Part of the explanation lies in the warrior's aristocratic background-his educational preferment under the old re- gime, his cult of action, and (at his best) his intense social idealism.

Okano Kitar6, a man born in a warrior family of low rank, who founded an important provincial bank, illustrates the point. He writes in his autobiography: "I lost my wife and third daughter in the earth- quake of. ry21. They were on their way to a resort hotel when the great quake struck, and their train plunged into the sea. When news of the accident reached me my courage failed, but after a while my sense of responsibility returned and I thought to myself,

'You are head of the Suruga Bankl You must discharge your duty as a banker in this time of trouble! Compared to that, your personal loss is a trifling matter!' My whole body trembled."

Other classes were scarcely less affected than warriors. Finding themselves suddenly free to become whatever wishes, effort, and abil- ity could make them, with not even the highest positions in society closed to competition, they responded with a heroic effort at self- transcendence. Freedom of this kind must always be heady; but one wonders if it is not especially so when it comes suddenly in societies with a strong sense of status differences, where the social rewards of succ€ss are more finely graded and seem sweeter than in socicties less schooled to such distinctions.

In a charming little anecdote in his autobiography, Ito Chfibei, the son of a peasant who became a leading industrialist, gives some hint of

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the poignancy of the hopes for success he shared with other peasanr boys of his generation. Upon graduating from middle school nor long after r868, the 6rst boy in his village to do so, It6 called on the head- mast€r to take leave- He was not surprised to meet with an angry scolding, since he had been far from the moder boy. After the masrer finished his scolding, however, he spoke glowingly of lto's future and predicted that, despite his rebelliousness, he would be a success. ,.you will make your mark in the world, I know it!" he exclaimed. And at this the young bo6 unable to hold back his rears, wept aloud. years later, in recounting this incident to a reunion of his clasimates, Ito was so affected that he wept again, and his gratitude to his former teacher was no less when, after rhe meeting, he discovered that a[ of his class- mates had been sent off with exactly the same prediction.

Such hopes were real because, although nor everyone was equal in the competition for wealth and honor, the privileged estate under the old regime had no prohibitive or enduring advantage. ln respect to in- come, for example, warriors were at no advantage over much of the rest of the population, and even though they were the most literate class in society, literacy was very widespread among other classes as well and it rapidly became more so through the new schools. But most important, perhaps, warriors could not for long claim a cultural supe- riorit6 compounded of superior education, elegance, and taste, to act as a bar to the achievement of others or to prevent others from the achievement of aristocratic culture. Indeed by the twentieth century one can scarcely speak of an aristocratic culture in Japan, despite the peerage creared by the government in rgg5. Whether a young man came from a warrior family could no longer bereliabry tord from his speech, manners, or social ideasl moreoverr^his origins were far less important to his self-esteem and the good opinion of others than whether he had a university diploma and where he was employed. I want to return to this point.

In hope of making its revolutionary behavior less puzzling, I have discussed three ways the Japanese warrior class differed fro- weste.r, aristocracies-its relation to other classes, its internal divisions, and its relation ro economic and political power. I should rike now to sug- gest' very briefly, some of the ways in which Japanese society seems to

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be different because its modern revolution was aristocratic rather than democratic.

First, an obvious point: the aristocratic revolution, despite the civic equality and cconomic progress it brought, did not create a strong democratic political tradition.

Second, perhaps more than any other single factor, that revolution helps explain Japan's rapid transition from an agrarian to an industrial sociery. How different the stor', would have been had the warriors be- haved as one would expect of an aristocracy,if they had used their mo- nopoly of political and military power to defend rather than change the existirtg order.

Third, as there was no aristocratic defense of the old regime, there was no struggle over its survival, no class or party war in which the skirmish line was drawn between new and old, revolutionaries and conservatives. There was, of course, tension between traditional and modern, Japanese and Western, but not a radical cleavage of the two by ideology. All parties were more or less reformist, more or less tradi- tional, and more or less modern; excepting perhaps the Communists, whose numbers were insignificant, no prevrar party thought of the past as a barrier to progress. It was a barrier in some respects, in others an aid. Modernization therefore appeared to most Japanese who thought about it at all, not as a process in which a life-or-death confrontation of traditional and modern took place but as a dynamic blending of the rwo. I wonder if this does not account in large part for what has seemed to many people the uncommon strength of tradition in the midst of change in modern Japan.

Fourth, status-consciousness is relatively strong in Japan in part because there was no revolutionary struggle against inequality, but for that reason class-consciousness is relatively weak. These attitudes are by no means contradictory. The nervous concern ofJapa4ese for status is quite consonant with their relatively weak feeling about classes- higher-ups to some extent being looked on as superior extensions of the self. This attitude is familiar to us elsewhere. It is illustrated in Jane Austen by the servant who fairly bursts with pride when his master is made a baronet and in Fielding's story of Nell Gwynn. Stepping one day from a house where she had made a short visit, the famous actress

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saw a great mob assembled and her footman all bloody and dirty. The fellow, being asked by his mistress what happened, answered, "l have been fighting, madam, with an impudent rascal who called your Iadyship a whore." "You blockhead," replied Mrs. Gwynn, "at this rate you must fight every day of your life ; why, you fool, all the world knows it." "Do they?" the fellow said in a muttering voice; "They shan't call me a whore's footman for all that."

Finally-and this brings me back to an earlier point about the ab- sence of an aristocratic culture in modern Japan-since warriors were never thrown on the defensive by the hostility of other classes, they never felt the need to make a cult of their peculiar style of life, either as evidence of virtues justifying their privileges or as compensation for the loss of them. One wonders if Western aristocracies did not put ex- ceptional value on leisure, gambling, dueling, and lovemaking as as- pects of the aristocratic way of life in good part because they were a dramatic repudiation of bourgeois values.

In any case the warrior did not have the means of supporting a lei- surely and aesthetic style of life. The revolution found him separated from the land, living on a government salary rather than on income from property; he therefore carried no capital inheritance from his privileged past into the modern age. He had no country estates, no rich town properties, no consols to spare him unbecoming compromises with the crass new world of business. On the contrary, warriors were the chief makers of this world and they scrambled for succe'ss in it to escape social and economic oblivion.

Then, too, this new .rvorld was irrevocably bound up with Western culture, from which came (with whatever mo{6cations) much of its technology and many of its conventions. Success in it had very little to do with traditional skills and tastes and much'to do with double-entry bookkeeping, commercial law, English conversation, German music, French painting, and Scotch whisky. Traditional arts were not forgot- ten, but they were never identified with a particular social class, least of all perhaps the upper class. lt is significant, for example, that the prewar Peer's Club in Tokyo, located within easy walking distance of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Finance, was a great ugly stone building with marble stairways, thick carpets, a mahogany bar, wall-

J A P A N ' S A R I S T O C R A T I C R E V O L U T T O N r 4 7

paper, glass chandeliers, and French cuisine' In respect to such things

all classes of Japanese, during the 6rst generation or two after 1868'

were born cultural equals. One could not learn of these things at home'

any more than one could learn there a foreign language or the cal-

culus. Such subiects were taught only in the schools' and the schools

were oPen to everyone.

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