Detailed regulations for important groups or classes underpinned the Tokugawa administrative system. Such regulations took the form of basic codes which were reaffirmed and sometimes revised at the accession of each new shogun. One set, issued between 1601 and 1616 and known collectively as the regulations for Buddhist monasteries {jiin hatto), left doctrine and internal sect organization largely in the hands of the clergy, but made aggressive propaganda an offense and put the management and taxation of temple estates under bakufu supervision. These and later rules for religious houses were enforced by an important group of bakufu officials, the temple magistrates (jisha bugyd). Such legislation made Buddhism, and Shinto, completely dependent on Tokugawa protection.
The court received similar treatment. Laws for noble families {kuge sho hatto), dating from 1615, imposed stringent restrictions on the personal freedom of movement of the emperor and his courtiers. Not only were they confined to Kyoto, but even within their ancestral city they were not supposed to move outside the palace and its grounds. One regulation told the nobles that they were “strictly forbidden, whether by day or by night, to go sauntering through the streets or lanes in places where they have no business to be.” Even more obvious was the determination to prevent the emperor from taking any active part in the political life of the country. To this end, the bakufu insisted on regulating senior court and ecclesiastical appointments; the monarch was left with nothing but the style of sovereignty, the “right” to appoint the shogun, and his traditional religious functions as chief mediator— between heaven and earth according to Confucian notions, or between his divine ancestors and his subjects in the Shinto rituals. Yet although the Kyoto court lived as a sort of prisoner of the Edo bakufu, the Tokugawa authorities took care to make it a gilded captivity. Following the precedent set by Yoritomo and the Hojo regents, they always spoke to and of the court in an extremely respectful fashion. Whenever the Kyoto palaces and nobles’ residences fell into a state of disrepair or were damaged by fire or tempest, the Edo government hastened to rebuild them. Most important of all, the imperial and other court families regularly received an adequate, if hardly princely, income from certain shogunal estates set aside for their material support.
World History
