5 - The han

Summary

The han, or daimyo domains, covered some three-quarters of the total area of the Japanese islands. They presided over most of Japan's wealth and garnered most of its taxes. Under their control came the greater part of Japan's military forces, as at least three-quarters of the samurai class were in their service. For the majority of the common people, the only form of government they knew was provided by their han. Its borders, seldom if ever passed, formed the edge of their known world, and its officials were the only ones they could ever expect to see. The han gave the majority of Japanese their roads, their bridges, their laws, and their order. When villages quarreled over water supply or rights to forage in the mountains, it was the han that stepped in to separate them. When crops failed, the han doled out rations. Should a river burst its banks, then the responsibility for relief and restoration fell to the han.

This is not to say that those who lived in the han were not conscious of higher forms of authority. Above the han was the Tokugawa bakufu, presided over by a shogun from whom every daimyo, or han chief, derived his legitimacy. One step beyond that again stood the emperor and his court, powerless in fact but nevertheless the symbolic fount of all authority, even that of the bakufu itself. Yet to most people living in the han – the farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, servants, day laborers, and fishermen – shogun and emperor would have been little more than abstractions, dimly perceived and of no immediate relevance.