Tokugawa japan through chushingura musuis story essay
He glorifies his lack of worth ethic and also his lack of family honor all the while making himself sound like a saint at times. The novel is a good representation of what life was like during the era, however.
Armstrong State University Savannah, Georgia Contemporary Japan is often advertised as one of the safest and crime free countries on earth. The number of inmates in Japanese prisons today is an uncomfortable subject for the Japanese.
However, crime does exist in Japan, but is well organized and controlled by organized crime networks. The streets are safe in Japanese cities as a result of its organized crime, not in spite of it.
Inthere were 84, registered crime family members of Yakuza operating across Japan. The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai serves as a window into the growth and development of organized crime and of a crime boss in Edo Japan.
The samurai were at best soldiers of fortune, skirmishing, raiding, robbing, and sometimes murdering the unsuspecting for personal gain.
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Neo-Confucianism stressed filial piety, loyalty, obedience, and a sense of indebtedness to superiors. This was the ideal accepted by Japanese society for all Japanese and especially the samurai. Unfortunately, for Katsu Kokichi and for thousands of other unemployed samurai, this ideal proved to be elusive.
With the end of the wars of unification, the samurai class struggled to find relevancy within the shogunate and would compete with the new merchant class for power and influence.
Government positions were few in number and Katsu complained about this circumstance when he said: At the top of the samurai class structure more opportunity existed, but at the level of the bannerman, like Katsu, there were few opportunities for the uneducated to achieve government employment.
As a result of the realities of the Edo period, Katsu became the antithesis of the neo-Confucian samurai. He was more like a mafia don and crime boss than a righteous man, the ideal described by neo-Confucian thought and bushido. Katsu was a braggart, a bully, a brawler, a wife beater, a hustler, and more importantly a racketeer.
This was the new reality of the peaceful Edo Japan. Katsu scorned education and only learned to read and write in his early twenties. As a lower level samurai and unemployed retainer of the shogun, Katsu was expected to practice and live up to bushido. Unfortunately, that required money and a government position, two things that Katsu did not have.
Instead, he joined the many dispossessed in Edo Japan and he existed and thrived on the fringes of Japanese society. Katsu became by personality and circumstance, attracted to a counter culture of racketeers and ruffians that rose from the gamblers bakutostreet peddlers tekiya and unemployed samurai hatamoto-yakko 7.
This counter culture of misfits and juvenile delinquents became the Robin Hoods of Edo Japan, but more importantly would create the beginnings of organized crime.
With the new tastes for entertainment in the teahouses and brothels in districts like the Yoshiwara in Edo, a new class of organized criminal rose to take advantage of the new realities.
He would eventually seek education and enlightenment and as a result leave only his autobiography as a warning to his posterity. Katsu Kokichi began his criminal path with a spiral toward juvenile delinquency in early childhood.Organized crime in Japan began in the Edo period (−) as a manifestation of social and economic change, a dividend of an extended period of peace under the Tokugawa shogunate.
Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai serves as a window into the growth and development of organized crime and of a crime boss in Edo Japan.
Japanese History- Tokugawa Japan’s socio-political order illustrated from Musui’s Story. During the Tokugawa era, the shogunate, in league with neo-Confucian ideologues, established a strict status hierarchy based on the adaption of Confucian principles to Japan’s socio-political order.
Armstrong State University (Savannah, Georgia)
Free Essays \ Musui's Story. Musui’s Story. Length: words. Let us write you a custom essay sample on and to regain commitment and secure an afterlife after such incident usually meant going through seppuku, a cruel suicide ritual that could only Highly Recommended Musui’s Story is an autobiography of a samurai in the Tokugawa.
What led to the downfall of the Tokugawa shogunate.
Musui’s Story - Essay - Steve
Essay by brainiac, April download word file, 2 pages, Downloaded 93 times. Keywords Tokugawa Japan through Chushingura & Musui's Story Tokugawa (or Edo) period ( - ) of Japan history saw the cultural stagnation of 5 pages 26 May/ View 7B 一 from EALC at University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign.
MusuIs Story The Autobiography of a Lower-Level Warrior in Late Tokugawa Japan Main Queries 1. Who is . While in theory a social hierarchy still presided, Musui’s Story dismisses the notion that social groups remained isolated from each other, as in previous Japanese eras, and instead reveals that people of Japan in the late-Tokugawa-era mingled with one another during their .