My host dad, Kazunori-San, brought me to the Edo Museum in Tokyo. I have never learned so much history in such a short period of time. I learned a plethora about the city of Edo (present day Tokyo) which was the sprawling central cultural hub of Japan. I learned about the Edo Period: the social classes and their corresponding lifestyles, the importance and emphasis of fire-prevention, the widespread appreciation and enjoyment of the arts, the thriving self-sufficient economy, the hand-printed literature, the architecture—basically, I experienced what it would have been like to be alive during the Edo Period.
During the Edo Period, the social structure was largely based on the type of goods a person produced as opposed to wealth. It was a moral-based social structure. The upper class were the samurais who produced agricultural goods and cared more about the arts than the acquisition of wealth. The middle class were the artisans who produced non-essentials. Lowest were the merchants who did not produce goods at all. The majority of people lived prosperous and happy lives due to having a philosopher-king upper class.
After three hours of experiencing the Edo Period, the museum’s theme progressed into 1868 and into the beginning of the Meiji Period. During the Meiji Period, Japan made efforts to industrialize and adopt the same culture as their newly met European counterparts. I found that the entire history of the Meiji Period resulted in the tragic diminishing of the culture generated during the Edo Period—gone were the days of a culturally rich independent Japan.
The Meiji Period introduced, among other things, a bureaucratic government system along with its corruptive element, a national military to replace and abolish the samurai class, a transportation system connecting once isolated villages, and a government funded educational system replacing apprenticeship and private schooling. In 1871, the new government made strides to completely abolish the samurai class by forcing them to cut their traditional top-knots and sport a more western doo. New factories outpaced centuries of artisan class craftsmanship. The Meiji Period ultimately threw merchants up from the lower class to the upper class and introduced the modern day working class.
The abundance of wabi-sabi aesthetic in the Edo Period was met with government-encouraged western ideals: simple and natural aesthetics replaced with the elaborate and manufactured, artisan carpentry architecture replaced with colonial architecture, woodblock printing replaced with the printing press, maintaining the old replaced with buying the new, eastern music replaced with British military music. Even with the the western-ideals-promoting-government, the abolishment of the once-ruling samurai class meant every person could experience, learn, and appreciate the wabi-sabi nature of the tea ceremony. Thus the tea ceremony has carried the wabi-sabi essence into modern day Japan.
