Rjrasvacomment
Source: TW
Not only was it very rare but found out that blood revenge was elaborately regulated, u had to register ur intention to carry out a revenge killing with both ur local daimyo & the Tokugawa authorities, obtain paper approval, peasant women were allowed to kill Samurai men so long as they got gov’t approval for the revenge which was only given for murder not mere insults. You also had to only kill the target approved not any1 else in his/her family, the killed person’s family members in turn couldn’t legally kill u or any1 in ur family because the killed person was a murderer. So no generations long Hatfield-Mccoy style feuding that was common in some societies like Sicily, Corsica etc:
Rudeness and violence
Hereditary status in Edo Japan was one important quality by which people defined themselves and which they often considered in determining their actions. In this time of “the Great Peace,” samurai still talked about their capacity and right to use violence to exact their notions of justice, usually to enforce respect for the status system. The right to kill a commoner or servant for “rudeness” was in the law books of most domains in Japan. In reality, such personal violence was rare. When it occurred, as we shall see below, it often provoked lively debate.
Few samurai in Tosa had exercised the right without being punished themselves. When Hirosada was displeased with his komono servants, he simply fired them. The acceptance of peace meant that the social order was maintained through habit, ritual, and persuasion. When this did not suffice, bureaucratic forms of violence such as police, judges, prisons, and, occasionally, executioners constituted the means of enforcement. Samurai ran this bureaucracy that enforced the social order-status system and their own privileged position within it. The way status and government violence operated, however, was much more subtle and complex than a cursory description of the ruling ideology would have us believe.
Podcast
EP30 A License to Kill: Blood Revenge During the Edo Period
Until Kataki-Uchi, or blood revenge, was outlawed by the Meiji government in 1873, it had a long history in Japan. But it wasn’t until the Edo period where, in a move possibly unique to Japan, it became highly regulated, and laws, requirements, and restrictions were put into place to regulate vengeance. In this episode we talk about how and why revenge became regulated, and what the requirements were for someone who wanted to apply for a “license to kill” in order to take vengeance on someone who had wronged them.
Mentioned in this podcast:
Mills, D.E. Kataki-Uchi: The Practice of Blood-Revenge in Pre-Modern Japan Modern Asian Studies Vol. 10, No. 4 (1976), pp. 525-542 http://www.jstor.org/pss/311761
Public order priority 47 ronin case
Source: TW
Confucian university and another follower of the Chu Hsi school, publicly praised the ronin in his eulogy for them by citing instances in Chinese history of comparable instances of loyalty and righteousness. However, in his official report, Hayashi pointed out the distinction between acting out of personal motives, even though they may be righteous, and acting in a way which weakens the law and state. This approaches the position of Ogyu Sorai, the renowned jusha who represented the Kogaku, a school criticizing Chu Hsi and urging a return to the original classic teachings of Confucius and Mencius. For Sorai, the vendetta of the ronin was a righteous act in view of their loyalty, filial piety, and the Confucian teaching that “no man could live under the same heaven as his father’s murderer.“71 However, their righteous act was a strictly private affair.
Although that act was righteous since it was in accordance with the way of making oneself pure, it was in the last analysis an act based on private and selfish considerations, because it was a matter that was limited to that faction…. If we let public considerations be hurt by private considerations, it will later be impossible to set up laws for the world.72