Samurai Cops: Inside Edo's Police Force During Feudal Japan

Summary

After Tokugawa Ieyasu unified Japan, established the Tokugawa shogunate, and moved the capital to Edo — modern-day Tokyo — in the early 17th century, he ended hundreds of years of civil war and senseless killings. Weirdly, though, people still kept murdering each other. Plus, there were all these other crimes being committed all over the city. So, the government authorized a group of agents to blind and torture as many people as it took to make everyone understand that Japan was now at peace. They were the police officers of feudal Japan. This is their story. Studio photo of Magistrates/governmental workers visiting Paris in 1862, wearing swords and hakama | Wikimedia The Facts: Policing the World’s Largest City By the 18th century, Edo’s population exceeded 1 million, making it the largest city in the world. About half of the residents were samurai, who could technically be investigated by peacekeepers but were ultimately only answerable to their feudal lord. Except for extreme cases, they were effectively above the law due to their privileged status because while dates and names may change, the world largely remains the same. Still, that left about 500,000 commoners under the jurisdiction of two machi-bugyo (magistrates) and their police squads. Each bugyo commanded 25 middle-ranked samurai known as yoriki. They wore armor under their attire and carried two swords with hakama pants to remind everyone they were samurai. They also traveled on horseback to show everyone they were important samurai, so if they were called to a crime scene, it had better have been for something big, like a murder. Below yoriki you had samurai constables called doshin who actually did most of the real law enforcement in Edo by walking the streets with a sword. They didn’t wear hakama, though, because they were very low-ranked samurai. There were somewhere between 240 and 280 of them in total. It’s not exactly a lot to handle half a million people. Yet samurai weren’t the only ones exemp...