3) Social Order, Education and Etiquette

Social Order, Education & Etiquette: Rank as Ritual, Duty as Daily Bread

The Tokugawa peace rests on a social script everyone learns from childhood. Humans adhere to a fourfold estate—samurai administrators; rice-tilling peasants; artisan guilds; merchant houses—overseen by inspectors who read ledgers like sutras. Samurai carry the sword as a badge of authority but more often wield the brush: budgets, border writs, shrine correspondence. Yōkai society overlays this with its own hierarchies: Tengu by mastery and monastery seniority; Okami by pack and hunt record; Oni by feast-rights and duel scars; Kitsune by tail and temple duty; Yūrei by vow and grievance. The Hanyō, liminal children of two worlds, hold ambiguous status—distrusted in cities, cherished in Hoshikusa and tolerated in Kitsune no Mori—and increasingly serve as sworn mediators and scouts.
Education is widespread by design. Human terakoya schools teach literacy, accounts, seasonal rites, and civic etiquette; yōkai youths study in forest dojos, cliff monasteries, or cave halls, learning tradition, tactics, and obligations to land. Mixed academies in Sakuragawa—sponsored by guilds and moderated by shrine scribes—offer arithmetic for trade, herb-lore from Yukigakure, and Tengu treatises on wind and warfare. Etiquette manuals, copied like prayer books, instruct on how to bow to a Ryūjin envoy, when to uncover the face before a Yūrei guardian, and the proper phrases for requesting safe passage in Hebikiri Swamp.
Dress and everyday ritual mirror the peace: layered robes in domain colors; crest-sashes denoting pack, clan, or house; charms tucked in sleeves; fans inscribed with codes. Festivals glue society together: rice-harvest parades in Kome no Kuni, moon-viewings under Kitsune lanterns, Oni BBQ competitions judged by Okami elders, Yūrei memorial nights where grievances are heard and soothed. The ideal is wa—harmony—enacted through giri (duty) and ninjo (human feeling). People internalize a simple bargain: obey the role, keep the peace, and the world will let your children grow old. Break role, and the world becomes very small, very quickly.