3 - The social and economic consequences of unification

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Japan underwent a major transformation in its social organization and economic capacity during the latter half of the sixteenth century. These changes were of such enormous historical significance that historians see them as marking Japan's transition from its medieval (chūsei) to its early modern (kinsei) age. The first currents of this transmutation radiated throughout Japan during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and the impulses manifested themselves in the appearance of self-administering towns such as Sakai and relatively autonomous, self-governing rural communities, commonly referred to as sōson. These communities were the ultimate products of social movements that earlier had begun to shake the foundations of the medieval, shōen-based political and economic order. Central to this process was the appearance of organized peasant protest, incresingly common in the Kinai region and its environs in the late medieval period, and the emergence throughout large portions of Japan of local associations, or ikki, that were formed for military purposes and reasons of self-defense. Examples of such leagues include the so-called isuchi ikki, peasant organizations formed to resist economic demands made by proprietory lords, a phenomenon especially common in the Kyoto area from the fifteenth through the sixteenth centuries; the kuni ikki, larger federations composed chiefly of warriors who hoped to carve out spheres of autonomous control; and the Ikkō ikki, confederations associated with the Honganji branch of the True Pure Land sect (Jōdo Shinshū).

Under these unsettled conditions, the aristocratic houses and temple headquarters that had held the highest level of proprietary rights over private estates (shōen) were displaced by local bushi proprietors who had fought their way to power during the Sengoku period.