Book contents
- The New Cambridge History of Japan
- The New Cambridge History of Japan
- The New Cambridge History of Japan
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- Preface
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- Part I The Character of the Early Modern State
- PART II Economy, Environment, and Technology
- Part III Social Practices and Cultures of Early Modern Japan
- 13 Religion in the Tokugawa Period
- 14 The Medical Revolution in Early Modern Japan
- 15 Flows of People and Things in Early Modern Japan
- 16 Labor and Migration in Tokugawa Japan
- 17 The Tokugawa Status Order
- 18 On the Peripheries of the Japanese Archipelago
- 19 The Early Modern City in Japan
- 20 Popular Movements in Early Modern Japan
- 21 Civilization and Enlightenment in Early Meiji Japan
- Index
- References
16 - Labor and Migration in Tokugawa Japan
Moving People
from Part III - Social Practices and Cultures of Early Modern Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2024
- The New Cambridge History of Japan
- The New Cambridge History of Japan
- The New Cambridge History of Japan
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Maps
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- Preface
- Frontispiece
- Introduction
- Part I The Character of the Early Modern State
- PART II Economy, Environment, and Technology
- Part III Social Practices and Cultures of Early Modern Japan
- 13 Religion in the Tokugawa Period
- 14 The Medical Revolution in Early Modern Japan
- 15 Flows of People and Things in Early Modern Japan
- 16 Labor and Migration in Tokugawa Japan
- 17 The Tokugawa Status Order
- 18 On the Peripheries of the Japanese Archipelago
- 19 The Early Modern City in Japan
- 20 Popular Movements in Early Modern Japan
- 21 Civilization and Enlightenment in Early Meiji Japan
- Index
- References
Summary
This chapter surveys the history of labor in the Edo period. It begins by analyzing how merchant, samurai, and peasant households organized and mobilized working people, including shop clerks, building superintendents, apprentices, maidservants, sumo wrestlers, samurai retainers, wet nurses, and farmhands. It then moves to consider groups that mobilized labor outside the household, such as boardinghouses and gangster organizations. Along the way, it considers gendered divisions of labor, as well as the relationship between productive and reproductive labor, which could be paid or unpaid, pursued inside or outside kinship structures. Overall, the chapter argues that although households continued to be important in consolidating and deploying labor, an older form in which labor was controlled chiefly by samurai overlords working through status groups gradually gave way to a more diverse, specialized, and highly mobile labor market.
Keywords
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The New Cambridge History of Japan , pp. 537 - 566Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023