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Merchants and Society in Tokugawa Japan
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2017
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Merchants in the Tokugawa period were placed at the bottom of the shinōkōshō hierarchy of samurai-peasants-artisans-merchants. This social hierarchy was produced by a combination of social reality at the time Japan was unified in the late sixteenth century and an ancient Chinese physiocratic theory, never taken very seriously, in practical ways, in China. Once the country was unified, the social mobility of the previous years, of a kind which permitted men of ability to climb from the lowest ranks to join the military nobility—Hideyoshi is the prime example of this mobility—was viewed, by Hideyoshi above all others, as a cause of prolonged chaos and internecine warfare. With the argument that war had been abolished and common people therefore no longer needed weapons, Hideyoshi carried out his ‘sword-hunt’. He thus established the most fundamental of the class distinctions, between the samurai, the ruling class, who now enjoyed a monopoly of bearing arms, and the common people, who were henceforth expected simply to produce the food and other necessities of life, and to pay their taxes, which remained high even though warfare was supposedly ended.
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References
1 Actual tax collections in the Tokugawa period are estimated at from 35 per cent (the average revenue from Bakufu direct territories, tenryō), to 40 per cent.
2 Nihon Keizai Sōsho (Tokyo: 1914–1917), III, p. 427Google Scholar. See McEwan, J. R., The Political Writings of Ogyū Sorai (Cambridge: 1962), especially p. 63Google Scholar, and Lidin, Olof G., The Life of Ogyu Sorai (Lund, Sweden: 1973).Google Scholar
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27 A contributing factor was the virtual impossibility of moving food from domains with plenty, who wanted to hold onto it, to domains of want. There was an increasing gap, with the growth of cash crops and capitalistic farming, in the standard of living of the poor peasants who had difficulty adjusting to a money economy, and those ‘peasants’ who did very well in trade, moneylending and in the managing of handicraft industries. Such well-to-do farmers provided a demonstration of considerable affluence in the village which, one suspects, had much to do with the discontent of the less fortunate peasants, and on the resulting abandonment of fields, infanticide and peasant rebellions. The severe problems of the mizunomi hyakushō, ‘water-drinking peasants’, in view of evidence of increasing production throughout the Tokugawa period, can probably be best understood in terms of the mal-distribution of wealth.
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34 Translation from Seidan, 52, in Ibid., pp. 37–8.
35 From Seidan, 67, in Ibid., pp. 39–40.