The Japanese Economy in the Tokugawa Era, 1600-1868

Michael Smitka

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781136751660
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Makes Japanese sources accessible in English Although much of the work on Japanese economic history is inaccessible to Westerners, many of Japan's leading economic historians have published widely in English. Combined with the work of Western economists who can utilize Japanese-language sources, this series assembles a wide range of English-language articles on the key issues in Japanese economic development. Individual volumes cover the interwar period, postwar reconstruction and growth, the textile industry, demographics, agriculture, trade, and the rise of commerce and protoindustry in the Tokugawa era. An information-packed classroom and research resource An introductory essay in each volume discusses the significance of the articles, compares various economic development in Japan with those in other countries, and puts studies in the context of similar studies in Europe. A versatile research resource, this 7-volume set is a veritable gold mine of hard-to-find information and data from diverse sources and a godsend to everyone interested in comparative economic and social history. Professors will appreciate the collection because it gives them instant access to less familiar English-language sources and is an easy way to introduce students to doing their own research. Students will appreciate the many articles as a mother lode of information for reports and papers. Researchers will be pleased by the coverage of more than three centuries of Japanese history and life.

COMMERCIAL CHANGE AND URBANGROWTH IN EARLY MODERN JAPAN

An Era of Urban Growth

During the first century and a half of the early modern period, between 1550 and 1700, Japan became one of the most urbanized societies in the world. At the beginning of this era, the ancient imperial capital of Kyoto was the only city with more than 100,000 residents, and a mere handful of other settlements held as many as 10,000 persons. But by the year 1700, four new Japanese communities had exceeded the 100,000 mark, and approximately 5 to 7 percent of all Japanese lived in such large cities. This compared with a figure of 2 percent in Europe, where only fourteen cities had reached the 100,000 level, and only the Netherlands and England–Wales could boast of urban concentrations greater than Japan’s. Edo had become the world’s largest city by the end of the seventeenth century, and the populations of Osaka and Kyoto approached those of London and Paris, the two largest cities in the West.

The meteoric urban growth that occurred in Japan at the beginning of the early modern period had profound and diverse consequences for Japanese history. First, the cities acted as large magnets, creating energy fields that set in motion large-scale population movements and propelled hundreds of thousands of persons into the cities to fill burgeoning job opportunities. The growing urban centers served as enormous consumption centers as well, and across Japan farmers changed their cropping patterns to meet new demands for vegetables, fruits, and plant materials for clothes. Consequently, regional specialization increasingly became a feature of early modern commerce, and new transportation networks and post towns sprang up everywhere to cater to mobile traders. In time, a fresh, spirited set of urban entertainments came into being as well, thus enriching the texture of Japanese cultural history. Finally, the unprecedented concentrations of people – vigorous, creative, and at times unruly – compelled the authorities to devise new kinds of political and administrative institutions.

The Sengoku period background

The quest to understand how and why this urban growth took place, and to appreciate as well the historical significance of the cities, takes us back in time to the middle of the sixteenth century – to the Sengoku period and the genesis of Japan’s extraordinary epoch of urban development.¹ There were three principal types of urban settlement at that time. The most common, and the seed of what ultimately would become the dominant urban force in the early modern period in Japan, was the castle town, or jōkamachi, literally a community that grew up around a castle. During the first half of the sixteenth century, the bushi tended to live in agricultural villages, where they managed their fiefs and the affairs of the villagers. Gradually, during the decades of continual warfare that marked this era, these bushi emerged as an elite, arms-bearing class. As this happened, their leaders began to move out of the villages and to establish fortified residences at more easily defended locations. As revealed in names such as Negoya (literally, the huts at the base of the mountain) and Yamashita (at the foot of the mountain), these strongholds were usually situated where plains meet mountains, and they provided assembly points where, in times of crisis, the lord could gather his military band of retainers, relatives, and vassal samurai.²

These military centers quickly came to be the home for civilians as well. As combat spread into even remote parts of the country during the later decades of the sixteenth century, the castellans (now more familiarly known as daimyo), found it advantageous to gather into their castle headquarters larger and larger numbers of artisans who could manufacture weapons such as swords, lances, and even fire-arms; merchants who could transport these goods; and finally, groups of laborers to work on construction projects. It was also useful for the daimyo to establish within the precincts of the new castle towns officially authorized marketplaces where commodity transactions could take place peacefully, and this too encouraged permanent residence in the towns.³

As the daimyo’s policies gave rise to larger and more prosperous communities, the towns also became centers of local religious and cultural activities. Moreover, as life in the imperial capital of Kyoto became less secure after the Ōnin War (1467–77), men of artistic and literary accomplishment, such as the landscape artist and garden designer Sesshū, left the capital and took refuge in the provinces. And like Sesshu, who was employed by the Ōuchi daimyo of western Japan, such persons often were taken into service by the daimyo, thus ultimately bringing a measure of cultural refinement to the lives of the bushi and cementing the tie between artist and military figures that would endure into the early modern period.

Some notion of the vitality of these communities can be found in the epistles of the Jesuit missionaries, who openly admired the castle towns of the Sengoku period.⁴ When visiting Gifu in 1575, for instance, Luis Frois wrote: “At this point I wish I were a skilled architect or had the gift of desctibing places well, because I sincerely assure you that of all the palaces and houses I have seen in Portugal, India, and Japan, there has been nothing to compare with this as regards luxury, wealth, and cleanliness.” And after visiting Azuchi in 1584, Lourenço Mexia remarked that Japanese houses were as neat and clean as sacristies and that at Nobunaga’s palace “the gardens and corridors were such that one could not spit in them.” Such praise, however, should not obscure the fact that these castle towns were still relatively small; even in the 1580s most had populations of only a few thousand persons. Still, more than a hundred such settlements dotted the countryside of Japan, and these would provide one of the seedbeds for the rapid urbanization of the seventeenth century, growth that would propel Japan into the leading ranks of the urbanized countries.

Although these rustic castle towns represented the principal urban creation of the late Sengoku period, they were not without competitors. The warfare of that age was fought at two different levels. The first and most visible was the struggle among daimyo to expand their domains by military means; the other was the contest for supremacy within domains between individual daimyo and armed elements of the peasantry. In some instances, groups of such peasants were members of secularly powerful Buddhist sects, such as the Ikkō, or True Pure Land sect (Jōdo Shinshū), which permitted the peasants, together with merchants and artisans who were also sect members, to take up residence in and around a sect temple. These settlements then became known as “temple towns” (jinaimachi), and their residents often claimed autonomy from daimyo control.⁵

These temple towns were distinct from the so-called monzenmachi (literally, towns in front of the gates), which were concentrations of inns and souvenir shops clustered together around the entrances to those famous shrines and temples that attracted large numbers of worshipers and pilgrims.⁶ The essential difference between the two urban types is that the temple towns formed under the auspices of major temples had a distinctive religious character and asserted their independence from the daimyo’s authority. That is, these communities as corporate groups exercised judicial and police powers, apportioned and at times even levied their own tax dues, and undertook self-defense projects such as the construction of moats. The possession of these special immunities permitted the temple towns to carry out certain functions outside the direct purview of daimyo authority, and it is this latitude for independent action that has prompted historians to see them as autonomous, self-governing communities.⁷

Historians have identified seventeen temple towns, all founded in the middle decades of the sixteenth century.⁸ These settlements, however, tended to have very short life spans. As daimyo put together greater and greater concentrations of military and political might during the latter half of the sixteenth century, they attacked the major religious sects and cut away the independent power basis of the temple towns. In some cases, the daimyo actually converted the temple towns into their own castle headquarters. For instance, Osaka was known at that time as Ishiyama and was built up as an armed community of Honganji believers. In 1580, Oda Nobunaga destroyed this fortified town after a decade of fighting, and subsequently Toyotomi Hideyoshi erected his own castle headquarters on its ashes. Similarly, the castle town of Kanazawa, which by 1700 would become the fourth largest city in Japan under the rule of the Maeda family of daimyo, was built on the site of an earlier temple town named Kanazawa Gobō, which had existed under the protection of the Ikkō sect. In other instances, conquering daimyo left the towns in place as local merchant settlements. But in these cases as well, the military lords stripped the communities of their self-governing responsibilities and fully incorporated them into the tightening web of daimyo authority. The town of Imai, associated with Yanenji temple in Nara Prefecture, is a typical example of a temple town that lost its immunities and became purely a commercial settlement populated by small-scale merchants.

If the temple towns represented impediments to daimyo power, there was another type of sixteenth-century community that served an essential purpose for the daimyo. These were centers of trade and transshipment, or what might be called entrepôt towns. Some of these were inland post towns, but most were ports, such as Sakai on Osaka Bay, Kuwana on Ise Bay, and Hakata on the bay of the same name in Kyushu. In some instances, these settlements exercised self-governing powers similar to those claimed by the temple towns. In Sakai, for example, influential merchants managed urban administration and maintained armed forces.⁹ But whether fortified or not, these merchant communities received different treatment from the daimyo than did the temple towns. Their strategic locations made them useful to daimyo, almost all of whom had to engage in some trade in order to acquire goods that were produced beyond their own borders. Indeed, most daimyo believed these entrepōt towns to be so central to their own ultimate economic success that they adhered to a tacit agreement to maintain a policy of nonaggression toward the settlements.

Interestingly enough, certain features of urban life and the city-scape in sixteenth-century Japanese cities reminded the first Westerner visitors of European urban settlements. One missionary noted the similarity between Japanese temple towns and Venice, which was also governed through administrative offices staffed by merchants. When visiting Nara, Gaspar Vilela wrote, “I spent some days there and saw three outstanding things of note. One of them is a great metal idol as big as the tower of the gate of Evora.”¹⁰ However impressed those European visitors might have been, no medieval city would survive unscathed the wars of reunification at the end of the sixteenth century, and the powerfully centralized state that resulted from that unification would call into being new cities, larger and more grand than anything those first European visitors saw.

National unification and early modern castle towns

It has become a historical truism to say that Oda Nobunaga initiated the political and economic programs that resulted in the early modern state; that Toyotomi Hideyoshi amplified them; and that Tokugawa Ieyasu supplied the final institutional refinements. As familiar as that paradigm might be, however, it is still relevant to a discussion of those social policies that had the most significant impact on urban growth – the separation of the peasants from the warriors (heinō-bunri) and of the peasants from the merchants (nōshō-bunri).

Oda Nobunaga’s first step in imposing a new social order came after a bitter and bloody campaign against the forces of the Honganji sect gathered at their stronghold at Ishiyama. It took Nobunaga the full decade of the 1570s, and the sacrifice of tens of thousands of lives, before he could defeat the Honganji army, a mix of peasants, local samurai, and even merchants and artisans from the local temple town. As a consequence of this victory, Nobunaga acquired the strength and reputation to begin a policy of disarming peasants on some portions of his holdings. He also initiated steps to separate the warriors from agricultural management by conducting a cadastral survey (kenchi) in his home provinces of Yamato and Harima.

What lay behind Nobunaga’s actions was the fear of an aroused peasantry and of an alliance between his retainers and villagers.”¹¹ As long as the vassal warriors resided in the countryside and oversaw village affairs, they held the potential to threaten the lord. Indeed, in the middle decades of the sixteenth century, so many retainers turned their village holdings into independent power bases from which they defied daimyo orders, or even rose in revolt against their masters, that these years became popularly known as the era of gekokujō, of the inferiors overthrowing their superiors. The ultimate motive of Nobunaga, and of the daimyo who followed his example, was to drive a wedge between the retainers and vassals in order to bring each under more direct control.

Hideyoshi extended these policies of status separation.¹² As detailed in Chapters 2 and 4 of this volume, from the mid-1580s Hideyoshi began to expand the survey of rice-producing lands first started by Nobunaga, a policy that eventually produced a new village and administrative system, as well as a much more closely regulated peasantry. In 1588 he ordered a nationwide “sword hunt” to confiscate arms from villagers and to etch more clearly the status lines between peasant and warrior. Three years later, in 1591, Hideyoshi instructed the daimyo to conduct a village-by-village census (hitobarai) of their domains, a recording of the population and the numbers of households in rural areas that was designed to prevent the peasants from absconding and to bind them more tightly to the land. In that same year Hideyoshi also issued his famous edict that prohibited changes of status from samurai to merchant or from farmer to merchant. Although none of these policies could ever be fully enforced, they did provide a clear conceptual and legal differentiation of warrior, peasant, and merchant.

Tokugawa Ieyasu and his successors brought these policies to their completion. During the seventeenth century, the Tokugawa line of shoguns completely disarmed the peasantry and summoned the bushi class into the areas around its castles, moves that were repeated in nearly every daimyo domain. To be sure, in places where agriculture developed more slowly – generally in Shikoku, Kyushu, and in the north of Honshu – some lower-ranking bushi continued to live in villages. But with these exceptions, the imposition of status distinctions and the severing of the samurai from the management of agricultural affairs gave the shogun and daimyo the opening th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Tokugawa Monetary System: 1787–1868*
• The Village and Agriculture During the Edo Period
• Population Changes*
• Postwar Japanese Growth in Historical Perspective: A Second Look*
• Proto-Industrial Origins of Japanese Capitalism
• Commercial Change and Urbangrowth in Early Modern Japan
• The Economy of Chōoshū on the Eve of Industrialization*
• Productivity, Subsistence, and By-Employment in the Mid-Nineteenth Century Chōshū*
• The Tokugawa Monetary Policy in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries*
• The Labor Market in Tokugawa Japan: Wage Differentials and the Real Wage Level, 1727–1830*
• Saitō Osamu: Scenes of Japan’s Economic Development and the ‘Longue Duree’
• Forwards and Futures in Tokugawa-Period Japan: A New Perspective on the Dōjima Rice Market
• Both a Borrower and a Lender Be: From Village Moneylender to Rural Banker in the Tempō Era
• Acknowledgments