Page 162 - Changing Living Spaces

Miyuki Takahashi

Table 3 Number of Horses by Mochidaka in 1813
More than Less than Number Number of horses Number of horses per
(koku) (koku) of households household
<1 1 63 1 0.02
1 5 86 22 0.26
5 9 21 20 0.95
9 13 10 9 0.90
13 >13 8 10 1.25
188 62 0.33
Source Adapted from Kobayashi (2019).

lage adjacent to the pastures (notsuke village) had income from the sale of
firewood collected from the pastures, but occasionally suffered damage
to the fields from invading horses. However, since Edo society was char-
acterised by social stratification, people could not punish the Shogun’s
horses for destroying crops and rice fields.
In addition, the inhabitants of the notsuke villages bore the burden of
duties such as patrolling the pastures. The officials who directed the vil-
lagers were called ‘mokushi’ and had the status of samurai in the social
hierarchy. Every two or three years, the grazing horses were driven to
a certain place for the selection of the three-year-old horses. This event
sometimes had a festive character. The good horses went to the stable of
the Edo Palace, and those not selected were sold to farmers. The profit
from the sale of the horses also served as a source of income for the Edo
shogunate.
The horses sold to the peasants were used in the farming villages to
carry loads or to make manure. The number of horses owned by the mo-
chidaka category in the village of Fuse, a village in this region, is shown in
table 3. Only a quarter of households with less than five koku owned hors-
es, but many households with five koku or more owned at least one horse.

Conclusion
An illustration in the Nōgyō Zensho, written by Yasusada Miyazaki in
1697, shows cattle being used to till rice paddies, but no horses are being
drawn. In addition, Kanehira (2015) presents material from the Meiji pe-
riod explaining that ‘horses were used exclusively for collecting manure,
carrying loads, and soil puddling’ and that ‘horses were rarely used for
tilling the soil, which was mainly done by hand’. In other words, as Saito
(2004) noted, horses were used only to a limited extent in rice paddies in
early modern Japan, and the main industrial use of horses was manure

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