Page 198 - Changing Living Spaces

Masanori Takashima

The Ritsuryō regime experienced internal contradictions in its rule from
the eighth century onward, due in part to its institutional limitations.
There was a transition from a centralised system of land control to a de-
centralised system in which the royal family, nobles, and powerful temples
and shrines in Kyoto administered and levied taxes on the shōen located
in various parts of the Japanese archipelago. This situation continued for
about 600 years during the mediaeval period – the period of the Shokuhō
regime (the government of Oda Nobunaga and his military and politi-
cal successor Toyotomi Hideyoshi; ‘shoku’ and ‘hō’ are the initial letters of
their family names Oda and Toyotomi, respectively) until the time when
the Tokugawa shogunate (the Japanese feudal government headed by the
shogun Tokugawa) was established in the seventeenth century. In the me-
diaeval period, due to dispersed land control in the archipelago, there were
no records to determine the agricultural area of the entire archipelago or
of each region, although there may be information on the management sit-
uation of the land in individual shōen. Although there are countless shōen
documents, they are only individual cases and do not represent the entire
district in which the shōen is distributed.
Documentation improved under the Tokugawa shogunate in the ear-
ly modern period. The Tokugawa government was established after a long
period of decentralised rule; it was based on a feudal system of govern-
ment consisting of the Tokugawa shogun and his subordinate daimyō.
Although the daimyō collected annual tribute each year from the land
they ruled, each daimyō was expected to keep records of the area of land
cultivated and the amount of crops harvested each year. For this reason,
there are no detailed records at the national level. In fact, information on
total and regional cultivated area in the early modern period can only be
captured by the records of kuni-level (paddy and non-paddy) fields in 1721.
The public documents provide a continuous record of cultivated land by
narrowing the reference year. However, as in the mediaeval period, these
public documents contain data at the individual level and not at the area
or archipelago level. Therefore, these documents were not included in this
chapter. Data on agricultural production – expressed as kokudaka (crop
yield expressed as rice value) – are available at the national and regional
levels for the years 1598, 1645, 1697, and 1830. Because agricultural pro-
ductivity increased during the Tokugawa period as agricultural technol-
ogy developed, it is difficult to say whether the daimyō kept records of all
agricultural crops produced during this period due to technological ad-
vances. It is believed that there was a surplus of 20 to 30 percent from

196