Page 198 - Changing Living Spaces
P. 198

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


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