III. THE TOILERS

Castes—An experiment in the nationalization of land—State fixing of wages—A famine—Handicrafts—Artisans and guilds

In the imperial age society had been divided into eight sei or castes; in the feudal epoch these were softened into four classes: Samurai, artisans, peasants, and merchants—the last being also, in social ranking, least. Beneath these classes was a large body of slaves, numbering some five per cent of the population, and composed of criminals, war-captives, or children seized and sold by kidnappers, or children sold into slavery by their parents.*³⁰ Lower even than these slaves was a caste of pariahs known as Eta, considered despicable and unclean by Buddhist Japan because they acted as butchers, tanners and scavengers.³²

The great bulk of the population (which numbered in Yoshimune’s days some thirty millions), was composed of peasant proprietors, intensively cultivating that one-eighth of Japan’s mountainous soil which lends itself to tillage.† In the Nara period the state nationalized the land, and rented it to the peasant for six years or, at most, till death; but the government discovered that men did not care to improve or properly care for land that might in a short time be assigned to others; and the experiment ended in a restoration of private ownership, with state provision of funds in the spring to finance the planting and reaping of the crops.³³ Despite this aid, the life of the peasant was not one of degenerative ease. His farm was a tiny tract, for even in feudal days one square mile had to support two thousand men.³⁴ He had to contribute annually to the state thirty days of forced labor, during which death by a spear-thrust might be the penalty of a moment’s idleness. ‡³⁵ The government took from him, in taxes and levies of many kinds, 6% of his product in the seventh century, 72% in the twelfth, and 40% in the nineteenth.³⁷ His tools were of the simplest sort; his clothing was poor and slight in the winter, and usually nothing at all in the summer; his furniture was a rice-pot, a few bowls, and some chopsticks; his home was a hut so flimsy that half a week sufficed to build it.³⁸ Every now and then earthquakes leveled his cottage, or famine emptied his frame. If he worked for another man his wages, like all wages in Tokugawa Japan, were fixed by the government;³⁹ but this did not prevent them from being cruelly low. In one of the most famous works of Japanese literature—Kamo Chomei’s Hojoki—the author describes, as crowded into the eight years between 1177 and 1185, an earthquake, a famine, and a fire that almost destroyed Kyoto.* His eyewitness account of the famine of 1181 is one of the classic examples of Japanese prose:

In all the provinces people left their lands and sought other parts, or, forgetting their homes, went to live among the hills. All kinds of prayers were begun, and even religious practices which were unusual in ordinary times were revived, but to no purpose whatever. . . . The inhabitants of the capital offered to sacrifice their valuables of all kinds, one after another (for food), but nobody cared to look at them. . . . Beggars swarmed by the roadsides, and our ears were filled with the sound of their lamentations. . . . Everybody was dying of hunger; and as time went on our condition became as desperate as that of the fish in the small pool of the story. At last even respectable-looking people wearing hats, and with their feet covered, might be seen begging importunately from door to door. Sometimes, while you wondered how such utterly wretched creatures could walk at all, they fell down before your eyes. By garden walls or on the roadsides countless persons died of famine, and as their bodies were not removed, the world was filled with evil odors. As their bodies changed there were many sights which the eyes could not endure to see. . . . People who had no means pulled down their houses and sold the materials in the market. It was said that a load for one man was not enough to provide him with sustenance for a single day. It was strange to see, among this firewood, pieces adorned in places with vermilion, or silver, or gold leaf. . . . Another very pitiable thing was that when there were a man and a woman who were strongly attached to each other, the one whose love was the greater, and whose devotion was the more profound, always died first. The reason was that they put themselves last, and, whether man or woman, gave up to the dearly beloved one anything which they might chance to have begged. As a matter of course, parents died before their children. Again, infants might be seen clinging to the breast of their mother, not knowing that she was already dead. . . . The number of those who died in central Kyoto during the fourth and fifth months alone was 42,300.⁴⁰

Contrast with this brutal interlude in the growth of the soil Kaempfer’s bright picture of Japanese handicrafts as he saw them in the Kyoto of 1691:

Kyoto is the great magazine of all Japanese manufactures and commodities, and the chief mercantile town in the Empire. There is scarce a house in this large capital where there is not something made or sold. Here they refine copper, coin money, print books, weave the richest stuffs with gold and silver flowers. The best and scarcest dyes, the most artful carvings, all sorts of musical instruments, pictures, japanned cabinets, all sorts of things wrought in gold and other metals, particularly in steel, as the best tempered blades and other arms, are made here in the utmost perfection, as art also the richest dresses, and after the best fashion; all sorts of toys, puppets moving their heads of themselves, and numberless other things too numerous to be mentioned here. In short, there is nothing that can be thought of but what may be found at Kyoto, and nothing, though ever so neatly wrought, can be imported from abroad but what some artist or other in this capital will undertake to imitate. . . . There are but few houses in all the chief streets where there is not something to be sold, and for my part I could not help admiring whence they can have customers enough for such an immense quantity of goods.⁴¹

All the arts and industries of China had long since been imported into Japan; and as today Japan begins to excel her Western instructors in economy and efficiency of mechanical production,⁴² so during the Tokugawa Shogunate her handicraftsmen began to rival, and sometimes to excel, the Chinese and Koreans from whom they had learned their art. Most of the work, in the manner of medieval Europe, was done in the home by families who passed down their occupation and their skill from father to son, and often took the name of their craft; and, again as in our Middle Ages, great guilds were formed, not so much of simple workers as of masters who mercilessly exploited the artisans, and zealously restricted the admission of new members to the guilds.⁴³ One of the most powerful of the guilds was that of the money-changers, who accepted deposits, issued vouchers and promissory notes, made loans to commerce, industry and government, and (by 1636) performed all the major functions of finance.⁴⁴ Rich merchants and financiers rose to prominence in the cities, and began to look with jealous eye upon the exclusive political power of a feudal aristocracy that angered them by scorning the pursuit of gold. Slowly, throughout the Tokugawa era, the mercantile wealth of the nation grew, until at last it was ready to coöperate with American gifts and European guns in bursting the shell of the old Japan.