Everyday Life in Traditional Japan. Charles Dunn

      (10) (b). Samurai at the poulterer’s. A samurai is leaving the shop, and is replacing in his girdle his large sword, removed to allow him to sit comfortably while conducting his business with the shopkeeper, who is obsequiously seeing him off the premises. Outside the shop, the samurai’s servant, his kimono tucked into the back of his girdle, waits patiently for his master.

      Land was measured not so much by area, as by the estimate of the amount of rice it would produce in a year. The unit of rice used for this purpose was the koku, which is equivalent to about five bushels, and would, in fact, feed one person for a year; at the beginning of the seventeenth century surveys indicated that the annual national production was about 25 million koku. This was distributed by the Shogun, after keeping about one-fifth of it for his own use, among the lords of the domains—that is to say, land producing this amount was allocated either to the directly held territories, or to the lords, a small amount being granted to the Emperor. The highest allocation was to the “outside” lords of Kaga, who had their castle in Kanazawa near the north coast: they received 1,300,000 koku. Shimazu, of Satsuma (in Kyūshū), had 730,000, and altogether there were, at the beginning of the period, some 270 lords with 10,000 koku or over. These lords were the daimyō, the great landholders; and just as the Shogun kept some for himself and distributed the rest, so did the daimyō, keeping some of his income for himself and his family and allotting the rest to his vassals in sub-fiefs. The superior vassals had areas of land placed under their control; inferior ones received a stipend measured in koku, without land. Lower-ranking persons received rice or rice equivalent incomes.

      Incomes expressed in koku referred to the productivity of the land, and the lord had to see to it that he obtained the rice from the farmers, or, to be more precise, that his officials got it from the village headman, who got it from the farmer. The farmer was allowed to keep a proportion of the crop, sometimes six-tenths, but often less; in practice, the recipient took what he was entitled to, leaving the farmer the rest, which would depend upon his harvest. Sometimes the lord, especially if he had only a small allocation, ran out of resources before the harvest was in, and had to squeeze his farmers to pay early, leaving them to make what shifts they could to meet his demands.

      It has to be realized that incomes were not normally linked to the job that the recipient was doing, except in the sense that the income fitted a man for his position rather than the other way round. To serve as an official to a lord was part of feudal obligation, and a vassal should not expect to be paid especially for something that it was his duty to do. In the eighteenth century there was a slight modification to this, which allowed the Shogun to give a temporary allowance to a person whose rate of income did not in fact qualify him for a certain position, but whose ability fitted him for it.

      The sort of residence that a samurai occupied depended upon his status as measured by his income. The Shogun had his castle in Edo (where the Emperor now resides), and most daimyō also had a castle (I), round which grew a town. Castles came into being in Japan much as they did in Europe, as strongholds for barons fearing attack from their neighbors. The majority still in existence in Japan date from the sixteenth century, for there was little building under the Tokuga was except in Edo, since fortification was strictly controlled, the Shogun being anxious above all that no lord should become strong enough to challenge his power. Until the sixteenth century warriors had tended to live on their farms, and only go to the castle when summoned, but when the warrior and farmer classes were separated, the former went to live in the towns that had begun to form round the castles to accommodate the people concerned with its supply of goods and services. When the samurai moved in, the jōkamachi, “under-castle towns” increased in size and importance, becoming the most usual form of urban development in Japan. All activities in such towns were directed towards the castle and were controlled by it, and the atmosphere in it was quite different from that in Kyoto, where the Imperial court was dominant, and even more so from that of Osaka, a fundamentally mercantile town, in which, it is true, Hideyoshi had built a castle, later the headquarters of the Shogun’s Deputy, but which nevertheless managed to retain considerable independence.

      The castle usually included the town in its outer defenses of ditches. In Edo, for example, existing water-courses were adapted to form a series of more or less rectangular shapes, the innermost containing the castle, the intermediate ones having officials’ residences, and the outermost stretching down to the Bay and having merchants and craftsmen living within them. The purpose of the outer ditches was not much more than to slow down an attacker by making him use existing bridges and thus hamper his freedom of movement.