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One thing that I find interesting about this is that "samurai lived in dignified but extreme poverty" but never really did anything to threaten the state and take its riches for themselves for hundreds of years, despite all of them being crammed together with lots of opportunity to organize an enormous rebellion right in the city where the king lived.
Perhaps they didn't think of it as poverty. Anyway, great read.
The theme of this article is seen directly as a major plot point in the series Shogun.
Its quite a good show!
Loved it. This is some necessary background that helps me contextualize a few other oddities of the time period that I have had floating in my short term memory
- Miyamoto Musashi (d. 1645)
- Tsujigiri, random slashing of bystanders
- the Great wave off Kanagawa, painted towards the end of the Edo period
- Shinobi evolving from mercenaries into secret police
This is fascinating after learning about and rading Peter Turchin's concept of Eelite overproduction [1]. The theory is that much of society's conflicts are actually fights between the elite and that this happens when the elite start fighting for the same resources.
From that point of view they seemed to have created a system that stopped the elites from starting wars with each other by imprisoning their families. And although they levered high taxes they did force many elites to accept a small amount of resources per elite to the point that some in elite status were effectively poor. Instead of money they got status and a title.
An average tax rate of 40% for the lower class?
There were real geographic and social tradeoffs to having status and power.
Fascinating. Currently imagining a futuristic version of that and mixing it with some cyberpunk happening under the shadow of the big brother.
I thought this would be about a city building game like SimShogun -- that would be fun!
so interesting to read about the weird gate system for tracking the citizens. insane diagram.
A nice article! It really does a great job of describing the hostage nature of keeping the various daimyo in check.
One thing that I think is commonly misstated though, is that this period was one of "peace".
When viewed from the elite perspective, the power struggles between daimyo in the Warring States Era had subsided, but for the common people, the Edo Period was anything but peaceful.
The samurai class could chop up any commoner at any time, for any reason, or no reason. Sometimes just to "test" a new sword, or because their "honor" had been challenged (maybe the person didn't get out of the way and bow fast enough).
I wished the article was better written honestly
Banker in rural Japan here. I lend to small family businesses, so I read this from an odd angle.
The piece frames Edo as a gilded prison that produced little. True for the samurai half. But the merchant class it created in the Low City didn't just give us ukiyo-e and kabuki. It gave us companies that are still open.
Part of my job is assessing old family firms for credit, and a number of them trace their founding to this period. Soy sauce brewers, inns, sake makers, metalworking shops, the kind of suppliers who fed and equipped that captive elite. The forced consumption the author calls parasitic was, from the shop's side, three centuries of stable demand. You don't need to bet on a boom when the daimyo is legally required to come back every year and spend.
What strikes me now, screening these businesses, is that the survivors optimized for the opposite of what we usually praise. Not growth. Continuity. A shop that has kept the same name and the same customers for 200 years is doing something the prison framing misses. The prison was also a hothouse.
I don't know how much this generalizes. But the parasite and the thing that outlived the host turned out to be the same city.
Japanese here lol. "broke and hostage so they'd stay quiet" — honestly that one line taught me more about my own country than school ever did.
We get Edo as "250 years of peace" and sankin-kotai as some term to memorize for a test. Nobody ever just said the quiet part: the shogun kept his samurai poor and on a leash so they couldn't start anything. Kinda dark, kinda hilarious how well it holds up.
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The part that stuck with me is the chō: 1,500+ walled blocks with gated alleys, the control built right into the streets. A commoner born there would never have known a city that wasn't a grid of gates, so to them it wouldn't feel like a cage at all, just normal. Makes me wonder how much of our own daily background, the zoning, the cameras, the commutes, is just an old answer to some political problem nobody remembers was ever a question.
Great article.. NGL, in about the first paragraph and visual intro, I already was hoping and wanting a real Samurai city MMO/RPG with a true vibrant city and interresting characters to explore..
Me (char) climbing the ranks and politics while hiding my secret ninja origin from the nobles trying to get closer to the shogun.. Sometimes doing side-quest in my Samurai outfit-and-skillset... and sometimes doing missions in my ninja-outfit-and-skillset..
But good article :) It's Friday and I'm feeling creative
> In a way, the Tokugawa system was a success. Japan experienced near-total peace between 1600 and the late nineteenth century, a remarkable achievement for a premodern society and a dramatic contrast to Europe or China, where tens of millions of people died in wars.
> Tokugawa Edo stands as a monument to the power of rent-seekers, producing little and demanding immense resources as a condition of civil peace.
The two dominant political axes. Which of is more repellent to you: a rigid stable social system based around millions of rent seeking parasitic landlords, or frequent social upheaval and conflict and open warfare