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.