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.
Samurai City
21–30 of 52 posts
Re: Samurai City
#22Loved 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
Re: Samurai City
#23One 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.
They very much understood their situation. That was the means of control. Their incomes were directly defined by agricultural productivity, and their expenses largely controlled by the shogun. Daimyo couldn't meaningfully communicate with each other, easily intermarry, or form alliances. They were forced to maintain huge retinues and lavish estates, and the shogun could bankrupt them or kill their family at any point…
To add on to this, the wives and heirs of daimyo had to live semi-permanently in the capital, which gave the shogun a powerful leverage over his subordinates. Any murmuring of an uprising would result in his family (and heirs) being killed. Nor was there freedom of movement across domains; this had to be granted by the shogun, preventing daimyo from easily communicating and organising.
Approximately 50-75% of a daimyo's budget went towards maintenance and boarding costs for when they were in attendance at the shogun's court. "Commerce" was considered a lowly profession not befitting a proud samurai. Most of their wealth was obtained through their right to collect agricultural taxes, which was granted to them by the daimyo.
While the samurai were a caste descended from warriors, after hundreds of years of peace they had largely become "sword-wearing bureaucrats". They weren't all that competent or experienced in warfare. They carried swords and practiced martial arts, but this was just as much a LARP (to use a modern phrase): a means of connecting to their martial heritage.
Re: Samurai City
#24One 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.
Looking at rebellions and revolutions in Europe (just because I know european history better than asian history), they tend to start when someone (not necessarily the poor) feel than the upper class/the king is not doing what it's supposed to be doing. It's not a cash grab, and in a lot of revolt what the rich have and don't deserve is not taken and distributed, but rather destroyed to show that it's about punishing…
"and in a lot of revolt what the rich have and don't deserve is not taken and distributed, but rather destroyed to show that it's about punishing traitors of the social contract, not robbing them"
Or that those who revolt often lack coordination and a plan and can carry only so much with their hands and then rather destroy what they cannot carry to harm "the enemy"?
Re: Samurai City
#25The theme of this article is seen directly as a major plot point in the series Shogun.
Its quite a good show!
Re: Samurai City
#26An average tax rate of 40% for the lower class?
Re: Samurai City
#27Japanese 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.
Re: Samurai City
#28The theme of this article is seen directly as a major plot point in the series Shogun. Its quite a good show!
And an even better book, which is a part of an excellent series spanning centuries and Singapore, Hong Kong, Iran, and many other places.
Re: Samurai City
#29A 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 cho…
> The samurai class could chop up any commoner at any time, for any reason, or no reason.
This is a pop history misconception. It was always a rare criminal act, and to the extent it did happen, it was specifically more common in the Sengoku era. Article 71 of the Tokugawa Shogunate's 1742 penal code explicitly specifies public execution as the designated penalty for this crime.
Re: Samurai City
#30The theme of this article is seen directly as a major plot point in the series Shogun. Its quite a good show!
Shogun describes the period just before the establishment of the Tokugawa shogunate. This article describes the system that developed after that, under the Shoguns.