The pre-modern Japanese economy--at least
until the rapid commercialization of the
eighteenth century--was based almost
entirely on agricultural land. The
government's most important job, in the
words of Mary Elizabeth Berry, was "to
distribute the resources of land among the
social and political elites and their
clients". In Heian and medieval Japan,
landholding questions occupied a place
comparable to that of foreign policy in the
governments of today. The allocation of
land rights, taxes and tax exemptions, the
punishment of criminals who foraged
another's crops, military obligations that
went with a particular plot of land--issues
such as these appear time and time again in
the primary source documents of pre-
modern times.
Perhaps one reason that landholding drew
so much attention was because it was so
complex. The primary system of
landholding in Heian, Kamakura, and early
Muromachi times was based on the estate or
shōen. This was a private holding, but it
was almost never the case that a single
individual or institution held undivided
rights to the land. Instead, there was a
hierarchy of rights to income from the land,
beginning in some cases with the actual
cultivators. Estate functionaries also held
these rights, known as shiki; the most
substantial shiki, however, belonged to the
estate's proprietors, who were usually
central court nobles or powerful temples or
shrines. It was these entities, with their
close ties to the government, who could
obtain all-important tax exemptions for the
estate.
Scholars have often pointed out that by
directing tax revenues from public coffers
into their own, estate proprietors
effectively undercut the government and
contributed to the breakdown of the state.
More recently, however, others have argued
that the business of government itself was
carried out on the estates, which held police
and juridical powers over their residents.
The distinction between public and private,
moreover, was probably not as clear in
ancient Japan as it seems to be in our own
time. In fact, "public" taxable lands under
the jurisdiction of provincial officials, were
often treated as if they were those officials'
estates.
The shōen system dates from the eighth
century, when all land was claimed by the
state--an attempt to prevent the rise of
rival centers of power. According to the
land allocation system of the time,
agricultural plots were distributed to
cultivators; upon their deaths, their plots
were returned to the state for
redistribution. In fact, this system rarely
worked the way it was supposed to, since it
required the state to keep accurate
population registers and to update them
frequently.
The state itself also undercut efforts to
keep land under its control. To reward
temples, shrines, and aristocratic families
for their support, the state allowed them to
keep a certain amount of land in perpetuity.
Those who opened new agricultural land--an
expensive proposition--were given similar
rewards. As a result, some land was
privatized to form the nuclei of estates.
The estate system continued to develop
throughout the Heian period, despite the
efforts of a few emperors and court officials
to contain it. Some shōen proprietors
found it possible to obtain tax exemptions
on their holdings. Lower-ranked
landholders, unable to obtain these
exemptions, would sometimes commend
their land to these proprietors. Each party
would claim a portion of income from the
land; the land might be managed by either
the proprietor's representatives or by the
original holder. The eventual result was a
landholding system that bound provincial
holders to powerful religious institutions
and nobles at the capital. Vertical factions
were created in which people at each level
had duties and rights that could not be
claimed by those at other levels (Kiley, p.
111).
By the late Heian period, some proprietors
were able to obtain complete tax and
juridical immunity for their holdings. This
meant that provincial officials could not
enter the estate, either to claim tax
payments or to pursue criminals. While the
consequent decline in tax revenues may
have undercut the financing of the
government, much of the business of
government was in fact carried out by estate
proprietors and officials. Moreover, among
those who benefited most from tax-exempt
estates were court nobles--including
members of the imperial family--the very
individuals who would seem to have had the
greatest stake in preserving the financial
integrity of the state.
Until the end of the twelfth century, control
of the estate system was largely in the
hands of civilian aristocrats and religious
institutions. After the victory of Minamoto
Yoritomo in the Genpei War of 1181-1185,
however, the military class began to obtain
important shōen rights. Yoritomo
installed his representatives on selected
estates; these representatives, called jitō,
were responsible for keeping peace on the
estate, preventing the emergence of military
rivals, and mustering soldiers to support
Yoritomo and his successors if necessary.
The jitō system was a key element in the
development of Yoritomo's power into an
actual military government, the Kamakura
shogunate, that paralleled Japan's civilian
government without replacing it.
Eventually the jitō system was extended to
nearly all estates in Japan. Jitō rights
entailed a claim to a portion of income from
the estate; since these rights could be quite
lucrative, they were parceled out as rewards
to the shogunate's supporters. This
eventually became costly for the shogunate,
especially after the Mongol invasions in the
late thirteenth century. Many warriors
could then lay claim to rewards and the
shogunate had begun to run out of land
rights to give them; the result was a
weakening of support for the shogunate, one
factor that contributed to its collapse in the
early fourteenth century.
Jitō were supposed to make sure that the
nobles and religious institutions at the top
of the estate hierarchy received the taxes
due them, but needless to say they often
diverted income into their own hands.
While Yoritomo tended to support civilian
holders, later shoguns found it difficult to
do so. In some cases the jitō would claim
half the land of the estate as his own
possession; income from the other half
would in theory be forwarded to civilian
holders. Some estate land, in other words,
had turned into fiefs completely under the
control of the jitō.
After the fall of the Kamakura shogunate in
1331, increasing warrior independence
from central control hastened the decline of
the shōen system. Some civilian holders
were quite resilient, however--religious
institutions in particular held onto their
land rights tenaciously. The final end of a
weakened shōen system came in the late
sixteenth century, when Japan's military
hegemon Toyotomi Hideyoshi launched a
survey of agricultural land that established
the land ownership rights of provincial
lords.
For further information about the shōen
system, see Satō 1974, Kiley 1974, and
Mass 1974. For information about
Hideyoshi, see Berry 1989. Complete
bibliographic information is available in
Sources.