THE ESTATE SYSTEM

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.