The Tokugawa Period: The Shoen System In Japan

The practice of Buddhism and several Buddhism connections by the samurai transformed from the end of the Heian Period to the Tokugawa Period, especially the for the shoen system in Japan. During the Heian Period, the control of land and agricultural production was an important concept to the samurai. However, during the Kamakura Period, the jito came into the picture and took over the shoen system. By the mid-fourteenth to the late sixteenth century, the shoen declined due to four different factors. However, during the Tokugawa Period, the samurai gain economic surplus from the peasants of Japan. Ethan Segal’s The Shoen System, Jeffrey Mass’s The Kamakura Bakufu, and Eiko Ikegami’s The Taming of the Samurai all describe the transformation of …show more content…
Ethan Segal also describes how the control of land and agricultural production was considered as an important concept to the samurai during the Heian period. The government officials collect the taxes with rice and other agricultural goods for landholdings. Ethan Segal claims that the government officials got taxes costs out of the landholders as much as possible. For example, Ethan Segal states “Accordingly, governors tended to squeeze provincial landholders for as much tax revenue as possible”. Ethan Segal also mentions how the shoen estates were ran and the role of the managers of the shoen system. Ethan Segal states that the shoen estate managers checked on their estates daily to check the process of the agricultural production. Ethan Segal explains that the landholdings of the temples were mainly sponsored by priests that were sent from the temples. According to Ethan Segal, “In some cases, this was the individual who had sponsored and led the land reclamation; on temple estates, it was often a priest appointed by and sent from the main temple”. Ethan Segal mentions that the estates mainly included land officials, clerks, and other workers who helped to run the estates. However, the shoen system did raise several problems for the cultivators of the shoen estates. Ethan Segal brings up the issue that the cultivators of the shoen estates had only a few rights. …show more content…
Eiko Ikegami claims that the samurai during the Tokugawa Period gained economic surplus from the peasants. For example, in The Taming of the Samurai, Eiko Ikegami states “There were two main classes in the Japanese mode of production, samurai lords and peasants. The mechanism of vassalage can be regarded as the samurai’s political technique for extracting economic surplus from the peasants”. Eiko Ikegami considered this as the technique of surplus transfer of Tokugawa Japan. In The Taming of the Samurai, Eiko Ikegami also mentions how the villages become stronger during the medieval period of Japan. According to Eiko Ikegami, the farmers in Tokugawa Japan formed ikki associations in order to become stronger and more independent. For example, Eiko Ikegami states “Toward the end of the Japanese medieval period, the villages became stronger and more independent, and the farmers often formed ikki associations against samurai lords. Because of the villagers’ feisty and independent attitudes, ensuring a steady flow of tax revenue from the agricultural communities became a critical concern for the samurai lords”. This situation is very similar to Ethan Segal’s The Shoen System about the reasons why the shoen system had declined during the mid- fourteenth to the late sixteenth century. During the mid-fourteenth to late