Japan in The Seventeenth Century Labour Relations and Work Ethics
Japan in The Seventeenth Century Labour Relations and Work Ethics
Japan in The Seventeenth Century Labour Relations and Work Ethics
1017/S0020859011000502
r 2011 Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis
INTRODUCTION
Around 1500, Japan’s elite was in the midst of prolonged warfare, the
supremacy of the central government was fast declining, while many
territorial lords (daimyō) were assuming unprecedented power. The
whole country was in a process of political decentralization, which was
accompanied by social upheaval on various levels. During this develop-
ment many of the traditional structures, such as the landed estates, which
had been the primary production units in medieval Japan, were finally
destroyed, and the territorial lords gradually gained direct control of the
people in their domains.
Sources on the life and work of the common people are scarce and
scattered, and little is known about the work situation and the work ethics
of those who performed manual labour. Confucianism or neo-Confucianism,
which was to become the main ideology in the seventeenth century, was
known, but not widespread. If there was any kind of work ethic, it would
* In this article east Asian names are given in the sequence family name – personal name.
Exceptions are made in cases where authors have adopted Western personal names.
have been rooted in Buddhism. Although artisans with special skills, who
could probably be regarded as semi-free, formed small guilds (za), and
sought employment by local lords and temples in some places, the prevalent
forms of labour were serfdom, lifelong service (semi-free indentured service),
and corvée labour.
In the last three decades of the sixteenth century, efforts began to unify
the country under a new central government. After a decisive battle in
1600, a new regime under the control of the supreme military governors
(shōgun), the Tokugawa family, was set up and lasted for more than 250
years until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Many historians regard the
so-called Tokugawa (or Edo) period as comparable with the early modern
period in European history. In the evolving political and administrative
system, the central power of the shogunate coexisted with more than
200 feudal domains, whose lords were legally vassals of the shogun, but
acted as rather independent rulers in their domains. To maintain this
delicate balance of power, the Tokugawa shoguns established an admin-
istrative framework based on policies already introduced by their pre-
decessors, by which they tried to control their vassals firmly and stabilize
their own rule.
Among the measures to achieve that goal, two are of special importance
for changes in labour relations: first, a strategy of urbanizing the warrior
class by separating warriors and peasants and forcing the former to reside
in the emerging castle towns; and second, a system of alternate attendance
(sankin kōtai), by which the feudal lords were to live alternately in Edo
and in their domains, building and maintaining castles and residences in
both places. The result was an unprecedented boom in urban construction
starting in the 1580s and extending far into the seventeenth century.
Castle towns had to accommodate thousands of warriors and their
entourages as well as artisans and merchants who provided the material
basis for their living. This created a huge demand not only for goods and
services, but also for manual labourers, which forced the shogunate to
overlook the traditional ban on peasant migration and reluctantly concede
the development of new forms of service and labour, especially in the
cities, but also in some rural areas.
In the 1580s and 1590s Toyotomi Hideyoshi had explicitly forbidden
the hiring of day labourers. In his ‘‘Edict on Change of Status’’ of 1591,
which was part of his efforts to separate warriors from peasants, disarm
the peasantry, and stabilize agricultural production after long years of war,
Hideyoshi demanded that ‘‘if any farmer abandons his wet and dry fields
and engages in trade or offers himself for hire for wages, not only is he to
be punished, but also his fellow villagers’’.1 During the following decades,
however, this attitude on the part of the central administration was softened
and adapted to the changing situation.
Studies on this transformation process which focus on work, the
emergence of an urban workforce, ensuing changes in labour relations in
rural and urban areas, or the spread of a work ethic and its actual impact
on the thought and behaviour of the workforce are still few in number.
There are, however, groundbreaking works by Thomas C. Smith, Saitō
Osamu, Herman Ooms, Gary Leupp, Mary Louise Nagata, and others,
whose findings have greatly helped in formulating the following outline
of the transformation of labour relations in rural and urban areas, and the
possible impacts of a work ethic.
T H E S I T U AT I O N I N R U R A L A R E A S
Despite the sudden emergence and growth of castle towns and other urban
centres at the turn of the sixteenth century, the majority of Japanese people
continued to live and produce in the countryside throughout the early
modern period (1600–1868). While we have a rich stock of sources con-
cerning the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the economic historian
Hayami Akira has pointed out that ‘‘since there are few literary source
materials in Japan much before 1600 that tell us about social conditions, such
as how peasants lived and produced, no real contrast can be made between
pre-1600 and post-1600 socio-economic conditions through primary his-
torical sources’’.2 Therefore the following remarks on traditional forms of
labour in agriculture will focus mostly on the period after 1600.
The complete disintegration of the landed estates in the sixteenth
century was accompanied by the expanding autonomy of newly emerging
village communities on the one hand, and by the efforts of the daimyō to
gain control over their territories and people on the other. In this process
the daimyō developed a great variety of systems and regulations to cope
with landholdings, tax collection, and recruitment for military service, but
the unification process which started in the late sixteenth century estab-
lished new principles of land possession. A nationwide cadastral survey
(taikō kenchi) registered plots of land in the names of peasants, who could
henceforth claim possession rights for these parcels, while proprietorship
remained with the territorial lord. Even though the cadastral survey laid
2. Hayami Akira, ‘‘A Great Transformation: Social and Economic Change in Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Century Japan’’, in Erich Pauer (ed.), Silkworms, Oil and Chips (Proceedings of the
Economics and Economic History Section of the Fourth International Conference on Japanese
Studies, Paris, September 1985), Bonner Zeitschrift für Japanologie, VIII (Bonn, 1986), pp. 3–13, 5;
repr. in Hayami Akira, Collected Papers of Akira Hayami: Population, Family and Society in
Pre-Modern Japan [The Collected Papers of Twentieth-Century Japanese Writers on Japan], IV
(Folkestone, 2009), pp. 42–51, 43.
R E C I P R O C A L L A B O U R I N T H E C O U N T RY S I D E
Although large landholdings did not completely disappear, the majority
of the landowning peasants (honbyakushō) were registered for smaller
plots of land of one chō (c.1 hectare) or less. It seems that often the plots
became so small that they could no longer support even the nuclear
family. According to a treatise on farming from 1685, the Hōnen zeisho
[Writings on Taxes in Years of Abundance], ‘‘everywhere fields are divi-
ded and re-divided, until finally holdings of seven, five, and even one tan
[c.1,000 square metres] or less appear. The holders of such small farms put
their children out in the service of others.’’4 This statement is supported
by other sources. Smith mentions the example of a group of sixty-nine
servants in one village in 1678, of whom ‘‘all but one came from families
with fewer than five koku of arable and forty-one [y] from families with
fewer than three koku’’,5 which means that the income in rice did not
suffice to feed more than two to four persons in the household.6
Service in the countryside could take on several forms, which can be
roughly divided into hereditary servants (fudai) and indentured servants
bound for exceedingly long terms (genin), but the lines between these
categories are often blurred and the terms are used interchangeably. Besides
those two categories, which could be labelled ‘‘agricultural servants’’, Smith
distinguishes a third group, namely serfs, who would farm small plots of land
allotted to them by the landholder, to whom they owed labour services in
return. Smith calls them nago, but there are many other local names (hikan
for instance) for these dependent cultivators of land.
Although it is extremely difficult to assess the numbers of genin and
nago, Smith used scattered population registers to estimate that genin
accounted for about 10 per cent of the peasant population in the seventeenth
3. Wakita Osamu, ‘‘The Social and Economic Consequences of Unification’’, in John Whitney
Hall et al. (eds), The Cambridge History of Japan, IV: Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, 1991),
pp. 96–127, 105–110.
4. Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford, CA, 1959), p. 12.
5. Ibid.
6. One koku is equivalent to 180 litres of rice, which is sufficient to feed one person for one
year. But since peasants usually had to pay taxes in rice, the amount at their disposal was much
less than the number of koku registered for their fields.
Edo
Kyoto
Kinai Otsu
Osaka Nara
www.cartographicstudio.eu, 2011
Sakai
Tosa
11. Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law (Berkeley, CA [etc.],
1996), pp. 353ff.
F R O M S U B S I S T E N C E FA R M I N G T O C O M M E R C I A L I Z E D
A G R I C U LT U R E A N D S I D E W O R K
With the expansion of commerce and industry in the late seventeenth and
throughout the eighteenth century, some economically advanced areas saw a
transformation of agricultural labour, which gradually spread to other parts
of the country. These developments began to evolve first in Kyōto and the
Kinai area, i.e. the provinces surrounding the cities of Kyōto, Nara, Ōsaka,
and Ōtsu, as well as in the port town of Sakai (Figure 1).
Kyōto had been the hub of commercial activities for a long time. In the
fourteenth century peasants in nearby villages apparently began to produce
goods such as noodles, lamp oil, vinegar, and malt to sell in the cities. Some
of these peasants even formed guilds (inaka-za) under the protection of
powerful patrons, modelled after similar organizations of artisans and mer-
chants in Kyōto and other cities.13 At the same time, coins imported from
China since the end of the twelfth century circulated not only in the central
Kinai area but also in villages and markets along the great highways and
became an additional incentive for peasants to produce for the market. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the number of cities and towns as well as
their population increased. Much of this growth was based on the growth of
commerce, which expanded to regional markets. So, in the mid-sixteenth
century, the Kinai area was economically already far advanced, and com-
mercial transactions at markets and annual taxes were based mostly on coins.
There were also other ‘‘scattered islands of commercial farming in Japan’’.14
The reforms during the unification process greatly changed the framework
for agricultural and commercial activities. New policies of registering land in
the name of the cultivators since the 1580s, and the ‘‘return of the rice-using
economy’’ through the introduction of the kokudaka system, in which land
was measured in terms of rice output (kokudaka), and rice became again the
main basis of taxation, put an end to the medieval economy.15 However,
these changes did not prevent the further spread of commerce and its
growing importance for the economy as a whole, although they might have
contributed to form its special structure, which differs from similar devel-
opments in Europe.
From the late 1630s the Tokugawa shogunate began to cast its own coins
in large quantities, and the almost monetary role of rice was complemented
by a tri-metallic currency system of gold, silver, and copper monies. Over
time money became the common medium of exchange in the cities, but
also at numerous rural markets, which sprang up everywhere. A list of
commodities regularly sold at a village market in the Aizu domain (now
Fukushima prefecture) in 1665 included cloth, harnesses, cotton, paper, rice,
soya beans, firewood, hoes, hoe handles, sickle handles, winnowing baskets,
looms, tobacco, grain, vegetables, mortars, straw hats, and straw matting.16
The wide range of goods sold and purchased at that market shows that,
already in the second half of the seventeenth century villagers relied on these
markets for buying, but also for selling, many essentials.
With the spread of commerce and industry in the seventeenth century,
cotton, one of the main cash crops, became prevalent in many areas, while
others such as indigo, tobacco, and safflowers were produced as regional
specialities. The production of raw cotton provided additional work for pea-
sants and also entailed the emergence of a cottage industry gradually produ-
cing cotton thread and cloth far beyond the needs of the peasant families.
The growing importance of the domestic production of raw silk and
silk cloth, which came to be substituted for expensive imports from China
from the beginning of the eighteenth century, also created new oppor-
tunities for secondary employment for peasant families. Some other tra-
ditional side activities of peasants, such as hemp production, bleaching,
and weaving, expanded considerably after the late seventeenth century.17
The commercialization of agriculture and the growth of rural industries
as well as the growing demand for labour in the urban centres influenced
the composition of the rural labour force in many parts of the country.
15. Concerning the background to this development see Kozo Yamamura, ‘‘From Coins to
Rice: Hypotheses on the Kandaka and Kokudaka Systems’’, Journal of Japanese Studies, 14
(1988), pp. 341–367; Wakita Osamu, ‘‘The Kokudaka System: A Device for Unification’’,
Journal of Japanese Studies, 1 (1975), pp. 297–320.
16. Smith, Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, p. 73.
17. Ibid., p. 77.
20. Based on the English translation by Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice, pp. 363–373, 368.
The edict is commonly known as the Keian Edict, as it was issued in the second year of the
Keian era. In the 1990s its authenticity began to be disputed by some scholars. In his short
introduction to the translation Ooms briefly refers to the debate concerning the authenticity of
this edict.
21. The treatise is attributed to the Confucian scholar Kaibara Ekiken (1630–1714). The
English translation is by John Murray, Women and Wisdom of Japan (London, 1909), p. 40.
22. Cited in Smith, Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan, p. 78.
Figure 2. Threshing and husking rice. The picture from the Nōgyō zensho shows men and
women working together in threshing rice (below) and husking it (above). Men’s kimonos are
shorter and they wear a towel twisted into a headband, while women wear a sort of headscarf.
The woman in the middle is breastfeeding an older child.
Miyazaki Yasusada (Antei), Nōgyō zensho [The Farmer’s Compendium] (1696), reprinted in
Yamada Tatsuo et al. (eds), Nihon nōgyō zenshū, XII, Nōgyō zensho, Books 1–5 (Tokyo, 1978),
p. 42.
Men usually worked in the fields, and if they took up side work it was
mostly in crafts, transport, or petty trade. Based on figures from the
nineteenth century, Saitō remarks that in areas with rural industries the
proportion of men with side work (dual occupations) was generally lower
than that of women.23 This suggests the important role of women’s
contribution to Japan’s rural industries, especially in the field of textiles.
This view is not undisputed. While some authors, including Murakami
Nobuhiko, a writer and author of studies on women’s history, empha-
sizing the subordinate position of women in the hierarchical ‘‘house
system’’ (ie-seido) at that time, deny the possibility of men and women
cooperating in productive labour, and declare that the contribution of
female labour was negligible, others, such as the Marxist historian Inoue
Kiyoshi, regard peasant women of the Tokugawa period as relatively pow-
erful and claim they were engaged in productive work cooperatively with
male family members.24 Yet even though the rise of rural industry largely
occurred through the expansion of by-production in peasant households
without changing the existing social structures and thus the subordinate
position of women in the family and in society, the rapid spread of these
rural cottage industries shows that through their by-production the material
contribution of women must have been very substantial.
Spinning and weaving were not the only female tasks. Unlike women in
northern China, who were strongly discouraged from working in the
fields, Japanese women also worked on the land. Except for some women
from wealthy peasant families, women from peasant households usually
took part in agricultural work, especially in the busy seasons of planting
and harvesting. This is evident from several agricultural treatises (nōsho),
which were published in growing numbers from the end of the seven-
teenth century onward. Based on Chinese models or on information
collected in Japan, and sometimes even on personal work experience, the
authors describe various aspects of agricultural activities in writing and in
pictures, often with the intention of advancing commercialized farming.
For example, illustrations in the Nōgyō zensho [The Farmer’s Companion]
from the second half of the seventeenth century show women participating
in rice planting, weeding, or threshing, in the latter case working side by side
with men (Figure 2).25 Planting the rice seedlings in the main field was
obviously a typical, though not exclusive, job for women. An agricultural
Figure 3. Planting and weeding rice. Saotome (rice-planting women) are planting the seedlings
(right), while a man with a hoe is standing behind them. Another woman offers tea or water (left).
While men are drawing water, women are weeding the field. Another man with a hoe is passing by.
Miyazaki Yasusada (Antei), Nōgyō zensho [The Farmer’s Compendium] (1696), reprinted in
Yamada Tatsuo et al. (eds), Nihon nōgyō zenshū, XII, Nōgyō zensho, Books 1 to 5 (Tokyo, 1978),
pp. 38–39.
treatise from 1707, the Kōka shunju% [Cultivating the Soil from Spring to
Autumn], gives detailed instructions on how many saotome (rice-planting
women) one needed to work a field of a certain size.26 The appearance of the
obviously young, good-looking saotome in the fields each May seems to
have attracted great attention and is mentioned in several verses in the Aizu
uta nōsho [Agricultural Treatise from the Aizu Region in Verses] (Figure 3).27
In the course of the eighteenth century, the demarcation between men’s
and women’s work apparently became more and more blurred. While the
26. Tsuchiya Matasaburō, Kōka shunju% [Cultivating the Soil from Spring to Autumn] (1707),
% IV (Tokyo, 1980), pp. 17–18.
repr. in Yamada Tatsuo et al. (eds), Nihon nōsho zenshu,
27. Sase Yojiuemon, Aizu uta nōsho [Agricultural Treatise from the Aizu Region in Verses]
(1704), repr. in Yamada Tatsuo et al. (eds), Nihon nōsho zenshu,% XX, Aizu uta nōsho, Maku-
nouchi nōgyō-ki (Tokyo, 1982), pp. 74–75. The author (1630–1711) came from a wealthy family
of village headmen and knew peasant life and agricultural work from his own practical
experience – like many of the Japanese writers of agricultural treatises. So we can assume that,
even though he was influenced by Chinese writings on agriculture, his writings reflect the
reality in eastern Japan.
%
28. Aizu fuzoku chō [Record of Customs from the Aizu Region, 1807] and Ryury % u% shinku-
roku [Record of the Hard Work of Peasants, 1805], both cited by Sugano Noriko, ‘‘Nōson josei
no rōdō to seikatsu’’ [Work and Daily Life of Peasant Women], in Joseishi Sōgō Kenkyūkai
(ed.), Nihon joseishi, III, Kinsei (Tokyo, 1982), pp. 63–94, 92–94; part of the English translation
of the citations is based on Anne Walthall, ‘‘The Life Cycle of Farm Women’’, in Gail Bernstein
(ed.), Recreating Japanese Women, 1600–1945 (Berkeley, CA, 1991), pp. 42–70, 57.
29. Walthall, ‘‘Life Cycle of Farm Women’’, p. 57.
Figure 4. Women working in the mines. Women were employed in mines for many tasks relating
to processing the ore, which was mined by men. This picture (from a picture scroll on mining)
shows women dividing the ore into three categories by washing it and probing it with a hammer.
Picture scroll, Kingin saisei zenzu [On the Mining of Gold and Silver in Sado]. Property of the
University of Freiberg, Germany. Used with permission.
T H E S I T U AT I O N I N U R B A N A R E A S
The Japan of the Tokugawa period was one of the most urbanized regions
of the world. More than twenty major castle towns, including Edo and
Ōsaka, were established or expanded in the three decades between 1580
and 1610. They quickly grew, and it is estimated that at the end of the
seventeenth century 8 to 9 per cent of the population lived in cities and
towns with more than 30,000 people, and in some cases with several
hundreds of thousands of inhabitants.30 If smaller market towns of 3,000
inhabitants are included, the share of the urban population rises to 16 or
17 per cent. The urban growth was led by Edo, the population of which
increased from about 100,000 in 1610 to roughly 400,000 in the 1640s,
to as many as 800,000 in the 1680s, and to over 1,000,000 inhabitants
by the 1720s.31 In the large cities, new patterns of consumption and new
modes of social organization and labour relations evolved, and gradually
spread to smaller towns.
30. John Whitney Hall, ‘‘The Castle Town and Japan’s Modern Urbanization’’, The Far
Eastern Quarterly, 15 (1955), pp. 37–56, 44, 51. Around 1700 about 10 per cent of the popu-
lation lived in cities of over 10,000 inhabitants.
31. Gilbert Rozman, ‘‘Edo’s Importance in the Changing Tokugawa Society’’, Journal of
Japanese Studies, 1 (1974), pp. 91–112, 93, n. 7.
32. A thorough analysis of the term shokunin and its historical interpretations can be found in
Klaus Vollmer, Professionen und ihre ‘‘Wege’’ im mittelalterlichen Japan. Eine Einführung in
ihre Sozialgeschichte und literarische Repräsentation am Beispiel des Tōhoku’in shokunin
utaawase (Hamburg, 1995), passim, and pp. 101–102.
33. Leupp, Servants, Shophands and Laborers, p. 13.
34. Marius B. Jansen, ‘‘Tosa in the Seventeenth Century: The Establishment of Yamauchi
Rule’’, in John W. Hall and Marius B. Jansen (eds), Studies in the Institutional History of Early
Modern Japan (Princeton, NJ, 1968), pp. 115–130, 106, 121.
35. Leupp, Servants, Shophands and Laborers, p. 15.
36. Mary Louise Nagata, Labor Contracts and Labor Relations in Early Modern Central Japan
(London, 2005), p. 122.
37. Ibid., pp. 15–16, 54–56, 72.
38. Ibid., p. 16.
42. Wakita Osamu, ‘‘Kinsei shoki no toshi keizai’’ [Urban Economy in the Early Years of the
Early Modern Period], Nihonshi kenkyu,% 200 (1979), pp. 52–75, 63. These figures are based on
estimates by Wakita, who calculated the number of labourers by taking the overall costs of
labour and dividing them by average wages. According to this, there would have been several
millions of people (or possibly man-days) per year.
43. Leupp, Servants, Shophands and Laborers, p. 17.
44. Ibid., p. 160.
have grown by 10,000 immigrants a year during the first half of the
seventeenth century, and by 15,000 immigrants a year during the second
half.45 The casual labourers were employed on a daily, ten-day, twenty-
day, or monthly basis. As the free movement of people was still forbidden
and peasants were not supposed to leave their land, the government at
first repeatedly rounded up these rural immigrants in the cities, especially
in Edo, and returned them to their native villages. Around the middle of
the seventeenth century, as the above-mentioned edict shows, the sho-
gunate seems to have changed its policy and started to recognize casual
labour as part of economic and social development. Around 1700 one-
fifth to one-third of the urban population in Japan consisted of hired
servants, shop hands, and manual labourers.46
A closer look at the composition of this labour force shows that it com-
prised both men and women. Although women were fewer in number than
men, they performed many jobs in the cities, such as shop hands, tailors,
laundresses, dyers, pedlars, and hawkers.47 Leupp mentions one example of
thirty-two day labourers in the castle town of Kasama (Hitachi province,
now Ibaragi prefecture) in 1705, among them six women, who were all
widows. Other examples also suggest that women often had to work to
make a living or at least supplement their insufficient household income. For
them, the growing diversity of jobs in the cities offered alternatives to the
traditional resort in times of economic need, namely prostitution.
A rare example of female artisans is given in one of the writings by Ihara
Saikaku (1642–1693), who mentions female carpenters who worked at the
women’s quarters in the Imperial Palace in Kyōto and ‘‘do this for a living’’.48
The age of day labourers varied greatly. Some labourers seem to have
begun working at the age of fourteen or fifteen but, as Leupp points out,
in several documents the recorded average age of day labourers is sur-
prisingly high, sometimes even exceeding fifty years.49
In contrast to most of the corvée labourers, who were provided only with
room and board, the newly emerging group of casual labourers were
obviously paid wages. Conservative intellectuals noted and often deplored this
change. In 1730 the Confucian scholar Ogyū Sorai (1666–1728) wrote: ‘‘Until
seventy or eighty years ago the employment of day-laborers was unheard of’’.
Around the same time, his contemporary Dazai Shundai noted that:
It is rare nowadays to use peasants as corvée labor. For such [tasks] as public
work, workers in the capital are hired for wages [y]. Nowadays lords do not
employ people of their provinces, but hire them for wages in Edo. Wage-work
(chinpu) is, by the current custom, referred to as day labor (hiyō). For virtually
every type of work, people are hired for money. So people do not suffer, but on
the contrary, they prosper. This is different from the old practice.50
So, at the end of the seventeenth century wage labour was widespread in
urban areas, and even in Dazai Shundai’s statement this is depicted as a
positive trend.
One question is whether wages were paid directly to the individual
worker. A regulation dating from 1657 that tried to limit the wages to be
paid to different groups of day labourers gave the respective amounts in
‘‘one unit of gold (ryō) per 45, 65 or 70 persons’’, depending among other
things on whether they owned their tools or not. This seems to indicate
that the whole sum was often given to some kind of labour boss, who
would then in turn hand part of it to the workers he was in charge of, and
keep the rest to pay for his expenses and a profit.51
Wage levels seem to have fluctuated widely depending on demand and
supply, and the authorities repeatedly (though mostly unsuccessfully)
tried to keep them down. The new economic developments, the emer-
gence of wage labour, the rise and fall in prices and wages, and the
growing impact of money on the economy were important topics in
scholarly debates in Japan from the late seventeenth century onward. In
the early phase, neo-Confucian scholars, including Arai Hakuseki
(1657–1725) as well as Ogyū Sorai and Dazai Shundai, dominated the
debate. They mostly deplored the new developments.
In contrast, the economist and philosopher Miura Baien (1723–1789), a
contemporary of Adam Smith, although very critical about the money
economy and the accumulation of wealth in the cities, did not plead for the
complete abolition of money and wage labour. Instead he wrote a chapter on
‘‘the price of wage labour’’, in which he thoroughly analysed the connections
between the situation in rural areas and wage labour in the cities. In his eyes,
the shift of large numbers of poor peasants between agricultural work in years
of abundance and wage labour in the cities in years of bad harvests was the
main reason for wage instability. So he recommended improving the eco-
nomic situation of small peasants to keep them on the land and separate them
from urban wage labourers.52 In his writings he acknowledges the existence of
wage labour as an irrevocable fact, proving the consolidation of the new
W O R K E R S ’ AT T I T U D E S T O WA R D S W O R K
53. In Japan the four status groups (shimin, also translated as four classes, four peoples, four
orders, and in German Vier-Stände-System) were often reduced to three by merging the last
two groups, artisans and merchants, into one, and labelling them ‘‘town dwellers’’ (chōnin). A
comprehensive outline of questions related to the historiographical treatment of status, class,
and the social division of work is provided by Douglas R. Howland, ‘‘Samurai Status, Class, and
Bureaucracy: A Historiographical Essay’’, Journal of Asian Studies, 60 (2001), pp. 353–380,
353–367.
54. Takemura Eiji, The Perception of Work in Tokugawa Japan: A Study of Ishida Baigan and
Ninomiya Sontoku (Lanham, MD, 1997), pp. 24–27.
55. Ibid., pp. 94–96.
56. Ibid., pp. 55–56. English translation by Takemura Eiji.
but the 1649 edict on peasants shows that the indoctrination of society’s
lower classes had already begun by then.
To what degree these moral ideas shaped their actions and attitudes and
how they might have resisted them is hard to say. In popular fiction,
especially in the novels of the seventeenth-century writer Ihara Saikaku,
as well as in many senryu% (short comical verses) and kobanashi (humorous
anecdotes), servants are often depicted as lazy, pleasure loving, gossip-
prone, and unreliable, sometimes clumsy and ignorant, sometimes very
shrewd. Hired workers are similarly depicted drinking, gambling, and
spending their earnings in the pleasure quarters.60
These stereotypes were obviously especially popular with the public,
because they contravened the prevailing Confucian values. On the other
hand they might also partly reflect the fact that the new kind of short-
term employment might have loosened the bonds with employers and
offered these groups opportunities to pursue their own ideas about a good
life. They nevertheless hardly reproduced the authentic view of the
groups concerned.
Work songs, which could reflect this view, exist, but it is nearly impossible
to link them to a certain period of time. Some like rice-planting or weaving
songs could probably be traced back to the seventeenth century, while others
dealing with coal mining or female workers (jokō) can be linked at best to the
late eighteenth and early nineteenth century because the work they describe
did not exist in earlier times.
If the songs relate directly to the work, the most frequent topic is the
hardship endured by workers. In the cotton beaters’ song, work is char-
acterized by words such as tsurai (harsh, severe) or kurō (trouble, hard-
ship).61 ‘‘Sing, sing they kept urging me, but a song wouldn’t come out,
only sweat’’, or ‘‘If you’re suffering at work, instead of crying, sing. If the
song is good, you’ll cheer up’’.62 In some songs related to peasants’ work
we find complaints about backs sore from planting rice or the expressions
of loneliness by indentured servants, but rarely expressions of social or
political protest or antagonism towards one’s immediate superiors.63
Hughes cites two examples of songs expressing critique. In one, a local
entrepreneur is bedevilled by indigo workers: ‘‘the tycoon of Awa is a
devil from hell; he does not extract indigo dye, he extracts blood’’.
Another one focuses on the relationship between peasant and the local
landlord: ‘‘the peasant is mouse, the squire is a cat, his eyes on the peasant
drowsily [thinking I’ll catch him]’’,64 but they could be from the eighteenth
or nineteenth centuries. Other songs, such as the pottery song from Bizen,
praise the master, ‘‘The Lord of Bizen is a great and noble man. Thanks to
our lord the kiln flourishes. When the kiln flourishes so does the whole
village’’.65
Indirect information about the work ethic of servants or employees in
merchant and artisan households is likely to be found in sources dealing
with conflicts between masters and servants. Nagata has pointed out that
contracts usually contained provisions against absconding and dis-
appearing after theft. According to her, swindling scams were apparently a
problem in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and guarantors were
usually held responsible for bringing the fugitives back or compensating
the employer for his losses. The few cases she presents in her study seem
to indicate that such troubles occurred quite frequently, even with the
same person being hired, fired, and re-hired.66 So a broader analysis of
this kind of source could surely provide us with a better insight into the
attitudes of workers and servants towards their work.
CONCLUSION
So far Japanese economic historians have focused mostly on the eight-
eenth and early nineteenth centuries as periods in which certain new
characteristics of the Tokugawa period, such as urbanism, commercial
agriculture, and the growing importance of the money economy, fully
developed. The years 1500 and 1650, which were fixed as cross sections in
the framework of the comparative research project to which this article
contributes, have no special meaning in Japanese history. A closer look,
however, reveals that 1500 may be seen as symbolizing a period in which
the old order of the landed estates was rapidly dissolving, and new forms
of labour relations among artisans and other workmen were evolving.
The cross section of 1650 sets the focus on the seventeenth century. It
turns out to have been of special importance for the formation of new
forms of labour relations, the development of industry in rural areas, the
increase in female labour, and for reflection on all these changes. One of
the main trends in both urban and rural areas was the development of
short-term employment. In the course of the seventeenth century, lifelong
service in urban, and partly in rural, households was replaced by forms
with a fixed span of years, which by the end of the century could be freely
negotiated between employer and employee. For those aspiring to a
career of service in the households of merchants and artisans, the form of
long-term service was preserved, but as more and more strangers were
employed, written contracts became quite common.
At the same time, casual labour remunerated with wages replaced
corvée labour in the towns and larger cities. This led to the emergence of
an urban stratum of day labourers, workmen, small artisans, and pedlars,
who often came from the countryside. The shogunate tried to control the
evolving market for this kind of urban labour by strict regulations, but the
repeated issue of such regulations shows that its efforts were only partly
successful. Finally, even Confucian scholars such as Dazai Shundai and
also the shogunate itself had to concede that the new forms of labour also
had advantages.
The prevailing ideology of neo-Confucianism was without doubt very
influential in shaping the concepts of work and one’s role in society based
on status and occupation. While it is hard to grasp its direct impact on the
daily life of the people, images of indolent servants with loose morals on
the one hand and the complaints about exploitation on the other have
been passed down to us in literary and historical documents. Recon-
structing the work ethic as it was understood and practised by the lower
classes of Tokugawa society remains a topic for further research.