AGRICULTURE AND FORESTRY. 



peasant occupied a much freer position than many of his class 

 in Europe durinpj the Middle Ages, who were far more rigorously 

 oppressed, as Thunberg^ emphasizes, with villainage and other 

 burdens. 



From what has been said, we must infer a great difference in the 

 extent of peasant proprietorship. But larger, and according to our 

 conception, better rounded estates, the so-called latifundia, are now 

 altogether wanting. There are no large landed proprietors in 

 Japan, either peasants or nobles. In the most ancient times, as 

 long as the Mikado was still the actual autocrat of land and war, 

 and the various classes of society had not yet been rigidly and by 

 birth separated from one another, the taxation of the peasants was 

 h'ght, for Japanese conditions. Every eight families had to farm 

 for the Mikado a ninth part of the arable land apportioned to, and 

 divided equally among, them, and deliver to the officials its raw 

 products. But as dualism in government and the feudal system 

 under the Shogunat developed, the number of the unproductive 

 classes of the Samurai, in the widest sense, increased, and with it 

 the amount of taxation upon the peasants, which, particularly in 

 time of war, reached, through arbitrary regulations, a weight that 

 was often crushing. In place of the original feudal relation to the 

 Mikado, sprang up that to the feudal lords. Through all the 

 changes of mastership, the peasants remained bound to the soil, 

 and they are, to this hour, in every respect the most conservative 

 class in Japan. The chief support and power of the country rests 

 in the hands of this industrious, sober, and frugal population, 

 which still cultivates the soil in original simplicity, as it has been 

 accustomed for centuries to do under all kinds of rulers. 



About the year 1595 A.D. Taiko-sama (Hideyoshi) reorganized 

 their system of taxation, decreeing that the contribution of raw 

 products should henceforth consist of a third part of the assessed 

 produce of the fields, and should be paid in rice. lyeyasu made 

 no alteration in this arrangement with reference to his great pos- 

 sessions, but only declared, in the thirty-sixth of his Hundred Laws, 

 that the produce of forests, groves, mountains, and rivers should 

 also be taken into the reckoning.^ 



Thus matters stood until 17 16, when the taxation of the lands 

 of the Shogun was increased to one-half of the assessed produce. 

 In the estates of the Daimios, the revenues were by no means 

 everywhere the same. While the peasants under one of these 

 feudal lords were almost crushed by the high land-tax and lived 

 in extreme poverty, the mild, provident rulership of a neighbour 

 was indicated by greater prosperity, by the building of roads and 

 bridges, and many other improvements. But the peasant went 

 about his work in the old-fashioned way, and despite this great 



' In Akerbruket : "Resa," iv. pp. 76-92. 



2 Kempermann : « Die Gesetze des Izeyasu," in « Mitth. der deutschen Gesell- 

 schaft," etc., 1. p. 12. 



