9.2: The Balance of Weakness in the Economy and the Fisc

Low Productivity

This balance of weakness appears in the economy. Hei’an experienced economic and demographic stability. If we believe the historical record, right up until the eighteenth century, the Japanese economy was based almost entirely on agricultural land. Certainly that was true of the fisc, the state’s financing. The government's most important job was to manage the distribution of the products of the land to the aristocracy and their clients. Complex struggles around landholding appear in many documents, including the allocation of land rights, taxes and tax exemptions, the punishment of criminals who foraged another's crops, and military obligations that went with a particular plot of land. Control of land and labor was the foundation of wealth and of aristocratic power, and the two were related. Disease, low nutrition, and low productivity kept the population from growing much. The relative shortage of labor made it difficult to bring new lands under cultivation. Economic growth was limited.

Farming technology did not improve much, either. Farmers had to turn over almost the entire harvest beyond what they needed for subsistence, so they had little incentive to increase productivity. The educated people in society – aristocrats – lived in the capital, and were descended from warriors with no experience of farming, so they did not contribute new technology, either. Nor was it imported from the mainland: the disarray of late Tang made travel downright dangerous. So productivity did not rise through increased labor or land, nor through better tools, methods, or seeds.

Stagnant production levels meant that as long as the existing elite could keep hold of the resources they already controlled, there was no additional surplus locally honored families, travelling preachers, small-time fighters or merchants could commandeer and transmute into local political or military or social or cultural power. In fact, money, though coined in Nara times, fell out of use entirely in Hei’an times.

No More Money? No Merchants?

To understand why, let’s look first at manufactured goods, and then turn to grain. The architects of the centralized, Tang-Legalist-style ritsuryō order had planned that goods like salt, fish, oil, wine, wood, iron cooking pots, textiles, mats, etc. would come up to the capital in the form of taxes, be stored in government warehouses, and then be both distributed as part of salary to aristocrats holding office, and traded and sold in the two marketplaces of the capital. Other goods would be produced in the capital by artisans overseen by officials, and distributed in the same way. Money would have played a small role in this system, as it did in Tang.

But over time, the aristocracy gained more and more control over land – as I will explain below – and the economy shifted back to a more manorial system. Each of the aristocratic clans, though residing in the capital, requisitioned the goods they needed directly from their estates. Each clan patronized its own artisans to make what they needed (aristocrats themselves also designed and made textiles, as part of their cultural repertoire), and owned suburban manors on the outskirts of town where their staff processed and stored goods for their use. Temples, too, held huge estates, and managed their own production and distribution through feudal demands rather than through the market. Manorial control of production and distribution cut out buying and selling. No entrepreneurs arose to profit from trade, build up wealth, and change the dynamics of political power – as, for instance, Tang Gaozu’s rise had been bankrolled by a wealthy timber merchant, the father of Empress Wu.

But Historian Amino Yoshihiko has suggested that our whole picture of the premodern Japanese economy is skewed. He discovered that for the later Tokugawa period (1600-1867) huge numbers of people, as one might expect in rocky, forested, islands with long coastlines – earned their livelihoods not by growing rice but from fish, seaweed, salt, lumber, and commerce. Because of the Tang model, the central laws did not include such activities. The contracts and other documents that did record them were not needed in the long term, and while Tokugawa was recent enough that many Tokugawa contracts survived accidentally (and Amino tells the thrilling story of their discovery), Hei’an is too far back for much accidental preservation. The idea that Japan was fundamentally agrarian and isolated became so deeply embedded in historical thinking that the term hyakushō (百姓), which originally meant “commoners” as opposed to aristocrats and then to samurai, is understood by modern Japanese speakers as meaning “farmer” or even “peasant.” When they look back at historical documents that refer to hyakushō, therefore, they do not even consider that it might include fisherfolk, manufacturers, lumbermen, and very wealthy merchants.³

All transmitted and nearly all preserved written sources on Hei’an were created by a tiny elite. Perhaps they simply did not care to recognize in writing a social ferment below them. Perhaps coins went out of use, not because there was no international or domestic trade, but because (as occurred in the period of division and Tang) people did not trust coins. Perhaps the products of forest and sea were avidly made and traded, but escaped control by the state, which was blinded by its adherence to a Tang model of taxing agriculture and not commerce. The state did treat rice as the fundamental resource. Rice had fueled the Qin conquest, and imperial armies since then. But in Hei’an it came to be managed in such a way that it contributed to the balance of weakness.

Rights to Rice

In theory, the central government controlled rice through the equal field system, in which the center claimed ownership of all land and its produce, to distribute and redistribute at a taxpayer’s death, as needed. Excavated land registers and aerial photographs of land boundaries show that the equal field system was carried out, at least in less-developed western Japan (as in less-developed western China). But within 40 years, the state had to allow families to own land in perpetuity, because land without labor was of no use, and a smallpox epidemic had devasted the population in the 730s. To induce people to settle down and grow grain, the state gave up the right to redistribute land. Still, smallholders paid taxes to the center, through the provincial bureaucracy. That rice was paid out as salary to officials, supported the imperial household, and paid for defense, rituals, and other central government functions.

So, initially, tax rice went into central granaries. But land and labor, over time, passed out of bureaucratic control. Instead, it entered a second kind of tribute arrangement, called the estate (shōen) system. Originally, tax exemptions had rewarded farmers who planted (reclaimed) fields that had been wild or abandoned. But the imperial family, aristocrats above the eighth rank serving in office, a few other aristocratic families, and Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines were also able to get their fields designated tax-exempt. The farmers on these estates paid their harvest as rent to the estate proprietors, rather than taxes. From the late 800s onward, farming families began to “commend” their lands to aristocrats. The proprietors entrusted management of their estates to stewards, called jitō, who collected the rents and sent them on to the noble household or temple in Hei’an, keeping some for themselves.

As time went on, more and more land was held in estates, and less and less provided tax grain to fund the imperial government. This looks like the situation of Eastern Han, when the clans stopped paying taxes and the dynasty faltered and fell, doesn’t it? But it was different.

First, Hei’an aristocrats could not use their estates to build up local power as the Han clans had done, because they did not hold one big parcel of land, but many small plots of land in different places. And second, a single owner rarely held undivided rights to the land. Instead, when farmers or low-ranking landholders, who could never hope to obtain tax exemptions on their own, commended their land to high-ranking aristocratic proprietors at court, they would cut a deal. Each party claimed the right to a portion of income (rice or other products) from the land. The rights to certain proportions of produce were known as shiki. The farmers held shiki entitling them to some grain, the estate stewards were also paid according to their shiki, and most of the harvest was assigned as a shiki to the estate’s proprietor, the powerful court noble or temple who held the tax exemptions. Further complicating matters, shiki, the right to a part of the product of a given plot of land, were heritable; they were divisible; and they were alienable by sale, inheritance, or donation. So shiki, or a fraction of a shiki, could be traded or lost or won just like a pair of gold earrings. Many different people had rights to them produce of each small plot of land.

This certainly was not a clear, centrally managed bureaucratic system. Rather, it was a very complex system that supported the Hei’an court and aristocrats for centuries. I argue that it worked precisely by giving so many people at different levels a stake in it, fracturing control over land and labor in a balance of weakness.

The balance of weakness enabled farmers to maneuver better than in Eastern Han. In Han localities, a few big clans owned the land, hired the thugs, socialized with the county magistrate, and kept juniors in line with patrilineal ideology and organization. Their power over their poor neighbors was undivided. In Hei’an, because of the two systems of land-holding – taxes paid to the bureaucracy and rents paid to shiki holders, and because of the relative shortage of labor, each kind of superior, whether a shōen proprietor or a provincial administrator, had to restrain his demands somewhat. A truly unhappy farmer might cut a deal with another proprietor, and land could be shifted from one category to the other. Documents show farmers complaining to governors about their underlings, or working with the lower officials behind the governor’s back. They could complain to one shiki holder about another, since all these people had to somehow enforce their claims – easier to do with the cooperation of the farmers. A farmer who is half subject of the imperial state and half client of a court noble or a Buddhist temple in the capital has a bit more leeway to maneuver.⁴

Figure 9.1. Piece of silk woven cloth, Hei’an, tenth century. Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain.