FEATURE ARTICLES
The Financial Dealings of the Lord Class
2024 Volume 41 Pages 3-15
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2024 Volume 41 Pages 3-15
This paper aims to provide essential background information for understanding the business history of early-modern Japan, particularly financial dealings, and offer an overview of past research on the relevant topics. In Part II, I present the stylized facts on the socioeconomic structure of early-modern Japan and the market structure of Osaka—then the country’s central market. Part III shifts the discussion to the history of academic inquiries pertaining to financial dealings in early-modern Japan. To prevent the paper from exceeding its length constraints, I first explain the prevailing understanding among present-day scholars (especially elements that Japanese researchers have reached a consensus on) and then focus my survey of past research specifically on new endeavors that the latest research projects are tackling.
No market trade is impervious to the socioeconomic structure of the corresponding country or region. In the context of the financial dealings that this feature project explores, for example, credit is a crucial factor. Whether or not a given transaction comes to fruition depends heavily on the socioeconomic structures in place, the customs of the people involved, and a range of other similar factors. For this feature project, which explores past research on financial dealings in early-modern Japan, readers thus need a sufficient understanding of early-modern Japan’s socioeconomic structure.
To help establish that foundation, my first step in this paper is to present the stylized facts on the socioeconomic structure of early-modern Japan and the market structure of Osaka—then the country’s central market (Part II). From there, I outline the history of research on financial dealings in early-modern Japan (Part III). I have also prepared a map of early-modern Japan (Figure 1) that readers can refer to as necessary.
Source: Prepared based on Takemitsu, Oishi, and Kobayashi (2012, 29) and Shōsetsu Nihonshi Zuroku Henshū Iinkai (2015, 165).
Japanese history can be divided into four phases: ancient times (to the tenth century), medieval times (from the eleventh century to the sixteenth century), early-modern times (from the seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century), and modern times (from the mid-nineteenth century to the present). This paper mainly focuses on the third phase, called the Tokugawa period.
The Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867), established by Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542–1616), marked a significant shift in Japanese history.2 It was the first stable central government in over a century, ending a long period of warfare. This stability profoundly impacted the country, allowing for social and economic development previously hindered by constant conflict.
While most local lords (daimyō) focused primarily on protecting their domains, there were those with grander ambitions. Oda Nobunaga (1534–1582) and his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), were among these ambitious lords. They sought to protect their territories and unify the entire country under their rule, a goal that drove their military and economic strategies.
However, Nobunaga was killed by one of his servants in 1582, and the next leader, Hideyoshi, refined Nobunaga’s economic policy and applied it throughout the country. For example, Nobunaga sought uniformity by designating a square wooden cup used in Kyoto, the “Kyō-masu” (Kyoto measure), as a standard unit for the country’s rice measurement. Hideyoshi completed making the Kyoto measure the official unit of measuring rice throughout Japan. With the adoption of a uniform wooden measure, the system of measuring rice production in terms of koku (approximately 150 kg of rice) was introduced nationwide.
Under this system, local lords affiliated with the Toyotomi government were ranked by koku. For example, according to the Kyoto measure, a local lord ranked as ten thousand koku ruled a domain assumed to produce ten thousand koku of rice.
Under the hegemony of Hideyoshi, Osaka began to grow. Hideyoshi had planned to make Osaka the capital of Japan. He even tried to move the imperial court to Osaka from Kyoto, though this attempt eventually failed. After building Osaka Castle, he protected merchants in Osaka to develop the market near the castle (Ōsawa 2019, 343–375).
After Hideyoshi died in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu, an ally of Nobunaga, extended his power under the Toyotomi hegemony. He started to wipe out his rivals and unify the nation under his authority. He succeeded in weakening the economic and political power of the Toyotomi family after the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600. Finally, in 1603, the imperial court appointed him shogun, giving him the right to rule Japan. At this time, the Toyotomi family in Osaka retained an influential lordship, too influential to be of the local variety. To stabilize the authority of his central government, Ieyasu thus had to defeat the Toyotomi family, a task he completed in 1615.
(2) The beginnings of the shogunate’s ruling systemThe Tokugawa shogunate (1603–1867; also called the “Edo bakufu” or just “bakufu”) reigned as the authority over Japan, with each region under the control of a local lord. Hundreds of local lords had the authority to rule specific domains, and the shogunate had its domains in regions in various areas, which included most developed cities, such as Tokyo (then known as Edo), Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagasaki. Each lord, as well as the shogunate, received tax payments in the form of rice. The shogun never levied taxes directly on the lords, however; in that sense, the shogun and the lords had their own independent finances. The tax-rice was sold on the market to cover the administrative costs (Ōno 1985; Takatsuki 2022a, Chap. 1).
The shogun allocated domains to the lords as part of a “master-servant” arrangement. The Hosokawa clan, a typical example of a lord family that received an allotment with a sizable koku output, ruled a 540,000 koku domain in Kumamoto. In other words, the shogun allotted the clan an area capable of producing 540,000 koku of rice (according to the Kyoto measure I explained above). The Hosokawa clan divided the 540,000 koku between the farmers (the producers) in the domain and itself (the ruler), formalizing the distribution framework through contracts with the farmers. The proportion of the total that the clan retained amounted to a “tax rate,” which varied from lord to lord. Generally, tax rates in territories under direct shogunate control tended to be lower than those in local lord–controlled territories (Miyamoto 1989).
In early-modern Japan’s administrative framework, where the shogun and lords exercised decentralized rule, the shogun wielded supreme authority. The rights to issue currency and engage in diplomacy were two of several that were in the shogun’s sole possession. The bakufu monopolized the minting of the currency in nationwide circulation (gold coins, silver coins, and senka [small coins]) and allowed lords to issue “domain bills” (paper currency, hansatsu) that were valid only within their domains (see the Kobayashi paper). The shogunate would often devalue its currency to earn seigniorage, which represented a key revenue source.
On the trade side, lords could invest in trade through merchants in Nagasaki and import the commodities they needed through at least the first half of the 1630s (Oka 2020, 129–164). After the Tokugawa shogunate established the managed-trade system in 1639, lords lost the ability to make merchant investments and deal directly with foreign merchants.
Lords also had to alternate between living in their domains and living in Edo on a yearly basis: they would spend a year at their residences in Edo, return to their home domains for the next year, and then repeat the process, back and forth, indefinitely. For lords, this system of alternate attendance (sankin kōtai) was a considerable financial burden.
One of the most important features of early-modern Japanese society was its caste system. During the Edo period, there was a clear class distinction between the ruling and the ruled (controlled). The ruling class, consisting predominantly of warriors, held executive power and military control. The latter consisted of groups like farmers and townspeople. In the context of the financial market, too, caste had a significant impact. Take how finance worked within the judicial system, for example. The ramifications of the Edo-period legal system differed significantly depending on what classes the lender and borrower belonged to: if a lord were to borrow money from a townsperson and then default on the debt, the class dynamics were such that the shogunate would never order the lord to make good on the payments, even if the lender submitted a complaint (see later in this paper and the Mandai paper).
2. The emergence of the Osaka financial marketAn essential element in any discussion of the early-modern Japanese financial market is Osaka, whose market is also the focus of my survey in this paper. Known to this day in Japan as tenka no daidokoro (the “financial center of the realm”), Osaka was without question the nation’s economic and financial nexus during the Edo period3—but not necessarily from day one of the era.
Battles in 1615 completely burned Osaka to the ground, destroying all of its development. However, this provided a unique opportunity for Osaka, which no longer needed to be a military fortress, to be completely rebuilt as a purely economic center with infrastructure optimized for economic activity.
Still, it took Osaka about a century to establish itself as a critical hub of economic and financial activity. The most prominent economic powerhouses in the first half of the seventeenth century, at least, were Nagasaki (the center of international trade) and Kyoto (the financial center). The Tokugawa shogunate’s decision to institute the managed-trade system in the 1630s cut off cross-border trade. This move would set the stage for a geographical shift in the locus of economic power. The country’s lords, with no choice but to limit their economic activity to within Japan’s borders, began to concentrate on securing cash by selling tax-rice and other tax-goods. The city that emerged as a major force in that environment was Osaka. Over the course of the seventeenth century, as warehouse facilities, distribution networks (canals and water-based transportation), and money-transfer networks took shape in the area, Osaka saw large quantities of tax-rice pour in from lords across the country (Miyamoto 1988, 32–130).
In this context, the Hosokawa clan, which I noted as a typical case of a lord family, offers an enlightening window on the shift that occurred. According to past research, the Hosokawa clan was an active seller of annual tax-rice in Nagasaki until the mid-seventeenth century but made Osaka its sole target for rice sales in the second half of the century (Asao 2004). Given how rice was a high-volume commodity that moved in sizable quantities, it lent itself well to economies of scale—and that was likely one of the factors that made it logical for the Hosokawa clan to ship massive amounts of rice exclusively to the single market of Osaka. In 1703, a whopping 80,000 koku (approximately 120,000 tons) of rice made its way to Osaka, far eclipsing the conventional levels to that point (30,000–40,000 koku) (Takatsuki 2022a, 18–20).
The Hosokawa clan’s shift to Osaka epitomizes a trend prevalent in the second half of the seventeenth century. Like the Hosokawa clan, many lords in western Japan and coastal areas began making it standard practice to ship substantial volumes of rice to Osaka, which led to the emergence of merchants who would handle rice sales (through the issuance of rice stamps) and remittance (money transfer) work on the lords’ behalf. Merchants specializing in rice sales were “warehouse managers” (kuramoto), while those in charge of money transfers were “financial intermediaries” (kakeya). It was a matter of course that some of these brokers and agents also became sources of financing for lords (Mori 1970, 74–135).
With the shogunate’s isolationist policies prompting lords to limit their economic activities to marketing rice in major Japanese cities like Osaka, revenue streams tended to swell in the fall. This was because the existing system involved collecting rice—a fall crop—as a tax. However, lords were liable for expenditures year-round. Considering the lack of regularity and consistency in how money would come into and leave the coffers, lords needed to fill the resulting gaps with funding from outside sources. Stepping in with financial services to satisfy that demand, naturally, were the warehouse managers and financial intermediaries that sold rice for lords (Takatsuki 2022b, 37–45; Takatsuki and Hisamatsu 2023).
By the end of the seventeenth century at the latest, Osaka had cemented its position as Japan’s central market: it was the largest arena for rice sales and financial activity. For lords, then, Osaka was an extremely convenient, one-stop location for selling their rice and procuring funds.
3. The structure of lords’ financesUnder the annual tax-rice system, collecting annual taxes in the form of rice was the core of a lord’s finances. That reality applied to across the entire spectrum of the feudal lord class, from the shogunate and lords to temples, shrines, and the court aristocracy. For example, around 60% of the bakufu’s revenues as of 1730 came from annual tax-rice, and roughly half of all its expenditures went toward salaries for the kashindan (a group of vassals serving the shogun) (Ōguchi 2020, 14). The shogunate kept those levels relatively consistent over time, as well (Furushima 1978, 317–330).
Similar trends are evident among lords, too, and particularly noticeable among clans whose finances, like the Hosokawa clan, relied heavily on Osaka. In 1752, right in the middle of the Edo period, annual tax-rice accounted for 96% of the Hosokawa clan’s incoming revenue. Labor costs (kashindan salaries, etc.) consumed approximately half of its outflow, besides expenditures in Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka (approx. 16%), debt payments (approx. 5.5%), alternate-attendance costs (approx. 5%), and more (Takatsuki 2015). This was the standard financial structure for most lords, although some variance existed. Funding essentially rested on two pillars: selling annual tax-rice in the market and procuring outside funding using rice revenue as a reserve. For the lord class, therefore, financial operations hinged on how high the prices of their rice were and how low the interest rates on their loans from the market were.
The Tokugawa shogunate generated income via sources other than rice, such as revenues from trade, seigniorage from coinage,4 and earnings from mining operations. The sale of annual tax-rice was also important. Another frequent channel of income for the shogunate from the mid-Edo period on was goyōkin, or semi-forced loans that the government solicited from the citizenry (Kagawa 1985).
For most Edo-period lords, including the shogunate, borrowing from outside sources was thus a core part of their financial operations. Were they set on repaying that financing? The answer is yes and no. Say, for instance, that a given lord failed to repay a loan from a given merchant. The merchant could appeal to the bakufu if they so chose, but the chances that the shogunate would order the lord to pay off the loan were slim to none. Aware of that reality, lords knew they could renege on a loan if necessary.
Since it wielded absolute power over the country, the bakufu also had no obligation to repay loans from the private sector—but with all the seemingly unfavorable conditions facing lenders that offered loans to the lord class, Osaka was a bustling financing hub. There were lords who repaid their debts through loan agreements. Even the shogunate kept paying off private-sector loans, at least through the bakumatsu period (the final years of the shogunate), even though no legal provisions obliged it to do so.
Why did some members of the lord class in the Edo period make repayments on their loans despite the law not necessarily requiring them to? That has been a primary question for scholars in past research on the finances of lords in early-modern Japan, which I survey below.
The earliest study to explain the overall structure of the Tokugawa shogunate’s finances and how that setup changed over time was by Furushima Toshio in 1978. In his book, Furushima contextualized shifts the shogunate’s financial standing with collections of annual taxes and other farmer-oriented policies. He then suggested that, based on those results, one could divide the timeline into five specific periods. The first period that Furushima identified (1716–1736), a stretch where shogunate finances took a turn for the worse, saw leaders take cost-cutting measures and institute the jōmensei system (in which tax rates remained relatively fixed instead of changing according to yearly yield amounts). In the second period (1737–1764), the bakufu strengthened its efforts to collect annual taxes. A famine in the subsequent third period (1765–1786) and significant pushback from the farming segment led to an easing of the administration’s drive to collect annual taxes. In the fourth period (1787–1819), the shogunate worked to oil its financial machine by not only collecting annual taxes but also soliciting semi-compulsory loans from the private sector, garnering interest income from loans in a variety of areas, and taking other measures. The situation finally turned dire in the fifth period (1820–1844), compelling the bakufu to expand its revenue scope; non-tax earnings, such as interest income and seigniorage profits via recoinage, made up 70–80% of the shogunate’s total revenue (Furushima 1978, 331–359).
The basic progression that Furushima (1978) sketched out largely remains the prevailing take on the topic, but scholars have made some refinements in the years since. For example, some researchers have highlighted the second and third periods from Furushima’s timeline. These studies found that with the conventional means for navigating financial crises—such as intensifying its tax-collection practices and developing new rice fields—proving fruitless in the face of the situation, the bakufu implemented significant changes in its financial policy and economic policy. The shifts saw the shogunate exercise tighter control over urban areas' economic and financial spheres, develop lucrative enterprises, and take other new steps (Nakai 1971, 33–154; Fujita 2012, 59–106).
Another study examined the fourth and fifth periods in more detail, showing that the shogunate regularly lent to the private sector or had private-sector merchants invest its financial resources to secure streams of interest income (Takeuchi 2009, 367–422).
Several discoveries of historical sources have helped lay a stronger foundation for understanding the Tokugawa shogunate’s finances and also enabled researchers to conduct more detailed, more sophisticated inquiries into each of the different periods in Furushima’s construct (Ōno 1996; Iijima 2004; Ōguchi 2020). Through these revealing studies, scholarship on the financial history of the bakufu has illuminated not just the regime’s revenue-expenditure balance but also the cashflow spanning the collection of annual taxes to spending.
While the last ten years have seen a lull in research that addresses the shogunate’s finances directly, the availability of new historical resources and the insights in recent studies on political and economic history mean that there is still ample room to make further refinements to or even reframe Furushima’s perspectives.
One of the shogunate’s most important revenue sources was recoinage, or currency debasement. The mainstream view on the bakufu’s recoinage initiatives comes from the Zuroku Nihon no kahei [Catalogue of Japanese coins], an eleven-volume series (1972–1982)5 edited by the Research Department of the Bank of Japan (Volumes 2–6 cover the early-modern period). In addition to plotting out the shogunate’s recoinage efforts along a timeline, the series also discusses the programs' impact on the contemporary economy and shogunate finances.
Here is a general outline of how these initiatives proceeded (focusing specifically on gold and silver, the two of the three currencies [gold, silver, and bronze] with the closest connections to lords’ finances). Immediately after emerging victorious from the Battle of Sekigahara (1600) and securing control over at least eastern Japan, Tokugawa Ieyasu began minting a series of coins known as keichō-kin-gin, which remained the highest-quality currency (in terms of their percentage of precious metal per unit of weight) throughout the Edo period. The series included the koban, valued at one ryō (a gold currency unit) per piece; the silver chō-gin, whose value was determined by weight; the ichibuban, worth a quarter of one ryō, and the mameita-gin, a silver coin that was smaller than the chō-gin.
With its financial standing having deteriorated over the seventeenth century, the shogunate decided to implement its first recoinage (debasement) of currency in 1695. The newly minted coins, called genroku-kin-gin, contained approximately 34% less gold and 20% less silver than the keichō-kin-gin.
The recoinage disrupted the economic sphere, prompting the bakufu to mint the shōtoku-kin-gin—currency that matched the quality of the keichō-kin-gin—in 1714. The move caused the volume of circulating currency to shrink, leading to significant deflation in the early eighteenth century. Amid those conditions, rice saw an even more dramatic price drop than other commodities. This was particularly problematic for lords, who collected taxes in rice; a decrease in the relative price of rice meant a decline in revenues.
In response, the Tokugawa shogunate implemented another recoinage in 1736. The resulting currency, the genbun-kin-gin, differed from the previous debasement roughly forty years prior. Unlike the genroku debasement, which did not fully compensate for differences in value between old and new coins, the genbun recoinage ensured full compensation. This smooth transition allowed the genbun-kin-gin coins to circulate for nearly 80 years.
With the advent of the nineteenth century, however, came another recoinage. The shogunate started minting the new bunsei-kin-gin in 1818. Minted at an even lower quality than the genbun-kin-gin, the bunsei-kin-gin was an attempt by the shogunate to secure seigniorage income.
From the mid-nineteenth century onward, recoinage initiatives took on a slightly higher degree of complexity, making them too complicated to discuss at length here. One project that merits mention, though, is the minting of the man’en-kin, which the shogunate aligned with gold-silver parity on the international level.
The paragraphs above summarize the prevailing view of the bakufu’s recoinage initiatives. However, one should be cautious about adhering to the conclusions of previous research—even including the Zuroku Nihon no kahei [Catalogue of Japanese coins] series—on the effects of the different debasements on the real economy. For example, the existing studies draw a conclusion that has come under fire in contemporary economics: that the growth in the money supply after a debasement initiative naturally leads to inflation. The fact that scholars continue to apply this now problematic interpretation is a cause for concern.
Although recent studies (Yasukuni 2016; Iwahashi 2019) have brought the processes and intentions behind the shogunate’s debasements into sharper focus, the discourse on their economic impact has stagnated. The fact that scholars have established an exhaustive timeline of the initiatives bodes well for future research prospects. Looking ahead, the focus should be on analyzing historical sources from the private-sector business world, such as records from the money changers that conducted coin exchanges and merchants dealing in garments, to understand how recoinage affected the community.
2. How lords went about obtaining funding: Loans from Osaka merchantsResearch on how lords secured funding has seen some of the liveliest activity in Japanese history scholarship over the past decade. In the past, research tended to focus not on the means of raising capital itself but instead on the processes by which lords’ finances deteriorated or, inversely, how merchants and wealthy farmers began to emerge (looking at local histories by municipal organizations, one is bound to find numerous examples of studies among along these lines). A divergence from the traditional trajectory, which dated back to before World War II, came in 1970 with a book by Mori Yasuhiro.
Mori (1970), breaking the subject of lords’ finances away from the simple question of whether they were poor or not, explicated the defining characteristics of the lords who actively took on debt in Osaka as well as the processes that brought Osaka’s financial merchants to lend to lords. He argued that the core of the Osaka financial market was the flow of rice shipments into Osaka. Efforts to procure funding in the market depended heavily on the volume and stability of the rice supply coming in. Some of the merchants who acted as agents in selling rice for various lords became lord financiers, Mori found, and these financiers established deep, inseparable relationships that helped them provide loans with an intimate knowledge of the lords’ financial conditions.
One of the drawbacks in studies arguing that lords were in financial distress is that they have failed to explain how Osaka’s financial merchants could have developed massive amounts of capital if the lords were indeed struggling to repay their debts. One could posit a shift in the distribution between merchants and lords, but if lords’ economies were taking one blow after the other, that should have stifled the growth of the merchants lending to them in equal measure. Mori’s (1970) depiction of the financial landscape represented a major departure from the conventional takes by revealing that some lords, by forging long-term relationships with specific Osaka merchants, could secure funds at relatively low costs.
Mori (1970) has notably influenced recent empirical studies exploring how lords conducted fundraising activities (Takatsuki 2012, 2021, 2022b; Kobayashi 2015). Through these works, the conditions determining the success or failure of attempts to obtain financing in Osaka are taking more apparent shape: it appears that the key factor was whether lords could ship specialty products, not just rice, to the city.
A recent discovery of ample, thorough historical materials has fostered research on the case of the Osaka merchant magnate Kajima-ya Kyuemon (Takatsuki 2022b).
The founder of Kajima-ya moved from the outskirts of Osaka into the city at the beginning of the seventeenth century, worked for a time at a certain shop, and then established his own operation. By the second half of the century, he had made his fledgling rice business into a full-fledged kuramoto (warehouse operator) responsible for selling rice on behalf of various lords. However, Kajima-ya did not continue in the rice trade—instead, it expanded exponentially by using funds obtained from the rice trade to lend to lords. Mori (1970) outlined a similar strategy in his case study of the Kōnoike family, explaining how the family sought to cultivate inextricable relationships with lords and provide them with loans. Kajima-ya took that approach and pushed it even further.
Kajima-ya forged contracts with lords like the Kamei clan (Tsuwano Domain, present-day Shimane Prefecture) and the Okudaira clan (Nakatsu Domain, present-day Oita Prefecture), among others. The relationship between the Kamei clan and Kajima-ya deepened in the mid-eighteenth century when the Kamei clan formally entrusted the sale of paper and candles produced in its domain to Kajima-ya, which also managed the sales proceeds. Kajima-ya sold the paper and candles in Osaka and, from those proceeds, recouped the principal and interest for its loans to the Kamei clan. The remainder was the revenue for the Kamei clan, which would use the money to cover various expenses—which Kajima-ya also managed. In effect, the Kamei clan could not spend without Kajima-ya’s approval.
When the Kamei clan concluded its contract with Kajima-ya, it submitted a business plan for the following fiscal year, including projected sales of paper and candles and anticipated expenditures. Kajima-ya, for its part, carefully reviewed the details before finalizing the contract. It was an extremely cautious approach—and, notably, rice played no role in the arrangement.
Mori (1970) posited that the amount and stability of the rice supply coming into Osaka were the make-or-break factors for loans in the local financial market, but rice was not the only commodity with that kind of importance. Whatever the item, be it rice or something else, Osaka merchants would finance any lord capable of delivering products that they felt could generate cash inflow in Osaka.
Another lord that provided information to Kajima-ya in the same manner as the Kamei clan was the Okudaira clan, which sought financial restructuring proposals and new loans from Kajima-ya in the mid-nineteenth century. By receiving annual financial reports and business plans for the following year from the Okudaira clan. Kajima-ya could make lending decisions based on information that lords would not normally disclose. Research has also shown that, after providing loans to the Okudaira clan, Kajima-ya continued to monitor their finances.
The Tokugawa shogunate would not order lords to repay loans, even if they received the funding from merchants and proceeded to default. To understand why Osaka’s financial merchants grew into “merchant magnates” even under the seemingly disadvantageous circumstances, one can turn to the research findings I have discussed above. Since the contemporary legal system offered them little recourse, merchants deepened their relationships with lords, gathered the information they needed, and used their insights to provide financing in a way that enabled them to collect their loans in a stable, reliable way.
In conclusion, it would be misguided to argue that lords’ finances were in chronic distress across all domains and periods. Recent studies have helped relativize the once-prevailing historical perspective, which saw lords as being mired in financial straits; propelling this progress has been research on lords that left behind a substantial amount of historical materials, such as the Nabeshima clan (Ito 2014), the Mori clan (Tanaka 2013), and the Hosokawa clan (Takatsuki 2015, 2021). At the same time, scholars have also given increasing attention to the disparity between lords who could secure financing at low costs in Osaka and those who could not (Mandai 2019).
Scholarship on the financial administration of Edo-period lords is now at a major inflection point. What separated the lords who could secure relatively low-interest loans on a stable basis from Osaka merchant magnates and those who were unable to? How did those differences factor into the political upheaval at the end of the Edo period? These and other questions are likely to shape future research on how lords went about their financial activities.
1 Readers of English looking to study the administrative structure of early-modern Japan have traditionally begun by reading surveys by scholars whose first language in English. In recent years, however, the range of available literature has expanded to include English translations of textbooks on Japanese history in use at Japanese high schools, including one in e-book format (Satō, Gomi, and Takano 2024). While the content itself may be aimed at high school students, the benefit of having an English translation of a text that offers just the right amount of information essential for understanding Japanese history is immense. This paper discusses portions of Japanese history that these textbooks also cover. In this paper, I limit the basic background information I present to the elements of Japanese history that one would need to be familiar with to engage with the three papers in this feature project. Since my explanations simply reflect the currently accepted understanding of the topics, I do not cite sources individually.
2 Names in the Tokugawa period are given in the customary Japanese order, that is, surname first. Their names, when shortened, are often expressed as first names rather than surnames, and this paper follows this practice.
3 The daidokoro in tenka no daidokoro means “kitchen” in Japanese, so translations often call Osaka the “kitchen of the realm.” However, daidokoro also connotes “making ends meet,” “managing household finances,” “accounting,” and “economy.” Since these undertones are closer to the idea of tenka no daidokoro in the context of this paper, I translate the term as the “financial center of the realm.”
4 Lords were also allowed to issue currency in the form of “clan notes” (clan currency). While these notes were intended solely for circulation in their own domains, lords could obtain seigniorage income from within their territory by issuing the currency (D’Amico 2023).
5 Research Department of the Bank of Japan, ed. Zuroku Nihon no kahei [Catalogue of Japanese coins (11 vols in total)] (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai, 1972–1982).
