Rule of Law and Class Privileges in Kamakura Japan

Subordinantes of the first Kamakura shogun, Yorimoto, collected taxes. Yorimoto held other local powers in subordination. He passed laws and appointed some men to imperial positions while the emperor in Kyoto remained a figurehead, giving Yorimoto sanction for his moves while Yorimoto remained his shogun. Among Yorimoto's descendants, and in the imperial bureaucracy, sons continued to inherit their father's offices.

Government by murder survived in the succession disputes that followed Yorimoto's death in 1199. Two of Yorimoto's sons and a grandson were assassinated by another of his sons. Yorimoto's thirty-two year old widow, Hojo Masako, had retired to a Buddhist nunnery but then she took power and became known as the "nun-shogun." She ruled, made and unmade emperors, and presided over the expansion of the land of her family (the Hojo). The Minamoto and even Imperial Princes became puppets and hostages of Hojo family rule.

By 1230, the men around the shogun had adopted Confucian principles and believed that it suited their position to be familiar with the Chinese classics. They had an idea of what good government should be -- something other than just rule by the sword. They were interested in law and order.

A part of the new law and order was taming unruly warriors. Penalties were imposed on those who were abusive or started fights. Samurai who started fights could lose their estates.

The shogun's constables gained greater civil powers, and the court a Kyoto was obliged to seek Kamakura's approval for all of its actions. While legal practices in Kyoto were still based on 500-year-old Confucian principles, the new code under Hojo rule was a highly legalistic document that stressed the duties of stewards and constables, provided means for settling land disputes, and established rules governing inheritances. It was clear and concise, stipulated punishments for violators of its conditions, and was to remain in effect for the next 635 years.

Order meant preserving privileges. As with other class societies, including Hammurabi's at Babylon more then 2,000 years earlier, penalties were in accord with one's social status.

An Improving Agriculture

About half of all the land that was Japan was in the hands of aristocrat-governors under appointment by the emperor's court in Kyoto. The rest of was cultivated by wealthy peasants (myoshu) or low-ranking warriors who were responsible for collecting rents and drafting poor people for unpaid labor on "public" projects (called in Europe the corvée, where exploitation of the poor had also been common).

The poor lived scattered in small dark cabins and had a pot, a few bowls and tools such as spades, hoes and sickles. The myoshu lived in a house with a few rooms, with thatch roofs and owned a few cows, maybe a horse and had more tools. These wealthier peasants rented land to tenant farmers and had farmhands, servants or slaves working for them. They associated their privileged position to the gods and organized Shinto festivals and feasts. The poor were not allowed to organize such gatherings, but they were invited to the festivals.

In mid-1200s, agriculture was advancing in Japan -- as it was during the favorable climate the Europe was enjoying. Peasants developed a two-crop system. They flooded their fields in late May or early June to plant rice, which they harvested in October. Then they drained their fields and planted grains. The lords were interested in taxing rice, which was the prestige crop, and more-or-less ignored the grain crop, leaving greater wealth for the peasants. The peasants were also making better use of fertilizer. With more of a surplus they took part in an increase in trade. Local markets sprang up, near a local lord's manor, perhaps at the gate to a Buddhist temple, or at a crossroads. Poorer peasants began selling some soybeans, sesame seeds or string beans and maybe hemp. Better-off peasants sold rice and barley.

With the rise in agricultural productivity and the rise in commerce came a rise in population and growth in the number and size of towns. Traveling merchants joined in, and more craft persons were beginning to produce for common people. Common people were trading their produce for goods such as pottery, farm tools, pots and pans. Craft persons were making umbrellas, leather, saddles, copper products, roof tiles and weaving fabrics. Artisans and merchants traveled more. The number of market days in a locale typically increased from six a year at the beginning of the 1200s to perhaps twenty-one by the end of the century. Rice, lumber, fish, salt, sesame, dyes and other products were being transported about Japan, most of the transportation on waterways.

The use of money was growing. At mid-century, forty or fifty Japanese ships a year arrived at southern China -- during the reign of the Southern Song -- and exchanged lumber, sulfur and other products for China's copper coins. In the port area where the trade took place, copper coins might vanish for awhile following the departure of the Japanese. Alarmed, the Song government responded with a decree forbidding the trading of its coins with the Japanese. It was a part of the naiveté of those times about economics. The decree had little effect. Inspectors at China's port took bribes, and coins continued to pass to the Japanese. In Japan the naiveté about money expressed itself in people talking about the new "coin sickness," while authorities in Japan apparently failed to see the benefit in Japan minting its own coins. It was China's money that was respected, along with other things from China.

Rank in the Countryside

Good harvests came and went, and those who became destitute sold themselves to slave traders in order to survive. And the slave traders sold them in regions were there was demand for their labor. How easy it was for those who sold themselves into slavery to buy back their freedom is unknown.

The high-ranking lords demanded services from their vassals, who were rewarded with fiefs of their own. The fief holders exercised local military rule, and the lords continued to receive rents from the middle class farmers, the myoshu. The myoshu were themselves lords or sorts, lower in status while perhaps belonging also to the samurai class.

The myoshu differed from those who ranked above them in that they worked in the fields alongside others. Some who worked myoshu lands continued to be tenant farmers and farmhands, and it is a point of disputation among historians whether they lacked freedom of movement and could therefore be called serfs.

Beach Towns, the Itinerate and Public Baths

Before the 1200s, there were those who fished on the sea, settled on a beach and then moved on. In the 1200s they began to settle in one coastal area, to build houses and create a village. Their communities tended to be egalitarian, with fishing zones equitably distributed and families heads sharing salt-making ovens. The seashore villages grew into towns, with inns built to house merchants and other itinerants. Two such towns were Tsunuga and Obama (Little Beach), on the northern shore in Western Japan. The independence of such towns ended as the powerful lords or monasteries moved in to claim jurisdiction and the right to tax. The towns accepted their power and in return received armed protection against trouble from neighboring communities.

Moving through these and other towns were blacksmiths, pot makers, sellers of oil, mats, sake and other goods, itinerants who traveled under a freedom accorded them by the imperial court in exchange for their having supplied the court with goods. There were also itinerant dancers and musicians, people who lived by entertaining. Among the dancers and musicians some had a secondary form of entertaining: prostitution. They enjoying a somewhat elevated status and had the same right to travel as the craftsmen and merchants.

Along major roads one might find a public bath, first built in the 1200s by monks in association with monasteries. Bathing was associated with purification anyone could bathe there: commoners, warriors or nobles, men, women or children. The baths were considered places of peace and asylum.