Samurai city - Works in Progress Magazine

For three hundred years, Japan enjoyed enviable stability and peace. All it took was locking up its warlike samurai elite in the world’s least efficient city.

Cities are often centers of agglomeration, places where people gather to collaborate with one another. But this is not the only reason they exist. Sometimes, cities are chiefly centers of consumption, where elites gather to devour resources extracted from the rest of the country. And occasionally, they are something like prisons, where troublesome social groups are concentrated so that the authorities can keep an eye on them. Many premodern cities, like Versailles, Naples, or Imperial Rome, were a little like this. But perhaps the greatest example was Tokugawa Edo.<br>Between 1600 and 1868, Japan was dominated by the Tokugawa family. The Tokugawas had prevailed over their rivals after a series of civil wars, establishing a sort of dictatorship known as the Shogunate. They developed a remarkable social system, crafted to preserve their power, and with it, the peace and social stability of Japan. At the apex of this system was the city of Edo (today’s Tokyo), at times the largest city in the world, and one of the strangest urban structures in history.

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The Tokugawa social system<br>In early modern Europe, most people were tenant farmers, who paid rent to landowners. The state sometimes taxed landowners, sometimes tenants, and sometimes both through consumption taxes. In peacetime, however, the early modern state did not do very much, so taxes generally ran at just a few percent of national income.<br>The picture in Japan was profoundly different. The peasantry was directly taxed by the government, at rates varying from 15 to 70 percent of the harvest, with 40 percent as a rough norm. The authorities distributed most of their tax receipts to the samurai, a hereditary, quasi-noble class making up about six percent of the population. In both cases, the agricultural surplus ended up in the hands of a leisure class, but the Japanese system was structured very differently, with the surplus only reaching the leisure class through the funnel of public taxation.

Only a minority of Japan was directly ruled by the Shogunate. Most of the country was administered by various classes of daimyo: shinpan (collateral branches of the Tokugawa family), fudai (longstanding Tokugawa vassals) and tozama (formerly independent daimyo families who had submitted after the Tokugawa victory in the civil wars).

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Marius B Jansen, The Making of Modern Japan

Measured by agricultural output, about 15 percent of Japan fell under the direct control of the Shogunate. These were areas that had always belonged to the Tokugawa, or that had been conquered by them during the civil wars. About a tenth of samurai were Tokugawa retainers, who received their stipends directly from the Shogunate.<br>In about three quarters of Japan, the tax authorities were a different group, the daimyo. The daimyo had originally been the territorial nobility, and in the pre-Tokugawa era, the breakdown of central authority had left them as the effective rulers of their domains. After 1600 the surviving daimyo submitted to the Tokugawa and were rewarded with a role somewhat akin to that of regional governors. There were about 260 daimyo, and about nine tenths of samurai were their retainers.<br>Urban design as a panopticon for the nobility<br>The city of Edo played a crucial role in this system. The daimyo were required to maintain mansions in Edo, in which their families were obliged to live permanently. Any act of disloyalty by a daimyo would thus place his family in the gravest peril. Most women of the daimyo class passed their lives as effective hostages of the state, never visiting the domains that their husbands, fathers, and sons governed. The daimyo themselves were also required to spend alternate years or half-years in Edo, bringing with them great crowds of samurai retainers. Edo thus had a dual nature: on the one hand, it was the apex of Japanese society, in which the country’s agricultural surplus was consumed; on the other, it was a kind of prison, in which Japan’s potentially dangerous elites were contained and monitored.

Edo was zoned for social class centuries before the development of zoning in the West. Samurai and daimyo districts were concentrated on the higher ground to the west, while commoners were crowded between Edo Castle and the Sumida River.

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André Sorensen, The Making of Urban Japan, Cities and Planning from Edo to the Twenty First Century

This gave Edo a peculiar demographic and economic character. For one thing, it was enormous. Japanese rice agriculture was extremely productive by premodern standards and generated a huge surplus for the capital’s benefit. Edo’s population seems to have been over a million by 1700, which would make it the largest...