The people are the basis for the country; they are the root, the foundation that sustains the realm and the state.1 Warriors entrust themselves to their lord, and the lord is assisted by his retainers; both are able to maintain their house’s honor by receiving the people’s tribute in taxes. Monks and priests totally depend on support from the world as a whole, while townspeople, idlers, and various craftsmen all survive by living off others. In contrast, the people follow the seasons set by Heaven, cultivate their crops according to the basic conditions of the soil, and do not depend in the least on the benefice of others. Existing between Heaven and Earth, they expend their physical strength in hard work; as the lowliest of the low they eat rough food, wear the poor man’s garb of padded cotton, and deal with the humble. In summer, they roast under the hot sun and suffer along with oxen and horses. In winter, bitter cold afflicts them in the midst of frost and snow. Most of what they get goes to pay tribute; they always have to obey the lord’s or fief holder’s rules, work at corvée labor, and provide various required levies and services. In reality they are responsible for practically everything in this world, because they produce not only the five grains and other foods but also all the goods of use to the country. To sum up, they nurture everyone. They are the ones who produce wealth, the source of the world’s prosperity. It is thanks to their labor that others can take pride in today’s orderly rule and enjoy peaceful lives. The reason why we enjoy the effects of peace year by year, season by season, day by day, every instant, is because the humble people work hard at their occupation. Truly the farmers are the country’s foundation and the world’s treasure. Therefore the crucial matter in ruling the realm is to ensure that the people lead secure lives.
As peaceful conditions have continued, however, evil customs have arisen that cause more and more harm to the people, making it impossible for them to live quietly and securely. Among such evil customs, first is the tremendous expansion in luxury throughout the realm. In addition, townspeople and idlers are all too numerous, and they relentlessly pursue the Way of profit and interest. The cost of luxury for those above and below and the competition for profit in worldly affairs all end up as loss for the people. The people have to bear much additional suffering owing to the evil customs brought by peace, and since the pursuit of luxury and profit expands day by day and month by month, they are not able to overcome its effects. This is already striking at the root of their existence. Right now it is beyond their capacity to cope with the problems caused by this age of order and peace.
It would be difficult to cope with this burden even if it were shared equally among all the farmers, but recently the farmers’ customs too have changed, so that six or seven out of every ten evade this burden, and the remaining four or five have had to take it upon themselves. With the excessive splendor characteristic of our age of orderly rule, not all farmers are the same; various distortions have appeared, and great disparities have emerged between high and low, rich and poor. This polarization has given rise to deplorable customs that must be censured and piteous customs that must be rectified; conditions are truly in a chaotic state.
The Extravagance of Wealthy Farmers and Its Bad Effects
The first of these deplorable customs is that wealthy farmers have forgotten their status. They set themselves up in the same luxury as people of high status who live in cities, and their houses are as different from olden times as night and day. They embellish them with stately gates, entryways, polished horizontal timbers, formal sitting rooms with an alcove, and decorative shelves. They arrange their sitting rooms and such with exquisite taste. Some offer what they call a gratuity to the shogunate to be officially recognized as praiseworthy; they receive permission to use a surname, carry two swords, and flaunt their authority. Others present loans to daimyo and fief holders, and through this merit they too are granted the use of surnames, the right to swords, and a retainer’s stipend. They brandish their authority in their locality and oppress ordinary farmers. Others disdain small-scale fief holders, curry favor with imperial abbots and others of court rank, and through bribes of money become purveyors [to the shogunate or a daimyo] or even acquire status equivalent to retainers. They overawe the ignorant people and do whatever suits their interests.
The village officials and all the other families with a surplus leave the cultivation of crops to their male and female servants, while they themselves wear beautiful clothes, imitate warrior ceremonies and rites for their marriages, adoptions, celebrations, and memorial services, and invite people to elaborate banquets.2 They keep rōnin and the like on a regular basis so they can practice martial arts unsuitable to their status and seek out teachers so they can devote themselves to Chinese poetry and prose. They write in the Ming writing style, learn Japanese and Chinese painting and calligraphy, or employ tea ceremony teachers, teachers of waka and haikai poetry, and musicians so that they can study the performing arts and make these people their partners in pleasure. They bring back a beautiful woman from the city, make her a concubine, and hold drinking parties every day. Or they slip off to town to amuse themselves, and while having wife and concubine in the countryside, also keep a woman in the city. Some stay in the brothel district, flirt with a prostitute, and make her pregnant.
Other people enjoy meddling in lawsuits and disputes. Having abundant leisure, they find someone to egg on, creating a huge incident out of a trifle, with no qualms for whatever the cost might be for those directly involved. On the other hand, when it does not suit them, they will not mediate in a lawsuit even if it concerns an unnatural death, a breach of the law, or something totally outrageous but will instead bring about a private settlement by forcing the plaintiff to swallow his grievance.3 Some go to Edo on official business, including lawsuits and other services rendered for their lord or fief holders, but they treat such business as secondary and instead pursue their own pleasure. Their hearts seized by the town’s bustle, they are delighted when the official settlement to the suit is drawn out while they waste great sums of money in day-after-day entertainment. They wedge such expenses into dues assessed against the village’s yield and disguise their expenditure in the entertainment district as a part of the annual land tax and village costs, which are then levied on small-scale farmers. Since the small-scale farmers cannot accompany the village officials to ascertain what they are doing in Edo, they cannot check the officials’ claims. Because the village officials have means to discourage them from the beginning through intimidation, the small-scale farmers are not able to say one word of complaint, even if proof of wrongdoing becomes clearly known, and so the matter is just left as is.
The village officials’ duty is to do a good job in taking care of the small-scale farmers, but nowadays they do not concern themselves with the farmers’ hardships. They do not care if a farmer goes bankrupt; they do not concern themselves if parents, wives, and children end up scattered one from another; instead they take everything coming to them without mercy. For these reasons, everywhere in recent years levies for village costs have increased tremendously, sometimes to the extent that they come to more than the annual land tax, and the small-scale farmers’ hardships have doubled compared with what they were before.
Generally speaking, the wealth noted above originates from what is squeezed out of small-scale farmers; it is not acquired from someplace else. Furthermore, since such people do not work the fields themselves, this is not a surplus that is wrung out of their own flesh and bones. Through various devices and stratagems they work their greed and injustice against the ignorant and gather up the land’s abundance. They lend money at high interest with land as a collateral, and even though the loan is for just a small amount, the interest piles up year by year until finally they make that land their own or take control of the borrower’s livelihood. They become wealthy with the surplus accumulated through preying on the weak. Later they carry it off to other places where they entertain themselves in splendor. Over the years they squeeze out a profit in this fashion, taking pride in always living in luxury, and because they spread out to other places as well, as a matter of course those regions too decline. Such men are great criminals against the land; they are great thieves.
These days there are many such types who live in pride and luxury. Some enjoy fame as poets in Chinese or Japanese, linked verse, or haikai, or as calligraphers and painters. As a consequence, not only merchants but also artisans such as carpenters, plasterers, tatami makers, and those who fit out interior furnishings or adorn them with lacquer all aspire to pursue these arts, and as a matter of course this hinders their proper occupation. Although this could be seen as a splendid result of our peaceful age, such is not the case. It does not suit the countryside in the least, and it is not appropriate to farmers at all. It is the true cause of the land’s ruination and the rise of poverty among the people.
If we pursue the theme of luxury further, we see that the sons of farmers without a surplus, and also the wives and daughters of the poor, covet and try to emulate the ways of the rich. Out of feelings of jealousy and resentment against the wealth that they cannot achieve, they become determined to show off, so they neglect the tasks they should be doing and instead of spending their evenings braiding straw, making straw sandals, spinning thread, or weaving, they imitate whatever is currently fashionable. Aping the ways of the prosperous city and disliking the homespun woven by their daughters, they buy the products of other provinces, such as pongee and santome sateen, without any regard for what is appropriate to their status.4 They wear silk crepe and use costly materials such as linen crepe from Nara, Ōmi, or Echigo for an unlined robe; they wear jackets made of gauze crepe and obi sashes of heavy brocade or other fashionable goods such as damask or thick ribbed silk; they use felted and scarlet-dyed wool, gold brocade, or gold-embossed leather for a purse, wear a dangling tobacco pouch decorated with gold and silver, and carry a silver pipe. The straw used in ancient times to tie up hair has now been replaced with fancy paper hair ties and perfumed pomade. Women use lip rouge and white face paint and stick tortoiseshell and silver hairpins in their hair. In place of the appropriate straw raincoat and hat, these people flourish an umbrella. Rather than straw sandals, they wear tabi socks with their leather-soled sandals, high clogs with leather-backed decorated thongs, or lacquered clogs. Men even go to a hairdresser to have their pate shaved and their hair arranged. They do not look like farmers or poor people at all, but just like city folk.
People of this sort enjoy drinking parties and entertainment, form youth groups that waste too many goods on shrine festivals and the like, and do whatever they can to make themselves look beautiful. Seeing whatever astonishes others to be good, they put on an enormous show. Crazed by their hot blood, they think dissipation second to none to be a great deed, and they scorn those unable to indulge in it as worthless. The rare honest lad they trick, swindle, and lure, pulling him into the Way of luxury, or perhaps even dragging him into bad ways by encouraging him to gamble so as to cheat him out of money. In the end, he becomes unfilial and degenerate, heedless of his parents, and neglectful of farmwork, and because he gives himself over to useless extravagance, as a matter of course he ends up unable to support himself. He takes out loans or absconds, or in some cases he will put in pawn the fields passed down from his ancestors without telling his parents. There are even men who heartlessly sell such fields, thus reducing the family’s hereditary property and burdening their parents and other family members with hardships.
Troublemakers and the Problems They Cause
Once their behavior has deteriorated to this point, it is impossible for such people to return to being simple and sturdy farmers. Many of them further ruin themselves by making gambling their profession, and, driven by evil intentions to seize the goods of others, they become what are called troublemakers. They start fights and quarrels, intimidate the weak, or else speculate that a person has concealed a bad deed and resort to blackmail. Thinking his parents’ honesty a dismal thing, such a man forgets how important is the task of nurturing his parents. In the end he runs away from home and loiters in places where he does not belong. He may steal another man’s wife or have illicit relations with his daughter, and the most degenerate and immoral will commit the crime of rape. Not only that, but lying that the woman has agreed to marry him, he will sit down in her parents’ house and refuse to budge so as to force them to give up their daughter. He may call at her house with fake porters to take the woman and her belongings away,5 or he may extract consolation money or a payment to settle the matter privately and then send her back. In other cases, such a man may hate the thought of giving a woman back without anything to show for it, and he will deprive her of her virginity first, so as to prevent her from being given as a bride to another house. Another may entice the girl to move to a different place where he makes her into a prostitute.
A man of this kind engages in all sorts of other evil deeds as well. He abandons his aging parents, leaves his proper place of residence, and becomes an unregistered wanderer. Forgetting his base status, he shows no deference to people of high rank and status and becomes bold and fearless. He gambles, forces people to sell him goods, to buy his goods, or to make loans; or he stays at a brothel, knowing full well that he has no money, and eats and drinks his fill without paying for it. When pressed for payment, he starts a quarrel or deliberately sets himself up to be hit so that he can falsely claim injury and extort a payoff; in this manner he gets through the world doing as he pleases. Once things have ended up like this, he is unable to pursue an ordinary occupation in the city or find work as a live-in servant [because he lacks the proper papers], so he becomes totally caught up in evil deeds and swaggers back and forth between city and countryside. This is the breeding ground for dashing outlaws, unscrupulous men and profligates, unregistered wastrels and troublemakers, otherwise known as masked bandits, arsonists, muggers, and murderers.
These sorts of mischief-makers often go elsewhere to commit their evil deeds. In the past when this happened and the authorities punished them, their home village would be ascertained, their family and the village officials would be summoned, and these would suffer too. For that reason, miscreants would be scolded or threatened at the slightest sign of misbehavior lest they become, as the saying has it, the type to put the rope around their parents’ necks. Neighbors would admonish them, and the village officials would try to prevent them from going elsewhere and keep them under control lest they misbehave. They too knew that should they do something wrong while living elsewhere, it would cause shame to their village and hardships for their relatives, and they would restrain themselves by taking the consequences into consideration and show feelings of forbearance.
Nowadays, to avoid troublesome procedures for both places, a wrongdoer is commonly treated as being unregistered, even if his name has not been erased from the village register at his family’s request, and even if his parents have not formally expelled him from the household. This means that the village officials are not involved, no rope is thrown around the parents’ necks, the relatives do not incur blame or threats, and no one has to trouble himself about what the mischief-maker may be doing elsewhere. The mischief-maker, for his part, becomes all the more bold, knowing that no matter what he does, his village will not be involved and he will not cause trouble for his parents. In the end he comes to think that if he is willing to gamble his life, he can profit from doing evil, and should he get away with it, the profit will be even greater. Thus he becomes a menace to the world.
If villagers take so little care about mischief-makers on the village register, they are all the more nonchalant about giving troublemakers who come in from outside a place to stay. Even if a troublemaker is captured by the authorities, the claim is made that he was captured on the road, and the affair ends without the slightest repercussions for the person who offered him lodging. This person can thus safely put up troublemakers from other places and become an instructor in evil for the young. How merciful, people say, for the shogunal authorities not to blame relatives or punish people who provide lodging for troublemakers. People also say that with so many troublemakers in today’s world, to investigate each one’s home village would take too much effort. Is it better to extend blame to the parents, as happened in the past, or to treat people still officially registered as if they were unregistered, as is currently done? Although the pluses and minuses have yet to be thoroughly considered, the way things are today is not right. Is this not owing to laxity in institutions of regulation, especially given that as things are today troublemakers easily come and go?
In the shogun’s capital too, there are many troublemakers who survive without occupation or funds among those in the meanest houses, backstreet tenements, or where unregistered wastrels freeload in others’ houses. Few among them were born here; most come from various provinces. These unregistered people and troublemakers who have swarmed out of the provinces got their start as noted above. Since it is easy right now for unregistered persons and troublemakers from the provinces to roam about at will, they have no qualms about leaving their place of birth, and they do not fear being formally expelled from their household. Even if they are banished from their village, forbidden entry into their domain, or sent into exile, rather than regret what the future might bring, they are delighted. Furthermore, since the label of unregistered person or troublemaker strikes fear into those they pass, they travel widely in complete freedom. Should they be put in prison, it only makes them bolder; should a [punitive] tattoo or some other mark be carved on their body,6 their rank as a troublemaker goes up, and it goes up another step should they kill someone. All are assets in the competition to survive. Some use the power of these assets to take women by force or bring people under their control, and they go on their way with a hauteur beyond that of any upright person. Since by origin they are louts, they regard such a lifestyle as splendid beyond belief. This is only to be expected.
In recent years this proliferation of unregistered persons and troublemakers has spread across the provinces, and since human sentiment naturally tends to move in a bad direction, many sons of warriors, farmers, artisans, and merchants fall away from [their family’s occupation], and the post stations and villages are full of loitering good-for-nothings who disturb good people and disrupt the world’s affairs. Because customs have deteriorated even in the villages and dishonest people have become prevalent everywhere, the countryside has steadily lost its uprightness, and everything is pushed in the direction of the frivolity found in flourishing cities. Especially along the Tōkaidō highway, but even in rural towns throughout the country, there are now unlicensed prostitutes and serving girls who double as prostitutes, and that leads to even worse misbehavior and unfiliality. This situation fosters unregistered wastrels and troublemakers; there are many fights and quarrels, as well as much illicit sex and adultery. Gambling and various other games of chance such as betting on numbers,7 lotteries, and drawing lots become popular; instances of night robbery, mugging, murder, and arson begin to occur. Some people give up humble farming to offer their houses for such activities; others make their living by acting as a go-between or mediator, or they open pawnshops, drinking holes, baths, and hairdressing shops.
This leads to the ruination of local customs. When that happens only troublemakers and immorality flourish, and the people’s original vocation gradually withers away. This is the terrible consequence of these despicable customs. They must be reformed. Indeed, the shogunate has always had laws that forbade townspeople and farmers from indulging in luxury: they are not allowed to wear silk except coarse pongee; they must not allow unlicensed prostitutes, engage in gambling, games of chance, and lotteries, or provide lodging to unregistered persons from other provinces. Such laws once had effect, but now they are breaking down. Deterioration is everywhere, and the shogun’s laws are no longer enforced.
The Hardships of Small-Scale Farmers
The expenditures wasted on wealthy farmers’ prideful extravagance, the money squandered by young punks and rakes, the abuses committed by the troublemakers floating in from other places, and the profits secretly extracted by various merchants and artisans do not come from some outside source; all of them come from the vital resources of the village, which depend on the small-scale farmers’ labor. In this fashion the wealthy, young punks, and troublemakers as well as merchants and artisans all plunder the land of its abundance. Left behind are the small-scale farmers who keep to the old ways and the path of righteousness. They have to make up for this waste and take on more than their share of hardships because of these atrocities and immorality. They are to be pitied.
These small-scale farmers’ circumstances are basically fragile. They know not the slightest leeway, they do not understand dissolution, and they are as naive as the day they were born. They involve themselves solely in the people’s basic occupation and struggle to do their very best, but all that remains is appropriated by those gangs. Those who should be pitied in this world are precisely they. They must be saved.
It stands to reason that when one person enjoys paradise, another person has to suffer. Because there are so many idlers right now, suffering in their shadows are a great many people who year after year work their fingers to the bone. This is owing to the evil customs in our age of peace and tranquillity. A one-shō container will always hold one shō. In no matter which village, the amount of land and the number of people is gauged to a nicety, so that if there are one hundred people there is land for one hundred people, and there is food for one hundred people without surplus or lack. Out of the rice and grains produced by those hundred people, that part of the harvest that is meant for the annual land tax and various duties is supposed to be sent out of the village, but if too much of what remains is taken away to other places as well, that in itself will cause a shortage. But what happens now is that wealthy houses squeeze [money] out of small-scale farmers without getting their own hands dirty, take it to other places, and waste it on their own entertainment. Or else, the young punks and degenerates steal from their parents or expropriate [wealth] from other people and take it to other places. What the merchants and artisans cajole out of the people through the interest they charge is also taken away to other places. This leaves great lack and great poverty within the village.
Generally speaking, in a village with one hundred people, all one hundred alike should work at agriculture without distinction, without negligence, without even one person not doing his share. But today wealthy men, degenerates, merchants, and artisans have appeared in the countryside. Out of every hundred, some fifty have become idlers who do not cultivate the fields, and furthermore, as noted above, they take village produce away to other places, so that the remaining fifty people not only have to break their backs in heavy labor but also are left short of everything, including food. At this time, fifty small-scale farmers suffer double hardships because they have to perform the backbreaking labor of one hundred without even sufficient food. In order to make up the deficiencies in what is available to eat, they have no other option but to engage in some sort of production of commercial goods and use this to bring back money from other places to buy food.
Engaging in the production of commercial goods requires extra painful toil and adds another hardship on top of the two others mentioned above. These three hardships arise from the change in customs and the polarization between rich and poor farmers. In the past, farmers never bought food. I have heard that in the past, when one hundred men worked equally as one hundred men, each made his own miso and stored up various grains as his own food supply. None purchased any goods. Since the hardships described above have become more severe over the years, poverty-stricken people tide themselves over by selling off their rice and other crops as soon as they have been harvested and then only barely manage to buy back [what they need to survive] by adding on ever more side jobs. When they sell their crops, the merchants take one profit by forcing them to sell at a low price and another by making them buy necessities back at a high price. Their losses in such transactions constitute another hardship. Because fifty of the righteous small-scale farmers fall behind and suffer under the accumulated weight of these three or four types of hardships unheard of in the past, they find it harder and harder to endure and go off track in various ways. Some send their sons or daughters off to work, or they themselves go to other places to work, or they give themselves over to greed, and the number of righteous people decreases.
Indeed, this sort of behavior has become customary in the environs of the shogun’s capital and nearby provinces and in all provinces with convenient circulation [of money and goods]. In short, because of this convenient circulation, the wealth noted above can appear, extravagant people can appear, degenerates can appear, and large numbers of merchants and artisans also appear. On the other hand, in other regions, especially peripheral areas where the lord’s dominion is province-wide or in remote mountain areas where access is inconvenient and circulation is poor, you find poverty worse than that noted above. Although this poverty is too extreme to be described, I will outline it at the end of this chapter.
The Corrupting Effects of Commerce and Calculation
Nothing is better, it is thought, than the convenient circulation [of money and goods] for bringing prosperity and helping people to supplement their resources, but that is not the case. As we have seen, it leads to polarization between rich and poor, luxury and destitution, and to the emergence of large numbers of profit seekers who ravage the people. Not only in this area around the shogun’s capital but also in the neighborhoods of Kyoto, Osaka, and the castle towns of the various provinces, and also in places close to post stations and other places where townspeople live, farmers exchange vegetables and daikon for coins and sell even flowers and miscanthus grass. In these areas the people’s original conscience is lost to an evil cleverness that swindles others and covets profits. People in places where expensive goods such as silk crepe and the like are manufactured become wise in the Way of greed. They plant mulberry, hemp, Asian pear, persimmons, indigo, cotton, safflower, medicinal plants such as murasaki root and various species of peony, arrowroot, lily root, potato, Chinese water chestnut, lotus root, and other things on wet and dry fields. They find the five grains repugnant and covet that which brings profit; they bargain about everything with a merchant’s frame of mind; they are quick to put aside moral rectitude for the sake of making money; and they cleverly understand the ins and outs of how to do everything. Some travel far to other provinces to work out of greed. In other cases, profit seekers come in from other places, thus disrupting the census registers. Popular attitudes become disordered, and the people’s occupation declines.
The Way of Heaven and the Ways of the gods, sages, and buddhas all agree that single-minded adherence to honesty is good. They also hold it good that the people’s hearts and occupations be focused on a single thing. Now, however, the hearts and occupation of the people of the soil have changed. A devious intelligence attuned to the ins and outs of things has arisen, leading to a cleverness of speech and, particularly, an understanding of circulation and profit unsuitable to people of the soil. Some learn how to cheat those above them and deceive those of high status. Even in years when there is no great crop failure, they will complain of damage caused by wind and rain and come up with clever excuses. Or they will lavish hospitality on survey officials and give them bribes to have them deduct losses, or start a mass protest to intimidate their lord or fief holder into reducing the annual land tax.8 Or they will use bad rice to pay the land tax and keep the good rice to sell as they please. When they go to the magistrate’s office or other governmental offices, they deliberately wear ragged clothing and make themselves look shabby, so that they can appear as rude people of the soil when they enumerate their hardships. They stubbornly press a point when it suits their argument; if they are caught in misbehavior, they act as though they do not understand because they are people of the soil and give all sorts of excuses. They argue for unnecessary construction of dikes to control rivers, irrigation canals, drainage ditches, and so forth, with an eye to charging needless expenses against the lord or fief holder. Claiming that it will benefit the soil, the village officials and wealthy landowners connive and twist those expenses to their own use, without giving a drop of the windfall to the small-scale farmers. In any case, they show no deference to those above, they do not understand how indebted they are, and they turn warrior administrative officials into people they can manipulate.
When such baseborn people of evil intelligence look up at honest and straightforward people of high status, they see them as stupid, as people easily deceived. Therefore such wicked people take advantage of the honest officials and strip them completely naked. Even if an official knows about their guile and pursues a strict investigation, in the end will come a day when he has won the battle only to lose the war. In other words, when it concerns matters of profit and loss, he cannot beat the baseborn. For that reason, honest officials are useless in this world. Even the sagacious among them have only a general understanding of the difference between good and evil, truth and falsehood; they do not have a penetrating grasp. Because today’s good and bad, true and false incorporate a deviousness rooted in greedy calculation, one cannot fully understand the situation if one does not understand that deviousness. Understanding the true motives of deviousness has been difficult both now and in the past, and in today’s world, all things are rooted in deviousness. If you are not a devious person yourself, it is difficult to recognize each of these devious acts.
Therefore we have come to an age when officials are of no use if they are not wicked. For that reason the officials in today’s world have to have hearts unsuitable to a samurai in order to accomplish their task. They have to understand the circulation of goods and finance like a merchant, know how to seize what belongs to others, thoroughly master various courses of action, and be well aware where cunning lurks. Unless officials have that knowledge, the people below will overwhelm them. For this reason, you have to make yourself a devious person first, and then you can recognize the deviousness that people perpetrate; but this is an exceptionally onerous task.
Because it is such hard work to strike against this sort of guile in those below, the easy course today is to give up trying to crush it, to leave it to its own devices, to take a bribe and let things go. Adopting that easy course is the way things are done today. Particularly when officials go out on tours of duty, they leave things up to whatever the many devious types there want. If an official performs a tough investigation that outrages the devious, they may devise a plot so that everything will come out badly for him. Should they confront him fearlessly, the official would have to undertake the trouble of putting a stop to this, all the while facing the inconveniences of being away from his own base. Concerned to protect themselves, today’s samurai are thus reluctant to press a strict investigation. If they are opposed in some way, they get themselves away from that place as soon as they can, no matter how dishonorably. Even if something is for the lord’s benefit, or some measure would be good for the state’s future, their only concern is that fault will attach to them if some obstacle should arise; they think simply of weathering whatever happens without incident.
Today, those who are lords or high-ranking officials have no direct knowledge of how things are. If a disturbance breaks out below, they proclaim that it is because the officials in charge took immoderate measures. In the present world the lowly have become devious and have no fear of those above. The lords and high-ranking officials think it troublesome to strictly investigate the entire crowd when those below riot, so that many such incidents end up being blamed on a blunder on the part of one or two officials. This is because both lord and retainer are weak-kneed.
If the authorities were strict in dealing with a riot even when an official’s blunder was to blame for it, they would be able to impose their will, break it up, and settle the issue with resolution and bravery. If this is not done, the lower officials will not be able to maintain the dignity of their office, they will be unable to keep matters under control thereafter, and ultimately they will despise those above. In the past, when the Divine Lord was still based in Mikawa, the Ikkō adherents banded together and caused a serious disturbance because Suganuma Sadamitsu had rashly seized grain from Jōgūji temple in Sasaki. Yet Lord Ieyasu did not censure Sadamitsu.9 Although it awes me to speak of such matters, a resolute, honest administration would have been impossible if Lord Ieyasu had not handled it this way. At present higher authorities do not give lower officials’ will due importance: instead they try to put all the blame on the person directly in charge. Therefore lower officials fear the consequences of taking clear-cut action. Some simply retreat in a dishonorable manner, others accept bribes in accordance with the wishes of the lowly, and in the end they let things get off track. That is only to be expected.
The wealthy all become guileful, whether they are village officials or people who buy and sell commercial goods for a profit. Given that they are able to trick even those above, one can imagine how they all the more easily plunder the ignorant small-scale farmers inferior to them in status. Such guileful people deceive officials by putting on a show with their “gratuities” and “money for those above.” Merchants and those involved in commercial production often end up bringing lawsuits for the sake of their own greed. Unregistered persons and troublemakers who come in from other places, along with libertines, also may disrupt the countryside with illicit sex, fights, and quarrels, or get involved in lawsuits. Small-scale farmers who are earnest about agriculture do not instigate lawsuits.
Small-scale farmers basically have no artifice whatsoever, and because they have no understanding of profit and loss they do not get into quarrels. Throughout the year they are crushed by the leading farmers, and even if they are imposed on outrageously, they do not have the wherewithal to appeal to higher authority and explain their situation. No matter what sort of injustice they suffer, a lawsuit cannot be initiated without the ability to pay expenses. Should they go so far as to bring suit, they are not able to wait until the point when they would win. Thus they accept a private settlement halfway through even if they have a winnable case because they have exhausted their assets during the time it takes for the court to come to a decision. Anticipating this lack of resources, the opposing side will maneuver to drag out the case so that a suit that should have been won ends up being lost. Many also end up losing because they do not have the ability to offer the bribes so popular in today’s world.
Not a few people repeatedly perpetrate outrageous injustices because they know the weakness of those unable to engage in lawsuits. The poverty-stricken have no choice but to go along. Those who put aside the people’s main occupation to pursue greed never cease to be a burden on the shogun’s administration in this fashion, while the people who work for the sake of the entire country by being earnest about agriculture cannot rely on the help of the offices of government. The evil guile that eclipses those above and plunders those below is the doing of those who draw a surplus from the convenience of circulation; it does not come from the poor.
The chief reason for the neglect of the people’s proper occupation in this world is their move toward greed and evil guile; this comes from the convenience of circulation, which has surely warped everything. With the increase in luxury and expansion of circulation, everything has its price and all pursue the path of profit. Expenditures increase because of the taste for luxury throughout the world, and the levying of various duties on the people leaves them no choice but to become alienated from their basic occupation and move toward greed.
In today’s world it is difficult for the people to keep body and soul together through the earnest pursuit of agriculture. Therefore, once someone has departed from the people’s occupation because of one thing or another, he cannot return to it. Some might go to flourishing cities and other such places, and even though they may suffer terrible hardships, it is quite natural that they cannot return to being a farmer. This costs the state and is the reason for the decline in the people’s wealth. In today’s world, many warriors too have become weak and dissolute. Even though a few act uprightly, they are bothered by social obligations, or else they are tricked by insincere flatterers and are inevitably led astray. Many among the people who sustain the state have also become greedy and devious in this fashion, and those among them who continue the earnest pursuit of their basic occupation are ravaged by having to pay the costs, or are despoiled by evil injustices and end up bankrupt. This is a time when neither the warriors nor the farmers can preserve their innate uprightness.
Therefore, the impoverished people who earnestly pursue their proper occupation are steadily changing, and without the capital to participate in the circulation of goods or commercial production, they have no choice but to take one sort of evil path or another. They may make counterfeit items, pimp for unlicensed prostitutes, set up gaming houses for gambling, number games, and so forth, or link up with unregistered wastrels and troublemakers. In this fashion they end up becoming grasping evildoers who walk on the wrong side of the law. The provinces change and become full of nothing but bad people.
Especially in the five home provinces and the surrounding region, including Ōmi and Ise, all the people without exception have changed into greedy evildoers. Since the way to gain profit through trade started early in these provinces, everyone is greedy right down to the small-scale farmers. Calculating profit and loss is first among the region’s customs, and duty comes so far behind that it might as well not exist. Even the very young are clever enough to understand how to calculate profits; they see shunning greed as stupid and understanding duty as foolish. Even warriors in those provinces are customarily clever at calculation. Now, warriors who give themselves over to calculation may be shrewd and able to put down both the strong and the gentle, but they do nothing of benefit to others. They always take shortcuts and side paths, and because they think only of coming in first, they cannot be counted on; they would be useless in an emergency. This sort of behavior has become so popular in today’s world that it is not confined to these provinces but is also spreading into many other regions.
Formerly the farmers in the provinces lived out their lives without any involvement in profit, but now there are so many plundering idlers that farmers’ hardships have increased three- or fourfold. Because they cannot survive on agriculture alone, they pursue various sorts of greedy paths and go wrong. In distant provinces far removed from opportunities for greed in commercial production and the like, the population declines, fields go to waste, and those without families to rely upon increase in number.
Waste Fields and Depopulated Villages: Causes and Consequences
Due to the benevolent government that the Divine Lord established after two hundred years of disorder, villages that had no more than five or ten dwellings at the beginning of Tokugawa rule grew to fifty or one hundred houses by the Genroku and Kyōhō periods. As the effects of the ruler’s virtue were felt ever more widely, there were no longer orphans and elderly without any family to rely on, and everyone was able to live in peace, perform the marriage rituals, and have generation after generation of children to repay the deep debt of gratitude they owed the state. Recently, however, the world has become polarized because of the benefits of convenient circulation. Places with convenient circulation flourish, giving rise to guile, whereas in inconvenient areas where there is no circulation the population has declined, with only waste fields and dilapidated houses remaining.
Even in the Kantō, it is reported that there are villages with waste fields and dilapidated houses in over half of Hitachi and Shimotsuke provinces. According to one explanation, it has long been the custom in this area to “thin out” children by killing newborns, and the population has gradually declined for that reason.10 But such thinning out cannot be the cause of this decline. Since this is a long-standing perversion in these provinces, the population would have always been low if this were the cause. In the past, however, these seem to have been fertile provinces, the birthplace of famous commanders, brave warriors, and great heroes. There were many commoners’ dwellings here, and at the time the Divine Lord established his base in the Kantō, it would seem that this region was inferior to none. Many [Tokugawa vassals] had already received domains or fiefs there, and since the land was seen as suitable for granting warriors as a reward for their valor, it cannot have been a region particularly in decline among the eight Kantō provinces. According to an old man from that area, these provinces were exceptionally fertile from the time the Divine Lord assumed authority over the Kantō up through the reign of the fourth shogun, and the population steadily grew as new paddies and fields were opened. Thereafter, however, evil customs arose among the people and their disposition went awry. Thus the decline cannot have been caused by [the long-standing practice in this area of] people killing their children. The fall in population and the appearance of waste fields, which began only about one hundred years ago, [have other causes].
Among the eight Kantō provinces, neither Hitachi nor Shimotsuke has a notable base in commercial production. There are many hindrances to circulation, which is not as good as it is here [in Edo]. Although it is a place where human behavior is still rough and close to the temperament of rugged warriors, people go awry because they [are close enough to Edo to] see the splendor of the shogun’s capital, the prosperity of the military houses, and the profits from circulation right before their eyes. They form a distaste for the inconvenient place where they live, and many come to Edo, perhaps as servants hoping to rise in the world, perhaps as merchants; or they leave their homes out of an excess of dissipation or for reasons of poverty. These appear to be the reasons why this region has declined. Since the other Kantō provinces bordering on the shogun’s capital all have favorable transportation and communications, they share in its prosperity, so that even rural areas resemble Edo in every particular. Because of these conditions, people from more remote regions move to those provinces, so their populations do not decline. To be sure, in that people have developed the habit of coming to the shogun’s capital, the population of every province has become smaller than it was in the past. Hitachi and Shimotsuke are simply exceptional in the degree of their decline.
Right now, the hardships of large and small daimyo with domains in those provinces, and especially of bannermen with small fiefs there, are immense. Even though the villages’ putative yield remains the same as in former days, they cannot pay their annual land tax with the decline in households and nothing but waste fields. All of them are in arrears for over half or more of what they paid in the past, so that a lord of 10,000 koku cannot get the income one would expect from 5,000 koku, and a bannerman of 1,000 koku cannot get the income one would expect from 500 koku. Generally speaking, the land tax tends to be insufficient to cover a lord’s needs even in places where it is collected in full. In recent years this happens all the time. The fief holders can no longer endure it, and so they oppress ever more heavily places where the population has declined. This causes hardships on top of hardships.
Additional hardships are caused by the corvée burdens levied by the shogunate for public works and for horses and porters serving the transportation system. Corvée burdens for public works are assessed against the village putative yield, regardless of how small the population is or whether there are waste fields. It is said that these levies did not exist in the past but started being assessed as dues about fifty years ago.11 Since this region has lots of traffic on the Nikkō highway, the highway to the far north, and the road to Nikkō taken by imperial messengers,12 post stations and the assisting districts are supposed to perform post horse and porter duties. This too is divided up and assessed on each village’s putative yield in such a way that in places where it is difficult to supply more than ten or twenty farmers, the allotment is for thirty or forty men, and in places that cannot supply five horses, the allotment is for ten or fifteen. As a consequence, it is said, villages are forced to supply the post stations with funds to hire laborers to perform this service. I have also heard that overall the expenses for men and horses at the post stations are more than double what they were in the past. Since this increases the weight of hardships all the more, people are unable to endure, and thus they keep scattering, leaving behind wasteland and dilapidated houses. This is to be expected.13
With such conditions in so many provinces, the number of households declines in inconvenient areas without circulation and special types of production. In Kyushu, western Honshu, and also in the far north, populations have been shrinking in places where agriculture is the sole occupation. However, because it is difficult for people from provinces beyond the barriers to get to cities such as Edo,14 they have not abandoned their home territory as they have in Hitachi and Shimotsuke. On the other hand, it seems that provinces south of the barriers in Hitachi and Shimotsuke have lost larger numbers of their population because it is easy for people there to get to Edo. Because it is such a major undertaking for people from provinces beyond the barriers to travel here or to other prosperous areas, they first try to endure their poverty, and only when they have no other choice do they move here. Thus advantage and disadvantage depend on distance from the cities. Even if there are productive enterprises in a place far from a city, it is not possible to make a profit. For that reason, one by one people move closer to the city, and distant provinces and remote regions see households decline.
If only agriculture would grow steadily more abundant, as it did up to Genroku and Kyōhō! When agricultural households and production become less viable, this is the foundation for the warriors’ decline. If, as in the past, the people were not charged with additional corvée labor and attendant expenses, they would not need other occupations in addition to cultivating the fields. As a result, there would be no need for the convenient circulation of goods.
If only the people of the soil continued to be strangers to profit, naturally dull with little patience or ability! Would that they still thought the place where they were born to be better than the capital, and that they still were deferent to authority and wary of strangers! Would that they continued to be afraid of going to other provinces and remained hardy and naive! As the old saying has it, “The superior man is attached to virtue; the small man is attached to the soil.”15 For the people to think it important to take care of their native soil is their natural inborn character. Now, however, they have developed a cleverness unsuitable to the people; they have become greedy, are alienated from their Heaven-sent native soil, and want to leave the place where they were born in order to go where they can make a profit. In principle, where there is land there are people, and where there are people there is land, and it should not be the case that though there is land, people cannot live. This would never happen if there were no luxury and profit. Poverty would not arise, people would not become greedy, and they would not move. Nowadays, poverty arises because the costs for luxury and a life of ease, as enjoyed by people of high status and others, and the losses from convenient circulation are all pushed off onto the people of the soil. They are forced to fall into the habit of calculating profit, they lose their natural character and sense of duty, and the evil customs of greed are the result.
The people of the soil naturally hate profit, and the state’s system rests on the assumption that they are without greed. Therefore it should be especially forbidden for the people to become attached to profit. This has always been the law. Right now, however, the policy of all daimyo is to calculate profit, collect levies on commerce, lend money and charge interest, and teach the people nothing but how to produce commercial goods and conduct business. Encouraged by such policies, the people too eagerly compete for profit. Daimyo especially favor those who pursue profit and praise them for having worked for the domain’s benefit. This follows the [inverted] logic of “making the root one’s secondary object, and the result one’s primary, of wrangling with one’s people, and teaching them rapine.”16 Rulers have abandoned long-standing laws, deviated from benevolent government, and forgotten to hate greed. They do not know to what the people’s feelings are naturally attached, nor are they aware that with such empty policies, the good people decline and bad people have their way.
Lawsuits
There is another reason why even the farmers in distant provinces put aside their natural duties and base themselves on the calculation of profit instead. It has to do with the handling of lawsuits. Since this is a matter that concerns the shogunate, I will summarize it with all due deference. First of all, it is not easy for farmers in the provinces to undertake a lawsuit; it is truly troublesome. In distant provinces it is difficult to bring even cases that are about matters of principle to a clear-cut conclusion. The townspeople and idlers of Edo, Kyoto, Osaka, and other prosperous places initiate lawsuits as part of their everyday lives and take even trifling matters to the magistrate’s office to get a settlement.17 People who have sufficient wherewithal to employ a clerk send him in their place, claiming that they are sick, or they hire what is called an advocate as their representative and leave the negotiations in the suit up to him.18 They deceive the magistrate’s office by pretending to be sick and then go out on private business or for entertainment rather than spending the day discreetly at home; they show not the slightest feeling of deference to the shogun’s authority. Being skilled at negotiating at the magistrate’s office, the advocate knows that if he presents the case in a certain manner, it will work in his favor and that if he pushes another way, things will fall into place for him. He deceives those above and despoils the opposing side. By putting on an appearance of make-believe deference to the investigating officials, he ingratiates himself with them. He correctly calculates how the case will develop, and although he uses expedients and falsehoods, he succeeds in carrying it off. In the end he confuses all by calling white black and wins his case.
Farmers in the Kantō provinces and especially the Edo environs have become comfortable about appearing in lawsuits, and because they are so accustomed to Edo, they have no fear of the magistrate’s office and see straight through the officials. Having acquired the bad habit of going to Edo at every opportunity, they get into disputes on the slightest pretext and immediately take these to the Edo courts. Since they fully grasp the ins and outs of the procedures and understand how the matter will be concluded, they can assume an attitude of confidence. Farmers from far away places, in contrast, are not like that. They are afraid of Edo, let alone the magistrate’s office. To go on a long journey and engage in a lawsuit from a distant area costs a tremendous amount. In addition, the innkeepers officially permitted to lodge farmers who are in Edo to file a suit take advantage of the ignorance of people from far away and swindle them by charging them for petty things.19 Besides, the farmers fear the investigating officials, whom they take for honest men, and think it inexcusable to make a mistake in one word or even a syllable, or to raise objections. Having been raised in a faraway province where the customs vary and ideas are different, they are not accustomed to the officials, which means that they are not able to fully explain their views, and their anguish is enough to last a lifetime. The anxiety of waiting for days as the proceedings drag on exhausts their perseverance, they worry about conditions back home, and grow weary from the multiple tasks that need doing, so that finally they have no choice but to accept a private settlement.20 They return home without having the right and wrong of the matter clarified, and the innumerable hindrances to cultivation and the considerable expense they have incurred in traveling great distances have all added up to no effect. They are like those who expose their own weakness by seeking the faults of others, and the affair ends up causing a lifetime of pain. People from faraway provinces see lawsuits as something they should avoid at all costs. Furthermore, when a private settlement is reached, reason is twisted and pushed aside, with the settlement favoring whoever is better at calculating advantage and disadvantage.
Perhaps because they require special consideration on the part of government, lawsuits that come from the provinces take an especially long time to decide. Depending on the case, they can take two or three years or more, and this is one great difference with townspeople’s lawsuits. In the provinces and the countryside, for shogunal territory there are the intendants’ offices and branch offices, and within daimyo domains and the lands of large fief holders there are also local offices where it ought to be possible to resolve disputes. However, in regions where shogunal territory, daimyo domains, and bannerman fiefs are intertwined [and disputes often involve people from different jurisdictions], it is not possible to get at the truth because each party has a different lord to be taken into consideration, and because the daimyo’s power as well as the intent of higher officials becomes the issue. Further, when it comes to distinguishing right and wrong by listening to the statements made by the disputing parties, rural officials cannot clarify where justice lies. Being habitually negligent, they cannot manage to settle even urgent matters immediately. To make matters worse, even samurai today are attuned to the calculation of profit, so they are quicker to understand how to calculate profit than to follow the path of correctness. Calculating profit has become fashionable everywhere in our world, and most suits are decided that way. In recent times customs have declined and bribery has become prevalent throughout the country. Regardless of what is right, victory is determined by the power of bribes. This is because the calculation of profit comes first.
When a dispute in a village is settled through the arbitration of fellow villagers, it is again impossible to solve the matter on the basis of what is right. Should a matter be sorted out on the basis of what is right, people would take sides, making resolution impossible. Thus both sides put principle aside, and the matter is brought to a close through the calculation of profit and loss. Because it ends with a calculation of profit no matter what approach is taken, no one puts trust in principle. Even if you meet with outrageous mistreatment, it will end with money being paid out based on a calculation of profit. Rōnin, komusō priests,21 solicitors for donations to temples and shrines, sellers of offerings to religious establishments, medicine peddlers, and various sorts of troublemakers may come into the village and cause disturbances or practice extortion. Since it is hopeless to lodge a petition against them, people pay them money as an indemnity, in effect throwing more money to someone who has already robbed them.
Having figured out that far from the center of the shogun’s authority it is easy to survive in such a fashion, many troublemakers who have behaved so outrageously in the cities that they find it hard to live there have now left to roam around the provinces and rural areas. The local people cannot handle these troublemakers, and so there is no help for it but to settle fights and quarrels, even murders, with money. In the worst cases even the murder of a parent or the loss of a child is settled informally. In the case of murder or similar crimes, both sides hush the matter up lest the government probe into it, because people think it best not to involve the authorities, no matter what happens. If an issue becomes subject to investigation by the shogunate or some other government office, it will cost money and it will cost time. Since in any case the matter will be left in ambiguity without being clarified, people find it better by far to twist what is right and settle the affair on their own with money.
Because of practices like this, what is right has come to be seen as useless, and in provinces and rural areas greed has become pervasive. Heavenly principle has become irrelevant, financial interest has become the base, the shogunate’s laws crumble, and government is completely eroded. How can it be that the townspeople and idlers who are useless to the state make rapid progress with their lawsuits and know the benefits of government, while the farmers in the provinces who devote themselves to the benefit of the state cannot solve their problems with lawsuits and cannot depend on the government? To show affection for what is near and dismiss what is far is not the practice of a benevolent government. The superior man worries about what cannot be seen,22 and rather than focusing on nearby regions, where everything is visible, the main object of government should be to give particular attention to whether or not distant provinces, where things are not so apparent, are properly administered. Since nowadays duty has been abandoned and greed prevails both in prosperous areas and in the provinces, government does not reach to places where the situation is confused and disorderly. Because the government is no longer of any use, more and more things are determined only by greed. In our world, the natural sense of duty has been abandoned and human desire flourishes. Together with the expansion in convenient circulation, poverty has flowed into distant provinces and remote areas. As evil desires advance, righteous people have become few. Anyone who does not harbor evil desires will suffer torments and destroy his own house.
Sources and Consequences of the Disparity in Wealth in the Countryside
Below I will describe the situation of those people who live in distant provinces and remote regions, in whom evil desire has not given rise to guile, who have fallen behind the times, and who, pressed by poverty, destroy their own houses and ruin themselves.
Lowly people who go as samurai servants or other sorts of menials to the three cities and other urban centers on yearly labor contracts, or to work during the winter, all leave their homes because, being backward in the Way of greed and lagging behind others, they have fallen into poverty. To be sure, a person who still has the ability to move to another province for work cannot be said to have reached the depths of poverty but is suffering the middling levels of hardship. Some of these people may have ruined their livelihood through a love of drink, or they have done a little gambling and brought their misfortune upon themselves, but as noted before, this is because they have already been plundered by thieves who so wasted the village that people there cannot surmount even a trifling mistake and end up falling into destitution. Some people do not damage their livelihood even if they drink great quantities of sake and indulge freely in entertainment, but for others, drinking just a little sake and indulging in just a little dissipation wrecks their livelihood and finally destroys their house. This is why recently there is a total imbalance in people’s livelihoods throughout the provinces.
If you land yourself in trouble with the wealthy, even the most trifling misfortune will become difficult to withstand. All the paddies and fields that you ought to be cultivating will be taken by the rich, and having lost your livelihood, you will have to move to another province. Generally speaking, small-scale farmers are in the same circumstances as people who survive from day to day in the cities, and no matter how hard they work, they will lack the wherewithal to endure. Various sorts of occupations are possible in the cities, making it easy to get by, but because farmers have only agriculture, they can do nothing but go to another province once they lose that. In all villages the wealthy end up owning the top-grade fields, whereas [the other farmers] own only low-grade fields where little grows. Furthermore, in some areas, those who have been driven to sell fields have to discount the putative yield on those fields by transferring the difference to their remaining fields in order to get a good price.23
In this way, the wealthy single-mindedly buy up good sites with a low putative yield, and the poor come to be assigned a large amount of yield on the bad fields remaining in their hands. Because the poor have to put out more than their fair share of the annual land tax and do more than they should in corvée labor, loss piles on losses. The families who have lost even their bad fields can only work as tenant farmers, and they exhaust themselves in laboring for the farmers who own land. Because they pay all the rice that they cultivate to the landlord [in rent], the only things left for them are husks, bran, and straw. Throughout the year they never get their head above water, nor do they have time to draw a breath.
People who do well thus become ever more prosperous. They buy up fields one after the other, set up their second and third sons as branch houses, and build fine residences. Those in declining circumstances, on the other hand, fall still further, until they have to leave their paddies and fields and sell their dwellings. With the family sunk in poverty, its members, young and old, men and women, end up scattered. In today’s world the imbalance between rich and poor, between those who get ahead and those who fall behind, has become extreme. Around every wealthy person there are twenty or thirty impoverished farmers, and just as plants cannot grow alongside a big tree, farmers too cannot live in security alongside a great house. As a matter of course [small-scale farmers] will be swept away by the wealthy person’s power, and many people will be stricken by poverty. The wealthy suck up the resources of the many for the sake of one person’s adornment, their fortunes flower as described above, and some of them even have enough left over to spend their treasure in other places.
Let me describe the nature of the gap between prosperity and decline. First, as stated above, when some own an excessive amount of paddies and fields, others do not have any land to cultivate. When some pay only a little of the annual land tax and have lots of rice left over, others will not be able to pay their land tax and will be censured by the daimyo or fief holder. When some can sell fifty, one hundred, even up to two hundred or three hundred bales of rice, others will not be able to eat rice even at seasonal festivals, or make pounded rice cakes for New Year’s. When some people shower their children with excessive affection, other parents will have to sell theirs. Or, when some have splendid houses and storehouses, sitting rooms with fancy sliding doors decorated with patterned paper, tatami mats from wall to wall, and silk to wear, there will be others whose houses have leaking roofs, collapsing walls, crude bamboo flooring that is falling in, and torn old straw mats, while the clothing with which they cover their bodies is full of holes, and they are unable to withstand hunger and cold. Uprisings and conspiracies will definitely erupt where there are such extremes in the imbalance between rich and poor. Farmers’ riots do not arise solely because of the daimyo’s or fief holder’s tyranny. In every case there is someone who has more than he should in that area, and because he preys on the small-scale farmers, their pain spurs them to plot uprisings.
As noted before, in villages where in the past one hundred people worked together, today fifty of them not only idle their time away but also despoil the small-scale farmers. Fifty small-scale farmers have to bear up under hardships that have quadrupled or quintupled, and their food supply does not suffice at all. In the time they can spare from cultivation, they transport goods for pay, or they work as day laborers or at some sort of cottage industry. But because they live far from the cities, work of this sort does not provide that much extra income, and they cannot free themselves from anxiety. In some cases they are unable to nurse their sick parents, and as a matter of course they cannot afford to provide them with medicine. The members of their household suffer from fleas and mosquitoes on summer nights, and in cold weather they rely on the meager light from the hearth to spin hemp or silk or to weave cloth for sale. In some cases they have had to take out an advance loan for the loom from merchants, who then set whatever low price they please for the goods offered in partial repayment for the loan. Those merchants may find fault with the product and extract all sorts of extra charges, so that no profit remains to the worker. All the work that they have endured night after night goes for naught, and it is just as though they worked in order to lose their capital. But in areas far from the cities there is no other way to acquire money, so they can do nothing but bring out their goods and have them priced. Even if they lose their capital and wear themselves out, they have no choice. In former days people could get by without producing commercial goods, but now conditions have arisen that ravage the people of the soil and cause this kind of suffering.
On land where people have to get by on agriculture alone without other enterprises, it has become even more difficult for them to endure. In some cases their parents are so old as to be useless, while their children are so young that they cannot help out with cultivation, nor are they yet old enough to be sent out as an apprentice. Then the only thing a husband and wife can do is work like crazy morning and night. Ignoring the cries of their nursing baby, they work at rough, poorly paid jobs. When they leave for the fields, they place the infant in a basket and leave him in the care of his older siblings during their absence, or they tie a crawling toddler to the roots of a tree or the handle of a hoe beside the paddy they are cultivating. Even when the child is tormented by a belly full of worms, they can give him no medicine; their manner of child raising is no different from that of a dog or cat. All they can do is wear themselves out with the harvest and the public works corvée.
In some places, a couple that is unable to support all the children they produce will kill some of them in the practice called thinning. This is heartless and cruel beyond words. However, the epitome of inhumanity lies elsewhere. It is not easy to raise a child, even if one does nothing more than a cat or dog would. If in the end [the cost of] trying to keep the baby alive might result in the house’s destruction, the parents have no choice but to kill it. The criminal responsible for killing this child should be sought elsewhere. Small-scale farmers are commonly called “water-drinking farmers,” but some, in fact, do not even have water to drink.24
Farmers with many dependents such as aged parents and children—those said to be burdened with many parasites—are likely to find their livelihood toppling. With only a tiny income, they are unable to eat even rough grains. As a matter of course they fall into arrears on their annual land tax; they sell off the small number of paddies and fields that they have not already sold, as well as their house plot, and even doing that, they are unable to pay the village officials their share of the village expenses. In some cases it is difficult for them to offer excuses to landlords and others in lieu of repaying their loans. Under pressure of obligation, they are forced to change their status [and become tenants] in order to make amends. In some cases they seek work elsewhere, leaving aged parents to fend for themselves or small children, who do not understand what is happening, dependent solely on their wife or parents. Or husband and wife may split up and entrust their children to others while they go off to seek work in cities such as Edo. In this way they are separated from the people’s basic occupation and their place of birth and are led into bad habits. It is not an easy thing for parents and children and the whole family to end up scattered. Before that point, they have so exhausted themselves body and soul that they can do no more and are simply left with no other option.
Generally speaking, the ignorant lower orders think that the place where they were born is the finest there is. They think it troublesome to meet strangers and find it a particular hardship to have to go to a strange province. This is because elsewhere they may have a steady livelihood, but they cannot have a steady mind.25 In particular, the interactions between relatives in the countryside are different from those in the big cities, in that there is mutual goodwill right down to the most distant kin. People in flourishing cities are coldhearted and show little concern for family. They keep their distance from poor and destitute relatives, even if the latter are senior to them, and they stay on guard lest they be solicited for economic assistance. This sort of thing is not found in the provinces. Still, in recent years customs have changed even there, and greed has become prevalent. The wealthy have become stingy; by and by they have come to exhibit the coldheartedness customary in the cities, and they no longer lend a hand to help poor relations, preferring to shun them. Those people who fall into poverty are by nature dull. They only know how to deal with others kindly and are ignorant of the tactics of greed. Even if they notice that they are being shunned, they feel they should respond with kindness wherever they go. Instead of blaming their relatives, they blame themselves that their reduced circumstances sully the entire family’s reputation.
If a man’s fortunes decline so badly that he has to leave his native place, the grief and shame are immense. Although it is said that high and low differ in the degree of love between parent and child or husband and wife, such is not the case. Poor people live in close quarters inside a simple hut, enduring their hardships together. On winter nights each offers the other the rude coverings, stitched together from scraps, with which they try to ward off the cold. Even though there is never sufficient food morning or night, they all peer together to see what may remain inside the jar or at the bottom of the pot and share what they find. Because they do things like this, their feelings for one another are particularly deep and intimate. Just as it is said that for a couple not to see each other for a day feels like three years,26 to send an eight- or nine-year-old child to a faraway province as a laborer on a fixed-term contract, or to have the master, who is the pillar of the house, separated from his family, means immeasurable heartfelt agonies for his parents and family, who worry from the moment he leaves until his return.
He who parts from parents, wife, and children to leave his home also suffers immense anguish. Everyone leaves with the resolution to improve his circumstances in that other province. By working as a servant, he hopes, he will earn three ryō in wages for a year’s labor; during his time off, he will braid straw sandals for a few extra coins to be sent home, where it will make up for what has been lacking there and ease his parents’, wife’s, and children’s sufferings; and then he will return home solvent. Alas, no one is more wretched than the poor. As things turn out, he is unable to reach his planned destination; he passes time saying “next year, maybe next year”; and finally he returns home without having accomplished even half of what he had anticipated. In some cases he is so unfortunate as to return home diseased, or he is unable to get home in time to look after his suffering parents in their illness, or even to see them again before they die. It also happens that he too falls ill or dies of illness, and having separated from his parents, wife, and children while alive, he ends up with a final parting in death. Overall many such people are unable to return, and for one reason or another they remain in the cities.
Let me mention one or two reasons why such people are unable to return home. Generally speaking, their ignorance and naïveté go together with a natural tendency to be upright and honest. Such traits prevent them from moving with the times. Outrageous conduct has become commonplace today, so no one is censured for it. Falsehoods too have become common, and greed has become nothing to be ashamed of. This goes to show what a bad place the world has become. However, because superficially a sense of duty is still in effect, even if in a perverted form, everyone still makes sure to commit extreme wickedness in secret. Before long it will come to the point where no one will care about even a superficial sense of duty. This is what happens when too many people gather and shortages occur. In the provinces the population decreases, and hardships remain; in the cities the population increases, giving rise to hardships. That being the case, there is no benefit in either. The more impoverished a province becomes, the more grains and other products it ships to other provinces, and its poverty increases even more. Because it has become impoverished, the population declines more and more, whereas in cities, as the population increases, so do shortages in various goods. Profits too are reduced, until only outrages and evil remain. Here I skip one reason for the prosperity and decline of town and country, as well as one reason why popular customs deviate from the mean, because I will discuss these points below.
The Decline of Agriculture and the Lure of the Cities
Because the customs of people in the provinces have declined, the well-off do not till their lands, and the village officials pretend that they are so busy with this or that official duty that they cannot work in the fields. In addition, they may engage in commerce and various other enterprises rather than agriculture, lead a dissolute life, or employ various devices so as not to undertake the people’s proper occupation. Another reason why agriculture is abandoned is that poverty forces people to find work in other places, leaving behind only old men and old women and those who have to rely on others to survive. For these reasons people disappear from the census register, and for every ten men who are supposed to work at the people’s occupation, no more than five or six are left. This means that in places where once one hundred men cultivated the fields, now only about fifty actually work there.
The number of those who work at agriculture has become half of what it was in the past, and there are many ways in which these farmers are exploited more harshly than previously. The first is that the annual tax rate is higher than it was before. Because the daimyo and fief holders have become more extravagant, their expenses burden the people. Also, in contrast with the past, labor duties and public works corvée have come to be assessed in greater amounts, and extraordinary levies and village expenses have piled up. Shrine priests and temple monks have become so arrogant that they claim alms as if they were collecting what already belongs to them.
People who move to the cities lose their bearings, and for two or three years all they can do is aimlessly eke out a meager existence. Having spent two or three years in such circumstances, they finally become accustomed to the local customs and begin to commit misdeeds that make it even more difficult to return to their home in the countryside. What with one thing or another, they shift ever more to the ways of their current locale, and finally they put aside their native village’s troubles. Up to then they had understood that honesty and integrity were good in all situations, but once they get on the wrong track, they become caught up in the customs of today’s cities, where integrity is out of place. No matter how much they think to do better, there is no way that they will be able to abandon the easy life of the city and return to a place of unbearable hardship. For example, with the three ryō that you can make as a servant, you can buy eight or nine bales of rice on today’s market. If you work as a tenant farmer back home, it is difficult to make even half of that. It is not difficult to obtain wages of three ryō, and it is easy on your body. For these reasons, people change their minds and begin to think of staying in the city. As noted before, aged parents, wives and children, and the feeble are the only ones remaining in the countryside, where they sink to the depths of hardship. Even though it is impossible to forget day or night how eagerly they await one’s homecoming, the above logic is too strong, and it becomes impossible to return. This is entirely to be expected.
In comparison with that place of hardship, one of the splendors of the shogun’s capital is that even someone who enters service as a mere samurai servant can depend on others for his dress, food, and dwelling and live a life free from constraint. In your native place, the village officials stand ready to push your head down. When you enter a senior farmer’s front yard you must remove your footwear, and you are not allowed to use umbrellas and rain clogs within the village. Here in the city, someone who had been crushed by these constraints finds a place free of such hardships. Furthermore, you need not show any sign of deference to the daimyo and fief holders, who in the provinces are venerated like gods and buddhas, but can simply pass them on the road with an exchange of glances. Nothing is so strict as it is in the countryside; in the city there is no bigotry or narrow-mindedness; you can eat rice morning and night and drink good sake, sleep and sit on tatami mats, and enjoy prostitutes and courtesans without suffering discrimination because of your status; you can do what you like so long as you have the money to pay for it; and you can change your master as you please. Living a trouble-free life on your own, as the years go by you cease to think about your parents’ worries back home, about their growing old and feeble, about the lamentations of your wife and children.
Even a servant who can barely make three ryō will not return home under these conditions. Those who leave their homes as young men and conduct themselves outrageously in the cities, or those who have a bit of quick-wittedness enabling them to work for a profit in accordance with the fashion of the times, are even less likely to return to their native place. People who from childhood were sent away to work as apprentices are accustomed to city ways from the time they first become aware of things. They may become addicted to luxury in the high spirits of their prime, or else they vigorously stride the path of profit. They learn to make a living by exploiting others, take coldhearted insincerity for cleverness, excel in the kind of guile that quickly grasps how matters stand, and become skilled in the use of twisted schemes to the point that the idea of returning home to nurse their parents becomes unthinkable.
In the countryside the old customs remain in all sorts of ways. People fight over whose lineage is older, take pride in their ancestors’ genealogy, exaggerate matters of obligation or shame, and in general make much of such things. In comparison with this, customs in today’s cities are more easygoing. Obligation, shame, lineage, truth, and falsehood are all unnecessary. The best of great deeds is simply to accumulate money; nothing excels this in our world in terms of achieving supremacy, and people put their knowledge of good and bad to work in the pursuit of greed. This is only to be expected.
Because of the conditions described above, people flow out of their homes to other provinces. In today’s world the townspeople populations of the three cities, as well as of provincial towns and post stations throughout the country, have naturally increased. Various sorts of idlers and troublemakers have appeared, and the farmers in isolated parts of the provinces have gradually declined. Generally speaking, there is too much convenient circulation in the world today; readily frivolous customs become prevalent, and because townspeople, idlers, and unregistered persons can then easily make a living, people also move easily. People leave the provinces to gather in cities with their sights on the townspeople’s abundance. Although cities consequently flourish all the more, such things weaken the country’s foundation.
It is generally not good to have too many people gather in cities. In the countryside of the various provinces and in isolated areas where people do not mix with those from other places, the old customs remain, people have consideration for their fellows and a strong sense of duty, and conditions are tranquil. When people come together from other places in the townsmen’s blocks, particularly when they are good-for-nothings or ruffians, they treat everything lightly because no one knows where anyone else comes from. In today’s interactions all sense of duty is lost, and people seek to exploit others for their own benefit. This is the basis of the disorder in today’s customs. Should too many people gather in country towns in the provinces as well, the situation will become very problematic. Where will this trend end?
As noted before, everything in this world has a set limit, just as a one-shō container always holds one shō. As there is a measurable limit to the grains and other goods that can be sent out from the provinces, there should also be a general limit to what comes into the city. If provinces send out grains and various products beyond that set limit, it will cause problems and corresponding shortages in the countryside, and this will give rise to ever greater poverty. Further, when masses of people come into a large city beyond what it can properly accommodate, there will be an insufficiency in various goods. For example, when 150 or 200 people squeeze into a place with a set limit of 100, as a matter of course the prices of all goods will rise because there is insufficient food and not enough profit to go around. In the intensifying deadlock as competition for profit increases, people are sure to commit unreasonable deeds and feed off one another. Because particularly here in the shogun’s capital too many people have gathered in the past hundred years, the lower orders face a tight situation, and the wealthy are few. Many people have become impoverished, and each of them struggles to gain sufficient income. They feed off one another in various ways, and this gives rise to evil outrages.
Conditions have worsened year by year, although it may not be immediately apparent how bad the world has become.27 Many rich people amass paddies and fields or lend money to monopolize the land’s abundance. Merchants and artisans emerge and make profits by engaging in activities inappropriate for the countryside. Sometimes officials come to threaten the people with the power of their authority, and because the situation in the countryside is often confused, there naturally are many things for the various government offices to look into. Officials occasionally come to make an on-the-spot investigation, and that is expensive. In many cases they do nothing but skim off their own share, which leads to further losses. If you borrow money in order to survive such losses, you are immediately overwhelmed by the interest, just as though you had drunk medicine that turned into poison. Debts finally end up destroying your life. What is worse, the people end up in such a state that they can no longer sustain their basic occupation. The Divine Lord established a strict system of rule; he suppressed extravagance by the state, reduced costs that plundered the people, and made it possible for people to live in peace and security. Now the system is crumbling, the people have no security, they move about too much, and they are robbed and preyed on beyond reason.
Nowadays, whatever a person’s occupation, no one is really ignorant, humble, and unskilled at calculation. Those with even a little wit think about abandoning the people’s occupation or changing to other lines of work. Although they may understand that by undertaking an unsavory job they may come to a bad end, they see abandoning the people’s occupation as preferable. Things have gotten to such a state that to be a pariah or outcast in a city is seen as far better than enduring the people’s occupation. As a consequence, those who can be considered the “true people” are gradually disappearing. At present, the number of people who remain in their native place is only about half of what it was before. They are the true people who sustain the state, do not change their occupation, preserve the old ways and obey the law, and sweat and labor in heat and cold, all while their just portion is wasted or expropriated in the various ways noted above. They sink into poverty without knowing extravagance or becoming greedy; they treat their native land as important; and in particular they have a deep-seated deference not only for the large and small daimyo but for all warriors. They commit themselves to agriculture so long as they have breath in their bodies, pay the annual land tax, perform various labor duties, and do many things beneficial for the state.
Seen from the eyes of townspeople, idlers, rakes, unregistered wastrels, and troublemakers, it is the utmost in stupidity and foolishness to live in such a humble, base, and constrained fashion, but from the state’s or the realm’s point of view, these old-fashioned humble people are truly treasures. Year after year they produce the prosperity [that others enjoy]; they are truly the people who in our age sustain the state and the realm. They exert themselves to the utmost morning and night in order to sustain the state, without giving the slightest consideration to anything else. This is indeed the meaning of the saying that “the firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to benevolence.”28 They offer great benevolence to the state. In the present world, feelings of benevolence among people of middle rank and above have become so attenuated that one cannot tell if they still exist at all. Perhaps only a tiny bit of the simplicity and modesty that come close to true benevolence remains to be found among these people. In today’s world as a whole, only a very little is left. This is truly a cause for concern.
Nowadays, the heavy burdens that are caused by the splendid comfort enjoyed by those of high rank and status, plus the townspeople’s and idlers’ extravagance and dissolution, all fall on this segment of the world. It is the few remaining people who sustain the state who must pay the retribution for all the world’s splendor with agony, sweat, and tears. The splendor of the cities all derives from the villages of the poor. What comes out of the villages of the poor becomes the world’s abundance. While people in the cities grow fat and robust, the poor in distant provinces and remote regions exhaust themselves and weep tears of distress. When city men enjoy a harmonious life with their wives and concubines, in the countryside husband and wife must part. When food and drink are tasty in the cities, people of the soil starve.
Everything is like this. The cities and the remote countryside are like two sides of the same coin, front and back. The impoverished people work at the back. Is it not pitiful? They really endeavor to do their best. They really do their best to endure. Even though they should be pitied and appreciated, in this world no one pays them any attention.
The Breakdown of Benevolent Government
It is said that “the ruler nourishes the people with his virtue; the people nourish the ruler with food.” The ruler’s virtue is benevolent government. Today, however, even though the people cultivate the five grains year after year to nourish the ruler, the ruler does not nourish the people and allows them not even a sprinkling of benevolent rule. As noted above, truly benevolent government means to enforce laws strictly, refrain from plundering the people, keep the annual land tax and labor duties light, ease all the people’s troubles, and make it possible for them to live in peace and security. These are the deeds of a benevolent ruler. At the beginning of Tokugawa rule, this Way of governing and helping the people was given priority, but it has eroded over time. Now people of middle status and above live comfortably while taking good care of their wives and concubines and acquiring beautiful clothing and tasty food as they please. They remain oblivious to good people’s ruination, the flourishing of bad people, and the wretchedness of the poor. Because of their insatiable desires, they pay attention only to people more prominent than themselves, throw not the slightest glance to the base poverty at the bottom, and show nothing but contempt for the lowly and ignorant. Consequently the poor decline even further in their misery.
Here I will sketch how rulers, even while seeing the extreme plight of these poor people, do not show them the slightest compassion. Out of excessive poverty, an impoverished person may steal something without thinking and be driven away from his native place. Since he is by nature ignorant and dull witted, he does not have the readiness of wit to plunder others quickly and easily through trickery, so when he steals something, he just sticks out his hand and takes it. Given his lack of skill, his bad deed soon becomes apparent, and without any grounds for equivocation, he is punished just like that. Although he did not mean to, he broke the law because he was unable to endure starvation. Is it not heartless to punish him in the same way as one should punish fearless troublemakers?
People burdened with many dependents in their household can neither go elsewhere in search of work nor survive where they are. They exert themselves body and soul, struggling without being able to extricate themselves, until they get sick and derelict, or give up and die. Some simple people are driven to extremities and die suddenly. Diarrhea, ague, and fevers are all diseases that afflict the poor. For these conditions as well, one should spare a little concern.
Some give up on farmwork and set off on a pilgrimage of faith in the Lotus Sutra, wandering through the sixty-six provinces.29 Others make their way along the Shikoku pilgrimage circuit, or the pilgrimage circuits to the thirty-three Kannon temples in western and in eastern Japan, the one thousand temples, or the twenty-four temples associated with Shinran in the Kantō, sometimes dragging along their weak wives and children.30 Perhaps a decrepit old person will start off alone to tour the provinces without a specific destination, making his way by begging and receiving alms. He travels to unknown distant lands and remote regions, lies down on the plains, sleeps in the mountains, spends days inside the precincts of a temple or a roadside shrine, only to be driven away by those pariahs and outcasts called watchmen.31 Beset by afflictions, unable to endure hunger and thirst, cold and heat, unable to rest when ill, lacking even a place to lay his dying body, with no one to take care of him, he falls down on the road and dies. Someone who is by nature ignorant and naive will be unable to get ahead of other people. No matter how far he travels, he will not escape hunger and thirst.
Without the strength to wander the provinces, unable to get around and hence unable to beg, another person crouched in a tumbledown hut without the means to take care of even herself regrets being alive. Even if she stifles her solitary weeping, she cannot regain what is lost, and in the meantime it seems a great happiness to die quickly. If life is not yet ready to leave her body, she has no choice but to make up her mind to hang herself or throw herself into the water. In the end this is what happens to those without anyone to depend on, those among the destitute who have declined the furthest. While they yet retained some small amount of energy, enough to get angry, they sustained the state with their land tax and by performing labor duties. Is it not inhumane and unjust to let the people who protect the state end up in this fashion, without showing them the slightest concern?
In some provinces, there are laws that prevent the people of the soil from moving elsewhere. Satsuma, Hizen, Awa, Tosa, and the like are particularly strict. Although people in Kii are allowed to go to other places as they wish, not only they but also their descendants remain under the control of their daimyo. This is unjust. In Kaga and Sendai, people are allowed to leave for a fixed term, and if they do not return at its end, they are treated as absconders. I have heard that Kaga is especially despotic. The local people of that domain cannot act freely, they lack purpose, and they are dejected without a brave soul among them. The people of Sendai tell lots of falsehoods, and they are all shortsighted. The despotism of a domain’s government can be known through the extent to which it prevents people from leaving. Destitute people have no other way to earn a scanty living than to go to work someplace else, wander the provinces as a mendicant, or go elsewhere as an outcast or a beggar. I have heard that because people cannot make a living in domains such as those noted above, many keel over and die.
Such prohibitions generally arose out of the customs of the age of Warring States [before Tokugawa rule began]. But now that we live in a unified realm, there should be no discrimination between one domain and another. Therefore, should people be prohibited from going to other domains, the most reasonable thing to do in return would be to grant those who have reached an extreme of destitution an allowance, so that they can survive. Without such measures, it is unjust to forcibly prohibit people from moving while at the same time ignoring their hardships when they cannot endure in their own place. This leaves the destitute in fetters and strangles them to death.
Nowadays, the daimyo large and small have completely forgotten to extend their concern down to the destitute; they take pride only in their own glory and oppress the people of the soil. Those daimyo who hate living in their domains and enjoy living in Edo have become particularly extravagant. They bring everything they can to Edo, let their domains wither away, and plunder the people’s food. Furthermore, there are entirely too many rich people in the prosperous cities and elsewhere. Such people, who enjoy the utmost in tasty food and drink, beautiful utensils and clothing, comfortable circumstances for their wives and concubines, and splendid houses, become more assertive, while far too many people in distant provinces and remote regions live in dilapidated huts and wear tattered clothing, no longer able to engage in farming, care for their parents, or raise their children. They are unable to take a bride or a husband, as any ordinary human being should, and have to live without anyone to depend on. In the end they may fall over and die of starvation.
The imbalance between poor and rich, those who suffer and those who are comfortable, steadily widens. On the one hand are people who pile extravagance on top of extravagance; on the other are people who pile destitution on top of destitution. It is said that disorder arises from the ruler’s bedroom and that good government should start with taking care of people without families to support them. Rulers should pay careful attention to this and conduct government in a manner to establish lasting order; they should carry out policies designed to ensure that the people do not decline in number or suffer loss and that none are without means of support. Right now, the system in the world is such that the people who sustain the state are sure to decline and suffer, and more and more destitute people are bound to appear. Is this not intolerable?
Fulfilling the responsibility to govern the realm and the state lies in setting the people at ease. Setting the people at ease lies in helping the destitute. Losing the will to help the destitute means failing the responsibility to govern the realm. This is what is meant by the saying that “Jie and Zhou’s losing the realm arose from their losing the people, and to lose the people means to lose their hearts.”32 Rulers should ponder this carefully.
According to an old saying, “The retainers are the body of their ruler, and the ruler is the heart of his retainers. The ruler makes the people his children, and the people make the ruler their parent.” In this fashion, the daimyo large and small should become fathers and mothers for the people and extend benevolence to them. But even though today the people have become destitute for the sake of their fathers and mothers, those fathers and mothers do not show them any mercy. There is another saying: “If there shall be distress and want within the four seas, the heavenly revenue will come to a perpetual end.”33 Today, even if the destitute are on the verge of collapse, they do not realize that this is because of misgovernment. Without the slightest resentment they blame bad luck or the dictates of fate or karma, and cling to Buddhist teachings. However, from Heaven’s perspective, the daimyo large and small cannot escape their crimes. If they extend benevolent government to the destitute, there will be no need for them to command shrine priests to conduct exorcisms and prayers, nor will there be any need to ask temples everywhere to pray for peace in the realm and happiness for the people. If you take good care of your body, you will not need to ask a doctor for medicine.
Balancing Wealth and Poverty
In today’s world ascetics who abstain from eating rice and grains are worshipped as noted priests of surpassing wisdom, or as saints who survive on only rough forest foods. They may be asked for incantations and prayers, entrusted with responsibility for chanting the Buddha’s name on behalf of others, or worshipped as a buddha or bodhisattva. The destitute, however, have already been subjected to such austerities countless times. Moreover, the ascetics’ austerities are of no benefit to the state. They are idlers. The destitute perform austerities by exhausting themselves for the state’s sake. Since monastics have left their households and do not cultivate paddies and fields, it is only to be expected that they will not eat rice or the five grains. Even though the destitute cultivate the five grains, they do not eat them but instead eat nameless crude foods. They wear rough padded jackets, handle clumsy tools, and bestow on the world everything that they have produced with the utmost travail, shedding sweat and tears in heat and cold. However much a noted priest of surpassing wisdom may exert himself in the practice of austerities for Buddhist merits in deep mountains or ravines, he will not match the virtue of the destitute.
Those who should be revered in this world are the destitute. That is why rulers should comfort them and grant them benevolent government. The heart of Heaven is benevolence. It is said too that the gods and buddhas are embodiments of mercy. Thus benevolent government conforms to the Way of Heaven and to the hearts of gods and buddhas. It is just as in the saying “He who exercises government by means of his virtue may be compared to the north polar star, which keeps its place and all the stars turn toward it.”34 If the ruler represents Heaven by punishing that which Heaven hates and by blessing that on which it bestows pity, all the gods of Heaven and Earth, all the buddhas and bodhisattvas will gather around him and offer their protection. It is not necessary to go and seek them by offering prayers. If the ruler shows benevolence and virtue, the people will all cleave to him, they will unfurl their brow and offer felicitations for ten thousand years. “How abundantly do spiritual beings display the powers that belong to them! We look for them, but do not see them; we listen to, but do not hear them; yet they enter into all things, and there is nothing without them. They cause all the people in the kingdom to fast and purify themselves, and array themselves in their richest dress in order to attend at their sacrifices. Are the spiritual beings thereby called down? They seem to be over the heads, and on the right and left of their worshippers.”35 When the myriad people are joyful, the spiritual beings too gather to accompany them in joy.
In the government of the present world, there is nothing to make the people joyful. Rulers institute despotic government, and they do not realize that this causes the populace to suffer hardship and torment, nor do they realize that the people are forced to scatter, starve, and collapse in death. Consequently windstorms, floods, earthquakes, fire, famine, and epidemics arise; descendants may have short lives, rupturing their ancestors’ bloodline; and various other types of disasters may occur as well, but the men who rule provinces and domains as daimyo do not know the origin of these problems. Out of the blue they pray to the gods and buddhas, but to no effect. If the destitute had benevolent government, would such natural disasters befall them? Rulers should act before Heaven does to bestow correct government, lead the spirits, establish laws and ordinances, take the ideal of the Mean to heart, suffer with the people, and rejoice with the people.
The Divine Lord is said to have declared that [taxes should be collected in such a manner that] the people are neither left to live [extravagantly] nor are killed.36 We should stand in awe before his understanding of the people’s unhappy suffering. Today, however, the wealthy live as they please, and the destitute are discarded and left to die. What we want is a system that allows neither too much wealth nor too much poverty.
There is an old saying that “to govern the people, three things are needed—firmness, gentleness, and the Mean.” Right now, the wealthy should be crushed with firmness, the poverty-stricken should be saved with gentleness, and benevolent government should hold to the Mean. When the Divine Lord first set up magistrates to administer Mikawa, it was said that in Mikawa “there is Kōriki Kiyonaga, who is as compassionate as the Buddha, Honda Shigetsugu, who is as fierce as a demon, and Amano Yasukage, who stands in between.”37 From this we can know that with his divine perception, he understood the nature of firmness, gentleness, and the Mean.
About ten months ago, it so happens, I heard from a person in Aizu that recently there too the rich and poor had become extremely polarized, a great many people had become destitute, and many farmers had already lost their livelihood. As a consequence of these conditions, the daimyo carried out a reform; he confiscated paddies and fields from the rich and distributed them among the poor, so that in each village wealth and poverty would be in balance without distinction. He adopted this measure in accordance with the maxim of Hoshina Masayuki, the Aizu daimyo who established the foundation for the domain’s prosperity and who said, “Administer government with the spirit of ruling the people by helping the small at the expense of the great.”38 This is good government.
I have heard that, generally speaking, people in Aizu have always had a violent temper, and they tend to rise up in protest over the slightest thing. In the past, an uprising that erupted over the assessment of a domain-wide government loan pushed in as far as the castle town, and things really got out of hand.39 Given this history, the reform described above was instituted with the recognition that it was all but certain to cause a riot, but nothing of the sort happened. Just like a fish gaining water, the poor felt relieved of their unhappy suffering; night and day they sang praises of thanksgiving for benevolent government and danced for joy. Many people who had left for other provinces came back home, where they were now able to live in peace. The matter ended with the rich losing their wealth as the paddies and fields that they had deliberately collected were confiscated, and they met with shame and humiliation. Was it not because benevolent government suits the realm that it proved possible to handle this reform without any problem? People who possess surplus resources are not going to riot even when subject to a considerable special assessment. Because “water-drinking” farmers always live on the verge of destitution, should an exceptional levy be added on, their only option is to risk their lives in fomenting a conspiracy. The situation in Aizu was heading in this direction, but it appears that [as a result of reform] the danger was averted.
Aizu’s system constitutes good government, but it is a manner of doing things that diverges from the true principle of government. Is it not the Way of government to arrange things such that as a matter of course there is neither too much wealth nor too much poverty? Lord Masayuki’s maxim says simply that one should handle affairs in this spirit, not that government should establish explicit laws in this fashion. People who live in distant provinces and remote regions, even those who are governors, tend to be obstinate, shortsighted, and ruthless. Will not such extreme policies dry up the productive capacity of fields and paddies? The ruler of one province or one domain cannot, of course, arrange things on his own so there is naturally neither too much wealth nor too much poverty. To bring such a situation about, appropriate measures would have to be taken throughout Japan as a whole.
It is thus the shogunate that must institute this sort of benevolent administration. Recently the shogunate has established various laws to help the people, but these are designed to assist the townspeople and idlers, and they have not provided help for the destitute. For example, the townspeople living in Edo are directed as a special favor to come watch the Noh performed for the shogun; they are given sake, sweets, and money; when it rains they receive umbrellas; and the lord’s fortune spills over onto them.40 Edo surpasses everywhere else in Japan in its splendors. Not only is it easy to live in a place where circulation is convenient beyond compare, the townspeople receive this sort of gracious beneficence in addition. The farmers get nothing like this. In Edo, ever since the Kansei years, granaries have been established where many of the poor can receive enough assistance to get by. There is also a medical school and a hospital in the pharmacological garden that dispense treatment and medicine.41 Whenever there are memorial services for a deceased shogun, the government gives lavish amounts of alms of rice to outcasts and beggars, and even criminals in prison are provided with tokens of the government’s concern in the form of medicines and so forth. It is to be regretted that people who are useless and a waste to the state, such as townspeople, idlers, outcasts, and criminals, all receive its mercy in this fashion, whereas as yet nothing has been done for the people reduced to destitution who serve as the essential foundation of the country. Temples and shrines that are close to extinction may receive official permission to raise funds or be allowed to run lotteries and commit other evils so that they can survive, but there are no laws showing concern for the destitute people who are on the verge of extinction. Even though permission is granted time after time for privileges to allow post stations and other such entities to continue, things are not made convenient in this way for the farmers.
As noted above, it is hard for farmers in the provinces to undertake a lawsuit even if they face outrages and injustices that damage their livelihood. The townspeople and idlers present one petition after another whenever they please, whether it is to set up a guild with a fixed number of members or to establish an association of wholesalers and brokers, and through this they secure regular profits. What is good for the townspeople and idlers harms the people. The rewards that enrich the world and profit individuals all derive from the people’s basic occupation and cause even more suffering to the destitute. Those who are the foundation of the country are the ones in trouble. Furthermore, the country’s foundation will be worn down even more, since the trend is now toward adopting policies that adhere to the logic of profit.
The destitute no longer benefit from the state’s compassion. Stories are passed down of the shogunate’s benevolent governance at the beginning of Tokugawa rule, but even though rulers are held to be benevolent also today, there is no concrete evidence of it. Because the destitute are ignorant and naive, they do not resent their lord and will not hate others even if they collapse and die of starvation. But although they die simply regretting their own lot, retribution will come to the realm and the state.
In the present state of affairs, even should most of the destitute in the provinces die of starvation, there is no sign of benevolent government. No one takes steps to help them; they are simply abandoned to their fate and die of neglect. Fearing that they might meet such an end, people go crazy and think it better to follow the greedy desires so popular today. Confused about all sorts of things, ignorant and dull-witted people fall into this trap. As a consequence the number of righteous people steadily decreases. If you look at all the farmers currently in the provinces, approximately seventy or eighty out of one hundred have become greedy, while the remaining twenty or thirty are only righteous because they are so ignorant and dull witted that they fail to catch on to greed and instead keep to the path of righteousness and simply endure their poverty. But if 70 to 80 percent become wicked, will the remaining 20 to 30 percent ultimately continue to be righteous? Of course they will become fewer. The warriors and the farmers are the foundation of the state, but as noted above, 70 to 80 percent of warriors are no longer warriors, and it is outrageous that the farmers too are turning to greed. This is the root of the ills in today’s world.
Given that only 20 to 30 percent remain righteous, the roots of these ills will sink deeper day by day and month by month if we do not immediately offer them the appropriate remedies. More and more will seek wealth out of greed, and scorning the weak, they will try to plunder the poor. Will not the poor prove unable to endure and lose their lives, or else reach the point where they too become greedy? Whichever, they will change, and righteous people will die out one after another. As for the remainder, everywhere the world will sink into greed, there will be few people with a steady livelihood, and people with a steady heart will disappear. It has already gotten close to that now. When people follow the ways of townspeople and idlers, who do not have a steady livelihood and who engage in greed, it becomes easy to make a living, and it even seems as if they have obtained a steady heart. On the other hand, neither warriors nor farmers are able to have a steady livelihood and a steady heart. This is because greed has become what is “steady” in today’s world.
If both warriors and farmers sink into greed and start to pursue the customs of townspeople and idlers, will not all righteous people disappear? Has not the time come near for all who act counter to the gods and buddhas’ will and betray the Way of Heaven to receive Heaven’s punishment? There is a means to return to the original path of righteousness. Since I discuss it elsewhere, I will omit it here. In any case, what is wanted is for the people of the soil to be people of the soil, neither rich nor extravagant, not plundered, impoverished, or ruined; to take righteousness and simplicity as their normal path without knowing the slightest greed; and not to leave the land but revere the lord of their domain and work at their basic occupation. Is this not the meaning of the saying that for the realm to rest in peace, the people’s livelihood must be in good order; they must be able to readily obtain clothing, food, and shelter and thereby to cleave immovably to righteousness and sturdy simplicity?