"One drink from a gourd": Servants, shophands and laborers in the cities of Tokugawa Japan. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

During the Tokugawa period of Japanese history (1603-1868), hereditary, lifetime, and corvee forms of labor were gradually replaced by free wage-labor. While scholars to date have documented this transition in connection with village communities, this study describes the urban labor force of servants, shophands, day-laborers and manufacturing operatives. It suggests that changes in the nature of this labor force anticipated, and served as models for, later changes in the character of agrarian labor. The massive scale of urban construction over the course of the seventeenth century made reliance upon the traditional corvee inadequate and impractical. The Tokugawa regime and various domains were obliged to recognize free, hired "day-laborers" to supplement, and eventually supersede, peasant conscripts. Meanwhile, for their own political reasons, the authorities banned hereditary service in both samurai and commoner households, facilitating the appearance of short-term employment seasons, labor brokers and employment agencies. Relations between employers and employees were based ultimately on a cash nexus, and were often cool and impersonal, if not hostile. In manufacturing operations, capitalistic productive relations, based upon wage-labor in the strict Marxian sense, also emerged in Tokugawa cities. When Japan began to industrialize in the Meiji era, she had at hand not only a suitable peasant labor force, but also an urban proletariat already accustomed to the discipline of wage-labor.