Taxation

Early Modern

Taxes were levied according to a myriad of different systems in the Edo period. The Meiji government recorded more than 2,000 different forms of taxation in place prior to its own tax reforms in the 1870s. The majority of domain revenues came from nengu, a set portion of agricultural production (sometimes paid in kind instead) collected village by village, while other taxes were often known as komononari, or by a variety of other names.

Outside of nengu, taxes can be considered as falling under three general umbrella categories: taxes on use of the commons, taxes on by-employments, and taxes in the form of corvée labor.

Since rivers, forests, and ocean were typically used in a communal fashion for the collection of a variety of products, and since the extent of their use or the volume gathered was difficult to monitor, taxes on the commons were typically levied by household. By-employments, meaning activities such as fishing, moneylending, shipping, or small-time artisanal manufacturing, in which peasants engaged in addition to agricultural work (theoretically but not necessarily actually their primary work), were typically taxed in a flat amount, or by percentages.

Corvée labor, meanwhile, varied considerably. Villages located near the major highways were subject to a corvée known as sukegô (助郷) in which villagers were required to serve as, or to otherwise provide, porters to assist in carrying luggage for formal missions such as a daimyô's sankin kôtai missions to and from Edo. Other forms of corvée were, most often, irregular, calling upon villagers to contribute to construction projects or the like only from time to time. Further, in many domains, by the mid-to-late Tokugawa period, corvée levies were replaced by payments in grain or in cash. Other taxes were also sometimes replaced by direct payments in cash or grain, coming to resemble nothing different from additions to the nengu obligation.

As the economy became increasingly commercialized and proto-industrial later in the Edo period, many domains began to tax specific products, in an effort to capture a share of the domainal economy necessary for the running of the domain (though, this chiefly involved paying retainer stipends, and funding sankin kôtai-related expenses). However, taxation negatively impacts the producer's profits, and so, to some extent at least, peasants often switched from one cash crop to another, seeking that which would bring the greatest profit margin. In short, domainal policies came up against basic economic forces of incentive and disincentive. Attempts to accommodate for this by, for example, mandating by fiat the production of certain goods, ran up against the expense of enforcement, and in many cases the relatively easy and inexpensive ways for peasants to circumvent the system.

References

• Mark Ravina, Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan, Stanford University Press (1999), 55.