- Japanese: 郷士 (goushi)
Gôshi (lit. "countryside/village warrior") were Edo period samurai who remained situated in the countryside rather than residing in castle towns. This was possible only in a few parts of the archipelago, including chiefly in Satsuma han, which had the highest samurai to non-samurai ratio of any domain, and which was powerful enough to exact from the Tokugawa shogunate exceptions to policies such as that removing samurai from the land. Gôshi could also be peasants or commoners who have been granted certain privileges of the samurai, similar to goyô shônin, such as the right to bear swords, the right to audience with the lord, or the right to use of a family name in official documents, albeit without being actually made members of the samurai class.[1]
Gôshi thus had more personal, direct power over the peasants of their local area, though many also worked the land themselves.
Famous Gôshi
References
- Conrad Schirokauer, David Lurie, and Suzanne Gay, A Brief History of Japanese Civilization, Wadsworth Cengage (2013), 155.
- ↑ Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press (1998), 11n26, 51.