Zusho Shozaemon

Zusho Shôzaemon was an official in the service of Satsuma han, known for his agricultural and commercial policies which aimed in the 1820s-1830s to alleviate the domain's deep financial difficulties. These policies aided the domain somewhat, but at the cost of the further exploitation of the people of the Amami Islands.

By 1827, Satsuma was the poorest domain in the realm in terms of the size of its debts, owing some 320,000 kan in loans taken out from Osaka merchants, in large part in order to help finance sankin kôtai missions to Edo. Zusho was placed in charge of suggesting and implementing policies which might help improve the domain's revenues, and thus help pay down the debts. He did this in part by establishing official monopolies on rapeseed, sugar, and rice within the domain, and by imposing requirements for the quality of these products. As the quality of exported rice, rapeseed, and other products improved, so too did the reputation and thus the price of those products. Zusho also expanded efforts aimed at combating smuggling and, ironically perhaps, enlisted sailors such as the Hamazaki family to operate as Satsuma-sanctioned smugglers, grabbing a share of the trade from the Western and Eastern Sea Circuit shipping routes, and paying some portion of it to Shimazu clan coffers.

However, Zusho had a particularly significant impact upon the production of sugar in the Amami Islands, where "a structure of colonial extraction," as one scholar described it, was already in place from nearly the beginning of the 17th century. Zusho re-established a monopoly the domain administration had previously exercised over the sugar produced there, claiming it all from the islanders for roughly 1/3 the price it would earn on the Osaka market. He also expanded the plantation-like exploitation of the island by mandating that all rice paddies on the islands be drained and replaced with fields of sugar cane. Men between the ages of 15 to 60, and women from the age of 13 to 50, were assigned fields to work, and were obliged to purchase all of their food and other necessities from Satsuma officials, often at raised prices; the islanders were further forbidden from using money on the island, and from trading amongst themselves.

References

• Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement, Harvard University Press (2009), 127-129.