Status, Property, and Wage Labor in the Early Modern Japanese City

The urban neighborhood (chō) was the basic unit of everyday life and local governance in the early modern Japanese city. More than mere residential districts, early modern neighborhoods were self-governing (status) organizations comprised of urban landholders. At the beginning of Japan’s early modern era, neighborhoods were relatively egalitarian associations of small-scale merchants and artisans, who owned small tracts of residential property and controlled the means of social reproduction. Generally, local landholders worked in their neighborhood of residence, and ownership of residential property in a specific neighborhood was an essential prerequisite for participation in the neighborhood administration.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, neighborhoods became increasingly stratified, as many smallholders were forced to sell their assets and rent property from a burgeoning stratum of large-scale merchant houses, who accumulated vast portfolios of urban property through money lending. This process of stratification led to growing absentee landlordism and gave rise to a vast array of sub-groups, all of which were placed under the authority of local landholders and excluded from participation in neighborhood governance. The lowest such stratum were the day laborers. Members of this group were alienated from ownership of land and tools, and had no other choice but to exchange their labor for a wage, or engage in some form of petty commerce. Those that were unable to find employment attempted to survive by panhandling and engaging in various forms of petty crime. This presentation examines the mode of existence of early modern Japan’s urban day laborers as an example of wage labor in a pre-industrial context. I highlight the mechanism employed by the early modern authorities to ensure their regulation, and discuss the kind of documentation that allows us to recover the lives of those living on the margins of early modern societies.