Commerce and towns in medieval Japanorganized into protected local guilds were the most prominent players in medieval commerce while
cultivators at the supply end and warrior lords at the domain level were likewise full participants in
the operation of commerce.
As for towns and cities, until the late twentieth century the characterization of medieval
Japan’s urban sector resembled a pyramid, with Kyoto at the top as the imperial capital, Japan’s
largest city by far, home to aristocratic and religious consumers of products shipped in from their
provincial estates. Mercantile and craft guilds proliferated there under the taxing authority of
mainly religious overlords. Outside of Kyoto, smaller cities of varying types emerged, including
port and post towns, temple- affiliated towns, country towns that evolved from rural markets,
and early castle towns. At the base of the pyramid were villages, tiny communities where the
majority agrarian population lived in what was assumed to be a largely subsistence economy.
Working against a more complex representation of the urban was historians’ tendency to
focus heavily on matters of governance and the nature of rulership. This can be seen in the
postwar search for the self- governing Japanese medieval city, in accordance with the con-
temporary understanding of European medieval cities. Although this search gave way in the
1970s to fuller attention to cities as communities, including neighborhood life, cultural activities,
and commercial guilds, a dependence on textual sources, necessarily elite in origin, still meant
that administrative policy, taxation, and conflicts between rulers and residents got the lion’s share
of historians’ notice.^2 Attention to rulership also determined Kuroda Toshio’s characterization of
medieval cities as primarily political and religious bases of the ruling elites, and thus, according to
him, necessarily large and only numbering three in total—Kyoto, Nara, and Kamakura.^3 Amino
Yoshihiko later broadened the category considerably with his concept of “city- like places” (tos-
hiteki na ba), allowing numerous communities of varying sizes to be considered cities.^4 Still, little
attention was paid to them as nodes in larger commercial networks and trade routes. The specifics
of commerce and trade, including transportation systems and the specialists who ran them,
remained mostly untouched until later decades when archeological evidence amassed sufficiently
to give both depth and breadth to our understanding of trade.
From the late twentieth century, as urban and commercial scholarship flourished in Japan,
several works appeared in English as well that explicated aspects of medieval commerce and
economy. Kozo Yamamura’s 1990 account of the medieval economic revolution through com-
mercial activities and institutions like markets and guilds, widespread commutation and moneti-
zation, was for its time notable for not making commercial matters primarily about the rulers’
policies.^5 William Wayne Farris’s economic and social history provided the important medieval
context in which commerce and cities could thrive, and departs from other treatments by
showing how economic developments affected and were effected by various social groups.^6 My
2009 study of a group of lamp oil merchants revealed a commercial network dealing in a specific
commodity that covered most of western Japan, utilizing trade routes originally for the transport
of estate goods in the Heian period.^7 Ethan Segal’s study of economic growth in the early medi-
eval period depicts Japan’s shift to a market economy as happening mainly far from the center.^8
Rural markets were a prime locus for monetization, while commutation and bills of exchange
enabled long- range transactions. Most recently, Peter Shapinsky’s study of Inland Sea “maritime
magnates” supplies for the first time in English an account of the workings of medieval maritime
commerce and trade routes while defining piracy in terms of local rulership.^9 It is notable that a
primary focus on Kyoto characterizes none of these studies, although its centrality is recognized
where relevant. The capital did not eclipse myriad other towns, cities, and commercial
activities.
This more sophisticated understanding of commerce, monetization, and trade routes requires
shelving the earlier pyramid model of medieval cities, with Kyoto at its apex. To insist on the