Commerce and towns in medieval Japanintrinsic link between towns and commerce, both locally and across regions, is now fully recog-
nized; and the merchants’ ability to supply the population with specialized and foreign products
is now understood. Also significant is the recognition that the subfields of cities and commerce
help explicate other topics: medieval social statuses cannot be fully grasped without reference to
Kyoto’s outcasts nor can medieval Kyoto as home to small- scale moneylenders be ignored in a
study of peasant uprisings. Finally, there is no longer justification for portrayal of the medieval
economy as a subsistence arrangement.
Why have the urban and the commercial gained a permanent place in medieval history?
Perhaps it is the tangible nature of these topics in a discipline that often grapples with abstract
systems of thought and governance. Perhaps it is that they provide a lens for understanding how
people lived and met their quotidian needs in a time that produced few written sources pertain-
ing to such matters. Perhaps it is that they show us a distant mirror of ourselves and our values,
including even materialism, in a harsh and difficult time. Or perhaps it is simply that they epito-
mize normalcy amid much instability. Commerce and towns were constants in an age of
volatility.
Notes
1 Farris makes this case in the areas of agriculture, commerce, and fertility in Chapter 4 of Japan’s Medieval
Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age, 128–163.
2 Wakita Haruko with Susan Hanley, “Dimensions of Development: Cities in Fifteenth and Sixteenth
Century Japan,” 295–326, describes the development of medieval urban studies in Japan through the
1970s.
3 Kuroda Toshio, Shōensei shakai. 191–193.
4 Amino Yoshihiko, “Chūsei toshiron.” 263–266.
5 Kozo Yamamura, “The Growth of Commerce in Medieval Japan,” 344–395.
6 Farris, Japan to 1600: A Social and Economic History, 129–163.
7 Suzanne Gay, “The Lamp- Oil Merchants of Iwashimizu Shrine: Transregional Trade in Medieval
Japan,” 1–51.
8 Ethan Isaac Segal, Coins, Trade, and the State: Economic Growth in Early Medieval Japan.
9 Peter D. Shapinsky, Lords of the Sea: Pirates, Violence, and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan.
10 The following account of the late twentieth- century evolution of local history in tandem with advances
in archeology draws primarily from Niki Hiroshi, “Chiikishi kenkyū no kanōsei,” 45–65.
11 Niki, “Chiikishi kenkyū no kanōsei,” 46–47.
12 Fujiwara Yoshiaki, Chūsei no michi to toshi.
13 Fujiwara, Chūsei no michi to toshi, 100–101.
14 Fujiwara, Chūsei no michi to toshi, 102–103.
15 Information on archeology and Kamakura’s history is derived from Fujiwara, Chūsei no michi to toshi,
77–99, and Ishii Susumu and Ōmiwa Tatsuhiko, Bushi no toshi Kamakura.
16 Kamakura’s archeological excavations have yielded almost no warrior implements like weapons and
armor, a puzzling lacuna in this city of warriors. This has been explained by the fact that most objects
unearthed in archeological digs are discarded items like broken dishes, worn tools, bones, shells, etc.,
whereas warriors did not discard their implements. Ishii and Ōmiwa, Bushi no toshi Kamakura, 222.
17 See Fujiwara, Chūsei no michi to toshi, 79–86, for accounts of military campaigns traced along these roads.
In the early Kamakura period, the coastal Inaba road to the southwest was the land route out of
Kamakura toward Kyoto.
18 These merchants have been studied extensively by Japanese historians for decades; see Sakurai Eiji,
Nihon chūsei no keizai kōzō, 360, comparing their wide network of operations to those of the Kumano
and Ise merchants. In English see Gay, “The Lamp- Oil Merchants.”
19 Murai Shōsuke lays out this concept most succinctly in Kyōkai wo matagu hito bito as, “peoples straddling
border areas.” This concept might be applied to the way many residents of San Diego- Tijuana actually
live and work in that zone, if the border existed without the official control apparatus of both nations.
20 Kitagawa Hiroshi and Bruce T. Tsuchida, The Tale of the Heike, 53–54, 90–91, 127, 142–145, 159–160,
162–164. 166, 179, 185–191.