JAPAN: AND THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST^361like European vassals, these samurai had no property in the land.
The system fed people according to rank. In principle, nothing more
was needed. But since there is more to life than eating and the appetite
for noncomestibles grows with status, the lord and his retainers needed
to convert much of their rice income into money, the better to enjoy
life's finer things. For this they turned to the despised merchants, who
played an ever more active role in what was supposed to be a quiet
economy but instead bubbled with desire. Here human nature married
the political arrangements, for the system of alternate residence and the
social ambiance of Edo incited to profligacy.^11
This in turn pushed the sword-wearers to extract more from the
peasants. As one superintendent of finance put it, "Peasants are like
sesame seeds: the more you squeeze them, the more you get." Very
witty; but squeeze too hard and you get peasant uprisings or flight, to
towns or to other han. (As in Europe, the best protection against op
pression was the possibility of exit.) Historians have counted almost
three thousand peasant disturbances between 1590 and 1867, occur
ring more often and violentiy in the second half of the period and in
the richer areas. Favored targets: the houses and warehouses of rich
farmers, merchants, and moneylenders. Clearly economic change was
shaking the social order and breaching the social contract.
It was easier to borrow than to wrest. Daimyd and samurai knew
their merchants, many of them already active in the grain trade and tied
into politics. The merchants in turn knew their customers personally
and felt unable to refuse their requests for loans.* To be sure, nothing
was riskier for the lender: his debtors were stronger than he and could
refuse to pay. Only too often, moreover, these deadbeats had the sup
port of higher authorities, who had their own reasons to resent the
power of money and decreed general reductions and cancellations of
debt.t
But this kind of thing cuts both ways: habitual borrowers and bad
- These loans often began as advances on anticipated rice revenues, converted into
long-term loans at 10 to 20 percent per year—Miyamoto, "Emergence of National
Market," pp. 300-01.
(^1) In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the shogun Yoshimune issued a
number of decrees freeing samurai of their debts secured by their rice stipends if the
price of rice fell and barring lawsuits over debt. Merchants began dunning their debtors
personally, picketing their residences and stopping their litters and horses in the street.
Some posted a paper protest flag in front of the house or on the gate—a practice that
the decree of 1729 found "most outrageous" and inadmissible—Takekoshi, Economic
Aspects, II, 362-66.