Some Aspects of Japanese Feudal Institutions
The starting point of my discourse should be the shō. Shō ... was the generic name applied to several species of private domains—such as shō in the narrower sense, sono, maki, soma, and the like, after their conditions had been more or less equalized— whose nature as an institution defies an exact definition. Being a slow, unpremediated growth under circumstances of considerable diversity, the shō may better be described and analyzed than briefly defined. When they made their modest appearance in the eighth century, the shō were few in number and of an irregular and varying institutional character; but they all shared in common at least the following aspects: (1) each shō contained, as its chief element, a tract of land that had been newly brought under cultivation; (2) the shō was under the patronage of some person of influence or of an institution, known as the hon-ke ... and ryō-ke, ... to whom we shall hereafter apply the word "seignior"; (3) some shō enjoyed or claimed and all shō aspired for fiscal immunity in whole or in part, the extent of
immunity being coincident with the degree to which their revenues were diverted from the fiscus of the state to the private coffer of the seignior. In the course of the next four hundred years, shō so far increased in number and in immunity at the expense of the state, that, at the end of the twelfth century, their extent probably equaled that of the public domain, and their practical influence upon the political and economic life of the nation overshadowed that of the government. At the same time, the shō underwent as remarkable an internal development. It is the first requisite for the student of Japanese feudalism to gain an understanding of the nature of the shō from a comparative point of view.
We shall imagine ourselves visiting a typical shō about the year 1150, for then the shō as an institution had attained its full maturity. Here we find our shō already immune or nearly so from taxation and from the intrusion of public officials. More or less autonomous, the shō is under the shadowy rule of an absent seignior, who is a court noble at Kyōto or perhaps a great temple; his interest is in the keeping of his agent residing in the shō. Under these agents range themselves in order the various tenures of land and the classes of people who hold them. As we set about____________________