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  • Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan by Maren A. Ehlers
  • Marcia Yonemoto (bio)
Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan. By Maren A. Ehlers. Harvard University Asia Center, Cambridge MA, 2018. xvi, 334 pages. $49.95.

In this richly detailed study of Ōno, an early modern castle town of some 6,000 residents in inland Echizen Province, Maren Ehlers uses a range of local sources to reveal the finely calibrated relations between and among rulers and ruled. She focuses in particular on people belonging to the most marginalized socioeconomic groups: the impoverished, itinerants, and outcastes. Ehlers shows how political and social stability was premised on the integrity and mutual dependence of self-governing groups, including the poor and outcastes, all of whom had clearly delineated roles within the Tokugawa status order. While Ehlers's study seems local and discrete, its implications are much broader, for the system of nested hierarchies of dependence and autonomy she describes in Ōno existed in regionally variable forms all over early modern Japan and together enabled the otherwise improbable stability and survival of the Tokugawa regime as a whole.

The book is organized into six substantial chapters, organized loosely by theme and chronology. Ehlers argues that a strict topical or temporal [End Page 169] division fails to reveal the interrelated nature of status and social relations as they evolved over time, and by and large the book's structure works, although there is some inevitable repetitiveness. The first three chapters constitute a highly informative review of the complexities of the Tokugawa status order and the sociopolitical relations it engendered—they should be required reading for any student of the early modern period. Chapter 1 gives an overview of the castle town and domain of Ōno, a smallish fief of 40,000 koku in a province (Echizen) in which there were no fewer than 17 different political jurisdictions, only six of which constituted castle-town headquarters; the others were domanial or shogunal exclaves. Ehlers points out that on the scale of fragmentation, Echizen was somewhere in the mid-range, although she is careful to avoid claims for its representativeness. She notes that "the people of inner Echizen behaved more as residents of a geographical region than as subjects of a particular domain" (p. 39), and Ōno itself was governed more like a "township plus hinterland than a territorial state" (p. 40). Some Ōno townspeople also farmed, and in both urban and rural areas, status and rank generally correlated with wealth, but only loosely. As Ehlers points out, Ōno's poor came from all status groups, including indebted samurai. All of these facts work against the idea of the neatly hierarchical "four-class system" in which lines of authority were clear and incontestable.

Most revealing of the deep but highly functional contradictions in the status/wealth relationship was the situation of Ōno's outcaste classes, in particular the hereditary beggars (known as hinin or Koshirō—the latter term at one time referred to an individual beggar boss but later came to refer to the entire status group), who form the subject of chapter 2. Outcastes in Ōno, as elsewhere in Tokugawa Japan, were not defined strictly by occupation or bloodline, but contained "many marginal groups that suffered from varying degrees of stigma" (p. 70) accumulated over time, and in addition to beggars included leatherworkers (kawata), itinerant performers, and the blind. All these groups were formally excluded from membership in the normative communities of peasants and townspeople, but yet they constituted integral parts of the status order. They all were organized around an occupation and they maintained long-term relationships with authorities and other status groups. Though outcaste occupations differed regionally, Ōno's Koshirō were professional beggars who solicited alms in designated begging territories or turfs, and domain officials regulated their activities.

At the same time, the Koshirō considered themselves a guild (nakama), and, like other guilds, they regulated themselves. By the late Tokugawa period, the Koshirō in Ōno had developed into what Ehlers calls "beggar bosses," who managed the operations of the entire beggar community and who served important roles in both town and...

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