Central Control or Parallel Evolution Samurai Landholding in Tokugawa Japan

It has long been a central tenant of Tokugawa history that samurai fiefs "effectively" became defunct during the 17th century. This typically is understood (in the English-language literature) as reflecting a tightening of "central control" over divisive tendencies throughout the Tokugawa polity and an important step in achieving political stability. While it is undeniable that samurai fiefs underwent fundamental changes between the 16th and 17th centuries, it is an overstatement to say that these disappeared from the Tokugawa political structure. Fiefs granted as holdings in land are estimated to have existed in some 16% of all domains, accounting for some half of the kokudaka ;p~ of the same. Since the holders of the overwhelming majority of these fiefs did not hold full and independent rights of administration, jurisdiction and taxation, their existence has often been dismissed as "insignificanL" This approach tells us a lot about what the fief holders did not do: it tells.us nothing about what they did do. Yet trying to move beyond this negative approach is difficult because we know so little about landed-fiefs in general. and what we do know does not lend itself to generaIisation. Notwithstanding how little we actually do know about landed-fiefs, there has been a change in emphasis in scholarship within the last decade. This has come about from a growing realisation among some scholars that despite landed-fiefs having been pronounced dead many times over, the institution did not disappear from the Tokugawa Polity, and mo~over, that it continued to exercise a strong influence over the self-perceptions of samurai of this period! This change in emphasis has yet to be accepted as the general consensus (the two "rising stars" of generaIistic formulations about the Tokugawa Polity, Mizubayashi Takeshi 7J<:if:*~ and Kasaya Kazuhiko ~~~1t -r!;, despite the considerable difference in their approach to describing the Tokugawa Polity, agree that landed-fiefs are of no significance).2 yet recent developments in research suggest that there is a need to take another look at