Servants, Laborers, and Shophands in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan

Although it is a subject far out of the 'expertise' of this blog, Leupp's Servants, Laborers, and Shophands in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan offers an interesting study on urban history and the rise of wage labor. Focusing on urban domestics, servants, casual laborers, and shophands rather than artisans or the urban poor or street peddlers, Leupp's study demonstrates the key role played by the state in instituting wage labor over life contracts between employers and laborers. The Tokugawa period, although often described as "feudal," paved the way for new social relations and proto-industrialization, a key step toward the development of capitalism. That is the importance of this text, although the study limits itself to the working population of Tokugawa cities and their lives.

 

The conditions were propitious for these developments as merchants became more status-obsessed like the aristocrats, flaunting their wealth and position. The urban boom in the early period of the Tokugawa era favored rural to urban migration as well as a high demand for labor, plus the shoguns mandated the daimyos and their relatives spend a significant amount of time in Edo, thereby fomenting the need for servants and workers to provide services. Soon employment agencies emerged, work groups with a boss who provided labor to clients, shophands and clerks who worked for various businesses, and entertainment venues for all social classes. It's astonishing how modern it sounds, these transformations in Edo, Kyoto and other Japanese castle-towns or urban areas.

 

Leupp's book also analyses in great detail master-servant relations for domestics, forms of resistance (usually individual forms, such as flight or theft, not collective action), housing for the urban laborers, Tokugawa government policies with regards to incarceration and vocational training, urban riots, wages, and gendered dimensions of the workforce. He draws on a wide array of sources, particularly literary ones to perceive societal attitudes towards changes in the workforce, master-servant relations, and the audiences of theater performances. For the casual reader with only a superficial knowledge of such literary references, it could be confusing at times.

However, perhaps the monograph would have been strengthened by including street peddlers, the urban poor, and artisans in the analysis. The groups overlapped considerably, since many day laborers also hawked goods or food in the street, or joined criminal elements and vagrants. Further, some apprentices and artisans, such as carpenters or masons, are included in the analysis. These categories overlapped and would have frequently crossed paths as commoners in the cities and towns, even if many artisans were organized into guilds and possessed more of a petty bourgeois outlook. It would also have been useful to see how technological changes over time contributed to the growth of wage labor and skilled or "unskilled" trades and professions. Was there a rise in the number of artisans who joined the ranks of the day laborers and urban hawkers?

Nevertheless, this is a fascinating perspective on the rise of a proto-proletariat before the Meiji period, and offers some insights into the rise of capitalism. Leupp acknowledges this throughout the book, comparing Japan with early modern European cities to stress the distinctive and shared patterns. Again, the key role played by the "feudal" state is central, although it throws into question what exactly feudal or capitalist systems entail.