Commercialization and Status in Tokugawa Japan

How to frame the social and economic system of Japan during its “early modern” period within universal categories has challenged many observers. Whether seen as a fundamentally “pre-” or “proto-” capitalist society, visions of the Tokugawa period depend on evaluations of Japan’s transition to modernity. When discussing the period on its own terms, historians have viewed Tokugawa Japan as a “status society.” Tokugawa subjects related to the state and to each other through hereditary and non-hereditary status groups, in a system designed to sustain the continued domination of the samurai ruling class. Tokugawa “status society,” the typical narrative goes, broke down under the pressures of commercialization and concomitant social and economic polarization.

In this story of the Tokugawa period, a static and inflexible status system built to buttress the samurai state steadily lost ground to the alien logic of money and commerce. But commerce and status mobility characterized the Tokugawa state and society at its foundation. Many of the phenomena described as morbid symptoms of a traditional society in decay during the late 18th and early 19th centuries – the role of merchant capital in the state, the flexibility of status, and an upsurge in the number of people living outside of status groups – all not only existed in the 17th century but even played a critical role in the formation of the new polity.

Building on this observation, this paper presents a vision of Tokugawa society as governed by status in name only. Commercial capital, far from something foreign to the Tokugawa system, fit comfortably within it. Focusing on fake households, the “stockification” of status, and the flexibility of names and identities, the paper argues that Tokugawa Japan was a society just as much governed by the logic of financialization as it was by the logic of status.