ABSTRACT
THE ASHIKAGA LAND SYSTEM REVIVED IN THE TOKUGAWA PERIOD.- As stated in the preceding chapter, prior to the Tokugawa period, rights over land were of two classes, Jochi-ken and Gechi-ken, the former developing into merely the right of control and the latter into ownership, both rights being salable articles. In Ashikaga times the taxes began to be paid more in money than in kind, but the system was a chaotic one, and rates of taxation varied throughout Japan. When Hideyoshi came into power he carried out an adjustment of the land and taxation system which then prevailed, and in their turn the Tokugawa revised the taxation system established by the Toyotomis. Hideyoshi concentrated all the taxes on land, discontinuing the miscellaneous taxes that had been raised prior to his time, but his successors, the Tokugawa, reverted to the minor taxes as in Ashikaga days, over and above the land-tax. Under Hideyoshi's land system, out of the total output of rice from the arable land, the Ryoshu or lord, who possessed the right of controlling the land, took twothirds, and the remaining one-third went to the farmer, who held the Gechi-ken or right of cultivation or true ownership over the land, and who actually worked on it. This system, too, was abolished by the Tokugawa as soon as they grasped the reins of government, which left Japan again without a common rate of taxation in practice all over the country, and both land and taxation system fell back into the chaotic state which characterized the Ashikaga period. Toyotomi Hideyoshi accomplished his political achievements in a very short time, and they were quickly undone by Tokugawa Iyeyasu's reactionary policy, and the same was the case with his systems of land and taxation. Generally speaking, therefore, the land system of the Tokugawa period was nothing but a revival of the land system operated in the later years of the Ashikaga Period.
