ABSTRACT
Chisui or water management is the process of changing the existing state of a river by manipulating it in some way or by implementing legal measures in order to improve or maintain the conditions of production, maintain the safety of daily life for ordinary people, or enhance the convenience of shipping. Several perspectives are viable in an analysis of chisui in the Tokugawa era. This chapter focuses on the various restrictions that authorities placed on land use inside the levees. It also focuses on land use and land patterns within the levees. The chapter examines chisui in Tokugawa-era Japan by focusing on riverside land policy. For much of Japan’s medieval era, large-scale river engineering projects that required massive labor mobilization were not conducted. However, by the mid-sixteenth century, as the medieval era was drawing to a close, large-scale chisui projects, including river work overseen by Takeda Shingen of Kai Province, were carried out by several Warring States daimyo.
