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16 - Labor and Migration in Tokugawa Japan

Moving People

from Part III - Social Practices and Cultures of Early Modern Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2024

By
Amy Stanley
Edited by
David L. Howell
David L. Howell
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
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Summary

This chapter surveys the history of labor in the Edo period. It begins by analyzing how merchant, samurai, and peasant households organized and mobilized working people, including shop clerks, building superintendents, apprentices, maidservants, sumo wrestlers, samurai retainers, wet nurses, and farmhands. It then moves to consider groups that mobilized labor outside the household, such as boardinghouses and gangster organizations. Along the way, it considers gendered divisions of labor, as well as the relationship between productive and reproductive labor, which could be paid or unpaid, pursued inside or outside kinship structures. Overall, the chapter argues that although households continued to be important in consolidating and deploying labor, an older form in which labor was controlled chiefly by samurai overlords working through status groups gradually gave way to a more diverse, specialized, and highly mobile labor market.

Keywords

Edolabor migrationemployment contractssamuraireproductioncastle townsMitsui EchigoyaShirokiyahitoyadoconcubinageprostitution
Type
Chapter
Information
The New Cambridge History of Japan , pp. 537 - 566
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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