| Samurai Movies (22) |
March 3, 2022
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| [Poorness] In the movie 'Yaji Kita dochu Teresko', Yaji helped a woman to escape from her working in a brothel and traveled together. Actually, the woman had told a lie to Yaji that her father suffered from a severe illness and she wanted to meet him before he died. Yaji, Kita and the woman aimed to go to her home town. But, she regretted having told a lie to Yaji, and left them She returned to her home village. It was for the first time for a couple of decades since she had been home. She went to her house and found that her father was more than fine. There was a wedding party in her house and her father was the groom. He was sitting in front of everyone with a young bride who was holding a baby. There were relatives and many villagers there as guests. A man was citing a ritual celebration prayer. In front of them, she started to accuse her father, saying that he had sold his daughter to the brothel for money, and now was doing something good for himself. This scene reminded him of a famous TV drama setting in the Edo Period, named 'Kogarashi Monjiro'. He was a student when it was televised. He had liked this drama very much. 'Kogarashi' means winter cold wind. At the beginning of each episode of the drama, there was a narration which explained about Monjiro's background. When Monjiro was born in a village in the Kanto region, he was almost killed by his parents because of their economical condition. He somehow survived it and  when he was 10 years old, he left the village. Now, he, in his twenties, was a traveling gambler, going here and there gambling at illegal game halls. In the drama, he would often meet poor, young beautiful women who were working in a brothel. They would be sold by their poor and/or mean family. Now that he thought of it, this drama gave its viewers a typical image of farmers in the Edo period, poor and desperate. He had studied at school that the first shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate said, "For farmers, don't be alive, don't be dead." He didn't know whether it was true or not. Once he had searched for the population in the Edo Period. In the early 1600s, the population of the country was about 17 million. In the next century, the population went up to about 30 million. It was because that after the warring years, a peaceful Edo Period came, and each han started to cultivate new lands. In those years, new gold, silver, and copper mines were discovered. But, during the rest of the Edo Period, from around 1700 to 1868, the population had been stuck. It was because the climate became cooler, and harvests became poorer. Natural resources dried up. But, he guessed that maybe the biggest reasons were that the Tokugawa Shogunate and each han's policies were bad. The Tokugawa Shogunate banned trade. They were ordered not to buy expensive things, and to live frugally, so the economy shrank. But recently, he found some interesting data on the web. The data set the population of each region in 1721 at a hundred percent, and showed the percentage in the latter part of the Edo Period for one and a half centuries: ・Tohoku Region (Northern Eastern (part of the country)) : 80%~90% ・Kanto Region (Eastern Central) : 80%~90% ・Kinki Region (Southern Central) : 90%~100% ・Hokuriku Region (Western) : 110%~120% ・Sanyo Region (Southern Western) : 110%~120% ・Kyushu Region (Southern) : 110%~120% The website didn't give any explanations so he guessed. In that era, the majority of the population were farmers: ・Tohoku was cooler and had a disadvantage for growing crops, especially during the Edo Period, coldness affected this region the most. ・He wondered why Kanto was so bad because it includes Edo, the most prosperous city. But he read that a lot of farmers escaped to Edo for a better life, so villages in Kanto couldn't keep their functions properly. This matches the 'Kogarashi Monjiro's story. ・He didn't understand about Kinki because it had two big consuming cities, Osaka and Kyoto. ・Hokuriku had Kanazawa han, which had good, broad lands for farming and produced a lot of koku of rice. ・Sanyo and Kyushu were located mostly in the south so the conditions of rice producing was better than other regions. They sometimes harvested rice twice a year. But, he had a second thought because those regions were mountainous and couldn't have had so much farming lands, in the first place. (To be continued ...) |
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No. 468
*groom :花婿
*ritual :儀式
*desperate :絶望的な
*ban :禁止する
*frugally :倹約して
*prosperous :栄えた
*mountainous :山の多い