In early medieval Japan, a wife filed a lawsuit.
She had transferred all her lands to her loving husband.
Her husband then lovingly divorced her.
She thought, “Whoops can’t trust a man,” and wanted her land back.
The law at the time said that you could take
back land that you gifted to a family member.
But her ex-husband said,
“Ah, but divorced couples are not family members,
they are like strangers.”
Which was a bit vicious, damn, but the government
said he was right, they were not family.
And the ex-husband kept the land.
This was a lawsuit from the Kamakura Period [1185 - 1333].
Old lawsuits are engorged with information,
allowing us to suckle many mouthfuls of knowledge from them.
From this case, we see that women could own land, that they could transfer land,
that people could take back land if they gave it to a family member,
and that love is a lie.
It was a time of big changes to the samurai family,
and the beginning of some s--tty times for women.
But some people overstate this.
There were positive changes for women, like changes to marriage.
Before, a man could marry multiple women,
but they were more like concubines with random expiration dates.
Marriage was so informal that a man could ghost a marriage,
just go out for a sushi break and never come back.
That’s how they rolled.
Old stories mentioned women freaking out because of this.
A woman panicked her husband may be visiting a different wife.
Another waiting in fear, not knowing if her husband had just ghosted her.
But things changed for wives.
Back then, people identified with their uji 氏, or their clans.
If you were part of the Minamoto clan, the other Minamotos were your brethren.
But at some point, these clans grew huge.
Minamotos were everywhere.
Lift a rock? There’s a Minamoto.
Open your closet? There’s a Minamoto.
On your marriage bed? There’s a Minamoto.
After a while, being part of a good clan was
like being into indie bands, you ain’t that special.
Instead of identifying with their clans, their uji,
people started identifying with their ie 家, or their household or family.
A clan was a group of people related by blood, theoretically,
but a household was a family built around a married couple.
By the Kamakura Period, households became the main type of family unit.
Relationships and conflicts happened between households, not entire clans.
Families centered around one married couple was a step forward for women.
Instead of a man being married to a bunch of women who were all on shaky ground, in
danger of falling down the depths of divorce at any time,
the ie system lifted one woman to wife status.
Her new powers included control of the household and the ability to redecorate.
She gained a higher power level than before,
but a wife really turned super saiyan after her husband died,
which happened often because a husband was usually much older than his wife,
and therefore was more likely to die first because he would rather kill himself
than spend his last years arguing about
whether or not they should replace the couch.
After her husband died, the widow controlled the family if they had kids.
If she was clever enough, she could have even
gone against her late husband’s wishes and
changed the inheritances of the kids.
The audacity.
Usually in a marriage, the wife wins the argument if her husband is dead.
Traditionally, husband and wife owned land separately.
A wife could live in her husband’s home and still have her own property elsewhere.
She could pass down her lands to any of her children.
If she had no children, her lands went back to her birth family, not her husband.
When a samurai wanted to sleep, he counted
pieces of land hopping over dead other samurai.
Land was everything to these warriors.
I’m not gonna make it.
Please tell my wife I love…that she agreed to give my lands to Nobu-chan.
It was a huge source of income, and they made
damn sure their lands passed to the right people.
The best reason to have parents is for the inheritance.
That’s how the world works.
You get rich and pass the money down to your kids,
then they pass it down to their psychopaths.
When parents died, they split their lands
between the children, and didn’t treat daughters
differently from sons.
It was normal for a father to declare that his lands would go to the kid
in his wife’s belly, not caring if it was a boy or girl.
But then history came and screwed it all up.
Land was becoming rare.
Households ran into a problem,
and the problem was spelled M-E-N,
with a W-O in front of that.
Households learned that letting women inherit property was kinda not smart.
When a daughter married and moved out,
her lands and properties went with her,
weakening the family’s holdings.
It’s all fun and games until she takes your house.
Some samurai families started to change the way they did family.
They had different answers to the inheritance problem,
fighting hard to hold onto their precious lands.
Some gave less land to daughters and widows.
Some refused to give women any land, giving them money instead.
Some gave them lifetime tenure, meaning women
held onto the land until they died,
after which the land went back to the family.
This prevented widows and daughters from passing on property to another household.
Honey, you can marry anyone you want,
but Jake with the face tattoos and a dream
ain’t getting my townhouse.
Some married within the family. This was really fun.
For example, one dude had a son, a grandson, and a daughter.
He gave all of them land, and married his daughter to his grandson.
Dude wasn’t playing around because he put in his will that if they ever divorced,
the grandson would lose all his lands.
Marriage plans could get super complicated.
And some families practiced single inheritance,
where land went to a single child, usually a son.
And this changed everything.
Instead of splitting the inheritance between the children,
fathers started passing all the family lands and properties
to one main son, the head of the household.
The other children became his vassals.
Family land stayed whole instead of being split every generation.
It allowed samurai families to gain land and power,
growing and growing towards a future
of badass armies and epic anime battles.
This type of household with a head at the
top became popular, and started to push women
and secondary sons out of landownership.
They had to rely on the family head for money.
Since succession happened through sons, women were pushed out of the family line.
Family descent was traced through the male line.
It kinda sucked for women, but it was kinda their fault.
Why were they born missing a d--k?
Now in the Kamakura Period, many of these
changes affecting women were only just starting.
They were more common in later periods.
Plenty of families still passed down inheritances
to women, especially families without sons.
There was a law banning women from becoming family heirs, but people did it anyways and
the shogunate wasn’t all that strict about it.
Women used a million clever ways to secure power.
Like there was a law that a widow could receive
her husband’s lands, but if she remarried,
that property would go to her husband’s children.
To get around this, a widow might transfer her land to her favorite child first,
or even adopt a girl to give her the lands, and then remarry.
The shogunate was like, “How dare women,” and passed another law saying that widows
could only transfer property when they died.
There were fun court battles between mothers and their sons.
Like a son might file a lawsuit against his widowed mother claiming she had remarried,
so the family land should go to him.
Back then, marriage wasn’t a formal thing with certificates and rings and cheating.
Sometimes it was hard to tell if a couple got married or were just close.
The son had to gather evidence and testimony from the community
to prove that his mother had remarried.
Yeah relationships between mothers and sons can get pretty bad, maybe even so bad that
he would abandon his mother in the mountains.
The practice was called obasute, but did it really exist?
Click here to find out.
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