There was a case in the year 1235 in Japan
where an entire household was murdered, parents and children.
Only one son escaped the bloodbath.
His uncle, who lived elsewhere,
came to visit him after the ordeal.
There is a bond that forms between family members after a tragedy,
and that bond was totally missing in this case
because the uncle claimed that the family lands
belonged to him from some agreement long ago.
The surviving son, after losing his family,
had to fight his uncle in court for the rights to his family’s lands.
The court could find no evidence of ownership for either the son or the uncle,
so it ended up giving half the lands to one and half to the other.
This is just one incident of family members battling it out over land and property.
Families in Kamakura Period [1185 - 1333] Japan were a lot similar to families today.
They often played Monopoly together.
Nothing expresses the love between you and your sister
more than snatching her home from her destitute fingers.
The most valuable thing a parent could pass on
as inheritance was land,
and sons and daughters could fight over those lands for years,
making Thanksgiving dinners really awkward.
“Akira, can you hand me the salt?”
“Can you hand me the rice paddy!”
Inheritance conflicts between siblings were legendary,
but between parent and child was super rare,
because Japanese children were loyal, reliable, and were all around good,
proper sons and daughters constantly terrified of losing their inheritance.
Mothers and fathers could change their wills
as fast as you change your morals at a brothel.
Parents held the blade of disinheritance over every son and daughter,
and had their other hand up their children’s kimonos
to play them like puppets.
Hard to sneak out of the house at night with dad’s hand on your bum,
knowing that your inheritance might go to your sister if you were caught.
Parents could even kick a child out of the family if they wanted.
Now there was one situation where you did see parent-child conflict,
and that was between mother and son, after father died.
In one case, a man died and left the family properties to his wife,
on the condition that she give them to their son when she died.
But time turns promises empty.
Eventually, she decided that the lands would go to her grandson instead,
probably using the common excuse that her son was disloyal.
Well, her actions made her words prophecy, because her son spent the next 2 years
disloyally fighting over the lands.
After two years, she caved and changed the will back,
probably because her husband’s wishes were black and clear on paper.
Hard for the courts to ignore.
Parents pretty much had their children in an iron grip,
but what about each other?
If we’re talking about inheritance,
a husband treated his wife like his children.
She could receive a nice plot of land if she behaved.
If not, then she would receive his collection of anime body pillows.
Now although husbands often gave land to their wives,
wives almost never gave land to their husbands. Why?
Well, marriage is great, but 100% of divorces
started off as a marriage, so how great is it really?
When you give your spouse something,
there’s always the risk that they leave and
then you forever lose your body pillows.
But medieval Japanese husbands had no such worry.
At the time, a wife could not choose to divorce, officially.
She could run away and do an unofficial divorce-by-flight,
but that was a crime that came with the punishment
of losing your lands.
Even after her husband died, if she remarried,
she had to give back her old husband’s properties.
But a husband could give land to his wife
and take it back whenever he wanted.
There was little risk because only he could start a divorce.
A wife had no such protections.
If she gave her husband real estate,
bastard could divorce her and she would’ve lost
a husband and a source of income.
It didn’t mean women were land-fcked though,
schemes were pulled.
The good thing about a dead husband
is that he’s always on your side.
Widows could make up all kinds of things about their husband’s intentions.
“I know it’s in the will, but your father
would only give the inheritance to a son
who respected his mother.
Since that’s clearly not the case,
the inheritance goes to your sister.”
Early in the Kamakura Period, parents usually
gave each child a piece of land as inheritance.
The main heir received a piece a bit larger than the rest, but typically not by much.
After daddy died, the heir became the head of the household.
This position normally went to the eldest son,
but there are special times in life when you realize
that your eldest son is a dumbass,
so you have to pass over him and choose one of his siblings.
Parents always wrote in the will an explanation for why they made
a younger child the heir.
They felt it important to explain why they passed over their first son,
resulting in millions of documents of parents politely shittalking their kids.
The most common reason for refusing a first son?
Lack of ability.
It was the most humiliating label
a parent could stamp on a child,
so doing it meant a parent was playing with fire.
Now a first son still could not fight openly with his parents,
because even if he wasn’t the heir, he was still entitled
to some lands if he played his cards right.
It was only after the father, the head of the household,
died that his children kicked off
their bitter battles, the bitterest of which
were launched by first sons who were denied
control of the house.
If your kid brother who ate his boogers in middle school
became the head of your household giving you orders,
it might just make you want to go to war in the courts.
It was also common for other siblings to band together against the heir,
who became the head of the family once daddy died.
Early in the Kamakura Period, the head officially
had more power than his siblings, he even received
a little more land than the others,
but things were a lot more equal than you would think.
Siblings felt pretty comfortable fighting each other,
more so than fighting their parents.
Parents wanted to pick the right heir.
They had their children under a magnifying glass,
trying to predict which kid had talent and ambition,
and which kid got 98% on their math tests.
But whoever they picked to run the family next,
they tried hard to prevent those sibling battles.
Like they wrote a separate will for each child
to make the inheritance clear.
The Kamakura shogunate, Japan’s military government,
enforced the wills, regularly warning junior siblings to obey the heir,
and warning heirs not to violate
the holdings of their brothers and sisters.
These precautions served to not help one bit. Climate change is worse now
because of the excess carbon that built up from the loss of Japanese
forests used to make the paper on which lawsuits between siblings were written.
One man, a firstborn son, lost his inheritance and for 40 years brought
lawsuit after lawsuit against his siblings, until he died.
Land disputes could last even longer than a lifetime. How?
Sometimes two siblings would fight over land,
then die, and their children
would fight over the same lands.
The doors of the shogunate court were open to feuding family members,
for as long as they wished.
Households usually did not lack in the children department.
That department was filled pretty easily, from many sources.
People didn’t really try to keep the household small.
They adopted the Frozen strategy of family planning.
Let it go, don’t hold it back anymore.
Some families had 15 or more kids, and still couldn’t find one with common sense.
The Japanese didn’t make a big deal about legitimate and illegitimate children.
Unlike in the west, where being a bastard was
a curse that handicapped your life
and locked your face into one expression,
bastards in Japan could receive inheritance and become
family heads just as easily as non-bastards.
They weren’t all that hung up about these bastards.
Even a family with no children, or dumb ones,
still had hope.
They could adopt an outsider and make him the heir.
Adoptions happened all the time.
And also, women could be heads of the household.
So there were plenty of siblings to fight with.
And over the generations, as family lands
kept getting split into smaller and smaller chunks,
family squabbles exploded.
Over time, things got so crazy that it clogged up the Kamakura court.
Cases took longer and longer to sort out.
The shogunate encouraged people to settle out of court,
and promised to endorse all private agreements.
Things started changing in the late Kamakura Period.
Land was getting scarce.
People started thinking, you know I don’t want to split my lands
15 different ways, and honestly it feels a little
wrong to give land control to Booger Eating Bobunaga over there,
even if he’s my son.
So parents experimented with different inheritance schemes.
Some parents gave their main heir most of the family’s estate,
and gave their other children much smaller holdings.
Some received like 1/100th of the total family lands,
a proportion just small enough to be rude.
And then there were families that hopped on the single-inheritance train,
where all the inheritance went to one child, the heir.
When the heir took over, his siblings became his subordinates.
When this system started getting popular, it made the head of the household go from
being kind of important to a pain in the ass.
He now controlled his siblings,
because their main source of income came from him.
Many secondary sons became monks.
Rather lock up their pp’s than lose their balls serving their brother.
The single-inheritance system also started pushing out women.
The shogunate preferred household heads to be male,
they wanted military leaders ready for war.
Also, parents didn’t want to risk a female household head
who could marry and be absorbed into another family.
A daughter usually got inheritance land that
she could pass down only if she bore a son.
It became harder for women to receive land.
Click here to see how women got screwed out of inheritances
and the clever ways they got around it.
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