You may think that your life is pretty average, pretty boring, nothing much happening.
But centuries from now, when historians look back at your life and how you lived through
a global pandemic and the rise of automation, they would absolutely agree with you.
Luckily, we’re not talking about your sorry life today, we’re talking about the lives
of commoners in early medieval Japan, mainly in the Kamakura Period [1185 - 1333].
[moneymoneymoney]
History books are filled with pages and pages of soap operas about the elites,
the top 0.1% of people who lived nothing like most of society.
But only learning about the Japanese upper class is like doing research on Twitch streaming
by just looking at the top streamers.
You would think that everyone on Twitch was a big boobied hot tub streamer,
and that would be totally wrong.
There are petite boobied hot tub streamers too.
Commoners were the petite boobied hot tub streamers of medieval Japan.
They didn’t receive much attention, but they did receive very little money.
Most people lived in villages scattered across the country.
They didn’t really own the land they lived on.
Japan was divided into thousands and thousands of pieces of land, each owned by the state,
by temples and shrines, or by nobles.
These units of land were called either shōen or kokugaryō, depending on who owned them.
Inside them lay a bunch of paddies, which were wet fields for growing rice.
Each field paid taxes to the landlord of the entire unit of land.
Although the villagers didn’t own the land, they were allowed to buy and sell paddy fields,
as long as they got permission from the landowner.
It’s like living in an apartment building, but the occupants could buy and sell individual
apartments with each other, even though they didn’t own the building itself.
The landowner cared little about which peon owned which field,
as long as that sweet rice money kept on flowing.
So if a villager controlled 2 paddies, he paid taxes on both fields.
Einstein once said, “Give a man a paddy and he can feed his family.
Give a man 2 paddies and he can make a Big Mac.”
We’re not sure what he meant.
Now all people in a village were equal, equally content to put each other in a hierarchy.
The villagers who controlled paddy fields sat at the top of the straw pyramid.
These were local powers like local influential families, relatives or descendants of nobles,
minor nobles, and ex government officials.
Only they had enough money and manpower in the area to manage these fields.
These paddy managers, the VIP villagers, were called myōshu 名主.
They weren’t as powerful as the landowner of the region because they were commoners,
but they were usually the big fish in their little ponds.
Most landowners didn’t live on their lands.
They were nobles who lived in the capital enjoying life.
Or they were priests who lived in temples enjoying suffering.
Their lands were these faraway printers printing money for them out of human sweat and tears.
As long as the myōshu’s kept these sweatjet printers running, landowners left them alone.
Paddy fields were premium farmland.
They produced so much rice it started a racial stereotype.
Myōshu’s had teams of peasants and oxen working on their paddies.
The peasants worked for food or shelter.
The oxen worked for a brighter future for their kids.
Now only a few got to be paddy-controlling myōshu.
Typical commoner households did not have wet paddy fields, but they did have dry fields,
meaning fields on dry land.
The cool thing about dry fields was that you usually didn’t pay taxes on them.
Whether the unit of land you lived on was owned by the government or some private landlord,
they typically didn’t care about dry fields, they were yours.
Japanese historians soak their pants over wet rice agriculture, writing articles and
articles with one hand about how the wonderful technology of wet rice farming changed Japan
since ancient times.
Meanwhile, dry field farmers are standing there like, “Where’s our soaked-pantied historian?”
Now I’m no historian, but my panties are soaked,
and I’m telling you that dry farming needs love too.
Recent research shows that dry fields were super important because they were the main
source of food for most peasants.
Peasants could eat or sell their crops without having to send a part of it as taxes to the landowner.
Early in Japan’s history, dry fields were trash compared to paddy fields,
but by the Kamakura Period, peasants had leveled up their farming techniques and their tools.
Paddies still beat dry fields in growing rice, but dry fields kicked paddy’s ass in other ways.
The most important way: paddy fields could only grow rice.
But Japan wasn’t some ricetopia where people ate rice 24/7.
Hey Akira wanna check out that new restaurant, I hear they serve some mean rice on rice.
No, people needed other foods.
The idea that most farmers grew rice is a myth.
This rice supremacist belief must go.
Peasants grew a bunch of crops like barley, buckwheat, soybeans, vegetables, hemp,
and mulberry for raising silkworms.
People did grow rice on dry fields too.
The amount of rice they grew was less than that of paddies,
but so was the amount of leeches they grew on their legs.
Even before the Kamakura Period, dry farming improved so much that some people were like,
“Why don’t I just convert my paddy fields into dry fields?”
It was a big enough problem that the government had to put out an order saying, “Stop that.”
Why?
Because the government calculated tax money by paddy fields.
Can’t have people getting rid of all that sweet paddy money.
Even landowners knew how important dry fields were, and usually did not tax them.
Dry fields fed the peasants, allowing them to go work in the wet fields.
[stardew valley]
Nature is a bish and bishes don’t play.
Nature was the number one enemy of peasant farmers.
Droughts and floods destroyed their homes and fields.
Animals were just huge assholes.
Wild boars and deer kept breaking through fences and eating everything.
Sparrows ate poor defenseless rice seedlings.
Locusts had zero manners.
They swarmed through entire fields like a Thanos fingersnap.
These little insects called leafhoppers sounded really cute but they devastated crops.
Rich villagers like myōshu could handle natural disasters better,
but the average peasant could only stand there scratching his nose and picking his ass,
wondering which gods he offended.
Abandoned fields were common.
Peasants whose crops died often had to make the difficult choice of leaving to serve under richer villagers.
Or they could become poor wanderers, drifting from place to place,
doing odd jobs here and there.
The average village house had probably two rooms,
with one of them a main room for cooking and storage.
Or they just had one room for everything.
So, not unlike the dwellings of the average tech bro in San Francisco.
The floor was just the ground with straw or straw mats for flooring.
So, not unlike the dwellings of the average tech bro in San Francisco.
Fancy villagers had wooden flooring.
Outside walls were made of mud or straw or logs.
Quality wooden boards and planks were rare in early medieval times.
They were valuable items made by specialists.
There were not many empty houses around because if someone abandoned a house, or they were
killed or banished, people would take down the house to reuse the wooden boards and posts.
You saw wooden boards used over and over again in different buildings.
Commoners ate all kinds of foods.
They grew a lot of rice because it was dependable, and taxes were calculated by rice paddies,
so you would think that people ate a lot of rice.
Not so.
Paddy fields were controlled by the richest villagers, and they ate rice, sure.
But not the field workers who grew it.
For normal villagers, it was a special occasion to see rice on the dining table.
They mostly ate s--tty grains like millet.
Winters were harsher than they are today.
Today, Japanese families gather for Christmas around a bucket of KFC.
Back then, Japanese families gathered around a bucket of their dead children (jk lol).
Winters were harsh.
People loaded up on grains like millet, barley, wheat, and rice to survive the winter.
Once they went through those, most of their calories came from ferns and plant roots.
Their diets seemed pretty varied, including all kinds of fruits, vegetables, and nuts.
They hunted birds, deer, and other adorable woodland creatures.
Villages near water massacred fish.
People wore clothes, they didn’t walk around nude.
They mostly used clothes made from hemp and ramie because these plants were everywhere.
Silk clothing was a thing, but silk was hard to make.
You had to raise silkworms, and it was hard to get the silkworms to design and sew a pair of pants.
So only the rich villagers could get their hands on silk fabric.
What was easier to make was silk wadding,
which was just a thick rough fabric made from silkworm cocoons.
It was rougher than the fine and smooth silk of the rich,
but it was popular with commoners in the winter because it was like wearing insulation.
Less common clothing were the hides of deer and antelopes and fabric made from wisteria vines.
People also stripped those fluffy seeds from cattails to fill their blankets.
There’s a common belief that medieval Japanese commoners were all rice farmers.
There are two things wrong with that belief: rice, and farmers.
They didn’t just grow rice, don’t be a rice-ist.
They grew all kinds of crops, like millet, wheat, and barley.
Also, they weren’t all farmers.
They had a thousand different jobs, farming was just one of them.
They had miners, woodcutters, fishermen, all kinds of RPG professions.
But that topic probably deserves a whole other video, if you guys want.
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Alright I love you, and spread the knowledge.