Kyoho Famine and the Hyakusho Ikki Peasant Uprisings
A famine in western Japan in 1732 and 1733 killed perhaps 12,000 people and produced the first rice riot in Edo. The immediate cause was an infestation. Locusts and planthoppers destroyed the crop across the Inland Sea region in a wet summer, and about forty-six domains reported losses of most of their harvest. The structural cause was the reforms it interrupted. The shogunate under Yoshimune had spent a decade on the Kyoho reforms, encouraging new rice land, cutting expenditure, and attempting to raise the price of rice — since samurai stipends were paid in rice and converted to cash, and a low price impoverished the whole ruling class. The policy of buying rice to support the price left less in the market when the crop failed. Rural protest in the period had an established form. Villagers petitioned the domain office collectively, which was itself illegal, and the leaders expected to be executed afterwards even if the demands were granted; some 3,000 such incidents are recorded across the Tokugawa period. What was new in January 1733 was the city. A crowd in Edo attacked the house and warehouse of a rice merchant named Takama, smashing everything and scattering the stock in the street without stealing it, which is the pattern all subsequent Japanese rice riots followed. The shogunate hanged nobody and distributed relief. Rice riots recurred through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and again in 1918, when they brought down a government. The Tokugawa system also had no mechanism for moving grain across domain boundaries, since each domain was fiscally separate and hoarded in a crisis. Every subsequent Japanese famine of the period had the same structural cause and the same result.
- Year: 1732 CE
- Category: Social
