refers to a system for determining land value for taxation purposes under the

Tokugawa shogunate The Tokugawa shogunate, also known as the was the military government of Japan during the Edo period from 1603 to 1868. The Tokugawa shogunate was established by Tokugawa Ieyasu after victory at the Battle of Sekigahara, ending the civil wars ...

of Edo-period

Japan Japan is an island country in East Asia. Located in the Pacific Ocean off the northeast coast of the Asia, Asian mainland, it is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan and extends from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north to the East China Sea ...

, and expressing this value in terms of ''

koku The is a Chinese-based Japanese unit of volume. One koku is equivalent to 10 or approximately , or about of rice. It converts, in turn, to 100 shō and 1,000 gō. One ''gō'' is the traditional volume of a single serving of rice (before co ...

'' of rice. Nussbaum, Louis-Frédéric. (2005)
"Koku"
in ''Japan Encyclopedia'', p. 549. One (roughly equivalent to five

bushel A bushel (abbreviation: bsh. or bu.) is an Imperial unit, imperial and United States customary units, US customary unit of volume, based upon an earlier measure of dry capacity. The old bushel was used mostly for agriculture, agricultural pr ...

s) was generally viewed as the equivalent of enough rice to feed one person for a year. The actual revenue or income derived from a holding varied from region to region, and depended on the amount of actual control the fief holder held over the territory in question, but averaged around 40 percent of the theoretical . pp. 14–15. The amount of taxation was not based on the actual quantity of rice harvested, but was an estimate based on the total economic yield of the land in question, with the value of other crops and produce converted to their equivalent value in terms of rice. The ranking of precedence of the ''

daimyō were powerful Japanese magnates, feudal lords who, from the 10th century to the early Meiji era, Meiji period in the middle 19th century, ruled most of Japan from their vast hereditary land holdings. They were subordinate to the shogun and no ...

'', or feudal rulers, was determined in part by the ' of the territories under their administration. In 1650, the total ' of Japan was assessed at 26 million ', with the Shōgun directly controlling 4.2 million '.

References

Japanese historical terms {{Japan-hist-stub

See also

References