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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Recurso digital |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Zenodo
2026
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18864586 |
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Table of Contents:
- <p>This article argues that Japanese land tenure history from 701 to 1947 CE exhibits a persistent<br>oscillation between two structural logics: distribution — the state's attempt to allocate land<br>equitably to cultivators — and domination — the concentration of land by political and<br>economic elites as a means of controlling people and surplus. In a civilization where wet-rice<br>agriculture made land the irreducible basis of survival, every regime was compelled to address<br>the tension between these logics, and the earliest recorded polity began from a distributive<br>premise. The post-743 formation of the shoen (private estate) system — structurally identical to<br>English enclosure — demonstrates that dispossession occurred in eighth-century Japan without<br>proletarianization, market formation, or industrialization, confirming Robert Nichols's<br>theoretical disaggregation of primitive accumulation. The oscillation's lack of net directionality<br>over thirteen centuries constitutes a counterexample to Marxian periodization, which treats the<br>communal-to-private transition as a one-way passage from feudalism to capitalism. The concept<br>of kochi komin ("public land, public people"), which Japanese textbooks present as the<br>foundational principle of the ritsuryo system, appears in no primary source of the period and was<br>constructed to serve a Marxist developmental narrative. I propose that the<br>distribution-domination tension is not uniquely European or capitalist but a structural feature of<br>any agrarian civilization in which land sustains life and power simultaneously.</p>