Post by washi on Apr 19, 2015 16:44:45 GMT
I usually think of the word "agribusiness" as applying to developments in America in the latter half of the 20th century. I can, however, think of no better word to describe what happened in Japan's Kawachi Province at the turn of the 18th century, when businessmen, not farmers, established huge agricultural enterprises.
Kawachi Province occupied the eastern half of what is now Osaka Prefecture. "Kawachi" means "within the rivers," and refers to river delta area of the Yamato River and its northern tributaries, between the Ikoma ridge that separates Osaka-fu and Nara-ken on the east and the Uemachi Plateau on the west. One needn't have recourse to geologic time to describe radical changes in this area. A mere 6000 years ago, most of the area was a bay in Japan's Inland Sea. The shallow bay gradually silted up to become first an estuary and then a large fresh water lake. At the turn of the 5th century, in one of Japan's first recorded public works projects, the Emperor Nintoku ordered the construction of a drainage canal, which is now the river that flows by Osaka Castle. This was done to ease flooding and to bring new land in the Kawachi area under cultivation. By the end of the 17th century, all that remained of Lake Kawachi were two shallow lakes, Lake Fukono and Lake Shinkai, but floods continued to devastate not only the Kawachi region, but also the city of Osaka, which by that time had expanded off the Uemachi Plateau and occupied much of the low land west of the of there as well. The shogunal government in Edo (now Tokyo) agreed to undertake the re-routing of the Yamato River, both to ease the threat of floods and to bring new land under cultivation. The story of that remarkable project, the man who accomplished it, and the numerous large landholdings it created is illustrated in a supplemental post which may be linked to at the bottom of the page.
Shinden means "new paddy fields". In the Edo Period, it was used to refer to both new rice land and new land used for dry field agriculture. Kaisho means "meeting place". In the context of this post, "headquarters" is the best English equivalent I have been able to think of, although the Japanese word is completely lacking in the military associations found in the English one. Kō no Ike means "Goose Pond," and it is the name of a family descended from Yamanaka Shikanosuke, a general of the daimyō Amako Katsuhisa, defeated in 1578, near the end of the period of civil wars. The family settled in Hyōgo where the "Goose Pond" name became associated with the prosperous sake brewing business it established there. (The names of Japanese historical figures are confusing at best, often changing several times throughout a lifetime. The Kō no Ike family adopted the business name as an official family name. Other famous families mentioned in the post, like Sumitomo, for example, did not.) Kō no Ike is still a place name in the area near Itami Airport and about 3 miles (5km) northwest of the old town of Itami, but none of the ponds in that area have that name, and I have no idea if a pond so named ever existed. One further note about names: Written Japanese does not use spaces between words. I have often taken the liberty of breaking less well-know names into their component parts, in order to make their reading more accessible to people unfamiliar with the Japanese sound system. (The name is pronounced "Koh no Ike," as in I like Ikeda, not I like Ike.)
By the end of the 17th century, the family had established itself in Imabashi, an area in Osaka where many financiers (I hesitate to call them bankers, in an age before there were banks) resided, and where Kō no Ike Zen'emon Munetoshi became one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Yamato Gawa re-routing project.
When the project was completed, he acquired one of the largest tracts of the new land. He built a headquarters complex there in 1707, where he, his son Zenjirō, and succeeding generations continued business throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and the operation didn't completely cease until the 1950's. Most of what remained of the complex was acquired by the City of Higashi Osaka in 1977, which restored the buildings to their historical condition and opened it to the public in 1997 as a historical museum and a venue for various civic events.
The supplementary post tells the story of Naka Jinbei, the man who designed and executed the river re-routing project. It also contains outline maps of the 40 large parcels of new land created by it. The owners of some of these shinden went on to found banks with names like Sumitomo and Mitsubishi, which most users should recognize in the names of many modern companies associated with those banks.
Graphics used in these posts that are not my own photos are taken from non-copyrighted materials published by the cities of Yao and Higashi Osaka.
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Post last revised March 11, 2023.
