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The koku is a Japanese unit of measurement equal to about 180 litres, or 5 bushels. [7] The power of feudal lords was often directly quantified by their output in koku rather than acreage of land ownership or military might. [8] In fact, the amount of military service required from a vassal depended on the koku of their specific fief.
Feudalism, also known as the feudal system, was a combination of legal, economic, military, cultural, and political customs that flourished in medieval Europe from the 9th to 15th centuries. Broadly defined, it was a way of structuring society around relationships derived from the holding of land in exchange for service or labour.
There were two leading classes, i.e. the gentry, in the time of feudal Japan: the daimyō and the samurai. The Confucian ideals in the Japanese culture emphasised the importance of productive members of society, so farmers and fishermen were considered of a higher status than merchants.
Feudal duties were the set of reciprocal financial, military and legal obligations among the warrior nobility in a feudal system. [1] These duties developed in both Europe and Japan with the decentralisation of empire and due to lack of monetary liquidity, as groups of warriors took over the social, political, judicial, and economic spheres of the territory they controlled. [2]
The European towns could grow outside of the feudal system instead of being integrated into it since the landed aristocrats were settled in manors. Thus, the towns and their people were independent of the influence of the feudal lords and were usually solely under the political authority of the monarchs of the European kingdoms.
Ieyasu founded the Tokugawa Shogunate as a new feudal government of Japan with himself as the shōgun. However, Ieyasu was especially wary of social mobility given that Toyotomi Hideyoshi, one of his peers and a kampaku (Imperial Regent) whom he replaced, was born into a low caste and rose to become Japan's most powerful political figure of the ...
Feudal societies are characterized by reliance on personal relationships with military elites, rather than a bureaucracy with a state-supported professional standing army. [55] The label of feudalism has thus been used to describe many areas of Eurasia including medieval Europe, the Islamic iqta' system, Indian feudalism, and Heian Japan. [56]
Unlike in European peerage systems, but following traditional Japanese custom, illegitimate sons could succeed to titles and estates. To prevent their lineages from dying out, heads of kazoku houses could (and frequently did) adopt sons from collateral branches of their own houses, whether in the male or female lines of descent, and from other ...