Shōen

Shōen ( Japanese 荘 園 or 庄園 ) were fiefdoms or estates in ancient Japan . This term comes from Japanese , comes from the Chinese term of the Tang dynasty zhuāngyuán and corresponds to the European concept of manorial rule .

After the fall of the Ritsuryō system in Japan, a feudal system of country estates developed. Land owners or name owners gave shares of the produced yield (called shiki ) to more powerful leaders, who often lived at court in order to be exempt from taxes and to undermine the Chinese equal-field system , according to which land was redistributed after a certain period of time. During the Kamakura period developed under the rule of the Minamoto a hierarchy of small landowners ( 名主 , myōshū ), large landowners from land Vogten ( 地頭 , Jitō ), provincial Militärgoverneuren ( shugo ) and the Shogun .

By the end of the Heian period , practically all Japanese lands had been converted into Shōen. This would last until the Ōnin war during the Sengoku period , which marked the defeudalization of Japanese society.

The fiefdom of the subsequent Edo period was based instead on the so-called Han .

See also

• Myoden
• Fiefdom
• Serfdom

swell

• Medieval Japan's Feudal Process (English, PDF ; 242 kB)