JAPAN
come of the two hundred and eighty-seven exceeded £40,000, whereas the Court nobles, who numbered one hundred and forty-three, had a total allowance of £45,000, being an average of £314. These figures must be understood as referring to the taxes upon agriculture only: they do not include sums collected from tradesmen and manufacturers, nor do they take any account of the forced labour which the people were obliged to furnish or to commute by monetary payments.[1]
With regard to the income of the Shōgun himself, there is some uncertainty. A return furnished by the commissioners of finance in 1843 showed a revenue of about one and a quarter million pounds sterling in coin, and half a million sterling in kind. The estates of the Shogunate were nominally assessed at a million koku of rice for purposes of taxation, being, in that respect, approximately equal to the estates of Mayeda, baron of Kaga. But there can be no doubt that the official assessment was much below the truth. It will be a close approximation to put the Tokugawa income at two millions sterling annually.
These incomes are not large from the standpoint of modern Europe and America. They would have been very large, however, in mediæval Japan, considering the high value that money commanded, had not the feudatories been obliged to incur heavy outlays on account of
- ↑ See Appendix, note 5.
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