nomic unit. Relieved of the feudal fees and restrictions of earlier ages, the merchants no longer needed the protection of closed guild organizations. Guilds gradually disappeared, and independent merchants and firms of merchants or manufacturers took their place in a freer economic order.
The prolonged, complete peace of the Tokugawa period brought to Japan years of unprecedented prosperity, and industrial production and trade grew rapidly. Although the Tokugawa, the Daimyo, and the whole samurai class clung tenaciously to the concept that agriculture was the only true source of wealth, and continued to measure their incomes in terms of bushels of rice, in the cities and towns of Japan a vigorously expanding merchant class was creating a commercial economy far beyond anything to be expected in a politically feudal land. Paper credits of all sorts were developed and commonly used in normal transactions, and great rice exchanges with daily fluctuating price quotations grew up at the two economic capitals, Osaka and Edo.
The ruling class had placed the merchants at the bottom of the social scale, but the merchants, with their control of the nationwide rice market, came increasingly to dominate economic life. In an expanding money economy, the Daimyo and samurai felt a growing need for money, and as the Tokugawa period progressed many of them fell hopelessly in debt to rich city merchants. In time, Daimyo and samurai, despite their social disdain for the merchant class, sometimes married daughters of rich merchants in order to improve their own economic status.
