be self-contained economic units, but their going allowed a wider exchange of goods and greater specialization in production by localities or by groups within each locality. Because of the need for protection from the many restrictions and fees in a feudal society, this new economic specialization usually resulted in the formation of guilds of merchants dealing in certain commodities and guilds of manufacturers producing various types of wares.
Under the guilds, trade and manufacture expanded steadily, and centers of paper-making, metal-working, weaving, and the like grew up all over the land. Small market places developed into little trading towns. Kyoto remained the largest city of Japan, but gradually a rival city of purely commercial and industrial origin grew up at the eastern end of the Inland Sea. This town, later to be called Osaka, was until the late sixteenth century a type of free city outside the domains of the feudal lords, dominated only by the local merchants and the great temple-castle of the True Pure Land Sect.
The true measure of the economic growth of Japan during the feudal period is perhaps best seen in foreign trade. There had been some trade with the continent ever since Prince Shotoku sent the first official embassy to China, but overseas trade began to assume significant proportions only in the late twelfth century. From that time on, it grew steadily until by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was a tremendous factor in the economic life of Japan.
The Japanese imported from the continent tropical products, which had originally come from Southeast