Eight-to-the-Lord, Two-to-the-People: A Brutal Tax?

[Tier-Group 34, Lifelong-Learning Building, Small Training Room]

At present, the very bottom of the Library-City Dungeon, the ground-level Tier-Group 34, was a large-scale complex facility that included the prefectural library.

"Tarōzaemon-san, we've safely made it to the harvest."

"Director of Books-sama, all that's left is to pray no sandstorm or the like blows in before the reaping's done."

"Even a fair-sized sandstorm, in this dungeon, we can stop with so much as a single tsū-dokkuri."

A tsū-dokkuri is a ceramic one-shō bottle.

Marie was holding a meeting with Okada Tarōzaemon, one of the first settlers, about the land tax.

"Now then, this year we managed the fields and paddies under what you might call 'direct management,' but as promised, from next year we move in earnest to the 'village-contract system,' where the land tax is paid by the village as a unit."

"Everyone's worked hard at it on the promise of becoming owner-farmers and being granted fields of their own. They're even trying to learn their letters so they can read the textbooks."

Owing to the constraints of the Library-City Dungeon, agricultural-school textbooks (in some worlds, agricultural-high-school textbooks) were readily obtainable, whereas Edo-period farming manuals were, conversely, hard to come by.

"So, as for the land tax: for the paddies, as already decided, the assessed rating is one koku per tan, at four-to-the-lord and six-to-the-people, and since the second-crop wheat is the farmers' staple food, we won't tax it. That way, whatever happens to prices, we collect, no, you pay, one hyō per tan, and that's the end of it."

"And if a man works hard and brings in a koku and five to per tan, it comes to two-and-two-thirds-to-the-lord… that the way of it?"

There was second-crop wheat, and there were side occupations, but both were exempt from tax. Tax them by force and you'd have an uprising on your hands.

"The more the harvest grows, the lower the effective tax rate. To put it bluntly, for this dungeon, having you work hard to raise productivity pays better than having you rise in revolt. The trouble is the dry fields."

"Rice you can't grow is rice you can't pay. That's the long and short of it."

"To take a simple example: in a village where half the land is paddy and the yield is one koku per tan, the paddies come to eight-to-the-lord and two-to-the-people, the dry fields go untaxed, and the figures balance out."

"Eight-to-the-lord and two-to-the-people is an outrageous land tax. Even if it is rice alone."

"But in a village that hasn't enough paddy to begin with, the tax can't be paid in rice. In theory one could always go buy it from a rice dealer and pay it in, of course."

In the Edo period, in many regions the share for dry fields, orchards, and homestead plots was likewise paid as land tax in rice, so in cash-crop districts it was common practice to buy rice and hand it over as tax. In the cotton-growing regions of the Kansai and in Noto, which prospered on trade, there were even villages whose calculated tax rate came to nine-to-the-lord and one-to-the-people. Strictly on paper, mind: actually impose a true nine-to-the-lord, one-to-the-people, and you'd have an uprising, and the lord wouldn't even be granted the mercy of seppuku but beheaded outright.

"Director of Books-sama, in other words, if a man buys rice to pay his tax, then come a bad harvest or the like the market shifts, and there are times the tax-rice can't be bought at all. So why not pay in coin from the start?"

"That, too, runs into the problem that if the crop's price crashes, it can't be sold. With perishable leaf vegetables especially, once demand is saturated there are cases where you can't even cover the cost of hauling them to town. Besides, in this world the currency system is a tangle, so cash payment looks likely to throw up thorny problems of its own. Tarōzaemon-san, how is the land tax usually handled?"

In the otherworld, when supply and demand break down too badly, the crop is discarded before the price collapses; but in this world, owing to constraints such as the difficulty of spreading information, such adjustment is hard, and when the price collapses it truly drops to the bare transport cost, leaving the farmer's income at zero, or, expenses counted in, deep in the red.

"It's the method where each year you pay a fixed number of koban according to the size and quality of the village's dry fields. In practice it isn't koban but coin reckoned to the going rate of the day, and in a poor year from sand and dust and the like, the magistracy inspects the fields and grants a reduction or a deferral."

"It comes down to roughly this, I'd say: either treat everything as paddy and levy rice alone at eight-to-the-lord and two-to-the-people, or pay the dry fields separately in cash, and let each village pick whichever it prefers. In that case, the cash figure has to be set with care so no one ends up worse off. Or else we launch a vegetable futures market."

"Once the harvest and the wheat-sowing are done, we'll need to talk it through. How many does this tier-group's 'big hall,' or whatever it's called, seat?"

"One thousand nine hundred seats."

"Too cramped to gather everyone, that's plain."

"Since we can manage the weather to some degree, shall we lay out an open-air plaza roomy enough to gather all the residents and hold a briefing session too? That said, if the population swells further down the line, then never mind the venue, simply assembling everyone looks set to become a trial."

A double-track railway can move up to some sixty thousand people an hour, but a railway is not among the things this dungeon can obtain.