A Group Beatdown

[Tier-Group 4, First Floor, Reception Room]

"What defines a society, whether it's the mode of production, that is, 'the base determines the superstructure,' or whether it's the family system (and this region's is a 'stem family that permits in-marriage'), is something I can't determine on my own. So along with the family, I'd like to take the mode of production into account as well. In this case, that means the holding and management of farmland."

The materialist conception of history was incomprehensible to everyone present.

"Begging your pardon, and I mean no offense to Okada Tarōzaemon-dono, but can't you just summon Shiso (Asura) in great numbers in the dungeon to till the fields?"

A reasonable question from Echizen-ya.

"Echizen-ya-san, there's a reason for that. To begin with, what a dungeon needs is the 'emotions' of those who aren't dungeon monsters, whether human or Asura or beast. For that, the most efficient thing is to have people living within the dungeon's sphere of influence, and for people to live, they need food, so we make fields. You have the order backwards."

"Ah, so it's like Umeda, the Mercantile City. I believe there are twenty thousand people in the underground of the first tier-group alone, and the total population easily exceeds a hundred thousand, or something like that."

"With a hundred thousand people, how do they manage for food, I wonder?"

"I don't know that myself. Whether it can be summoned as a dungeon function, whether there are fields underground, or whether it's imported from somewhere."

"I don't think it's summoning. Unless it's a farm dungeon, the accounts wouldn't balance. Underground fields wouldn't add up either, since you'd need a substitute for sunlight. Importing… if a large amount of food were being transported in from outside, the merchants would surely know about it, wouldn't they?"

"Indeed."

"So, Harima-no-suke-dono, this region's basic agricultural policy is the protection and cultivation of the honbyakushō, generally meaning owner-farmers, correct?"

"Just so. The honbyakushō, who hold land and bear the land tax, are the very foundation of the order. Overgrown wealthy farmers created by the concentration of land could threaten the order, so branch households are encouraged; conversely, if farmland fragments too far the tax can't be borne, so the splitting-off of small farms is curbed. As the saying goes: the peasant should be kept neither too alive nor too dead."

So said the Knight Commander. This doesn't mean to wring out the land tax until they have no margin to live on. Do such a thing on your fief and an uprising breaks out and you're sentenced to seppuku. In this dungeon, the farmers would all flee to the dungeon's direct holdings before any uprising even started. For the record, a honbyakushō is one who holds land, pays the land tax, and in wartime bears the duty of camp labor. In this dungeon, that last wartime mobilization has grown rather vague.

"Now then, if we're to seek efficiency in agriculture as well, I think the most efficient arrangement would be for the dungeon to hold and manage the land, establish an agricultural management division, and run large-scale operations…"

"That's absolutely no good. For us peasants, our own land is a dream… Ah, Secretary-General-dono, my apologies."

Okada Tarōzaemon, voicing his objection in a strong tone.

"Tarōzaemon-san, you were in the first wave of settlers, but will future settlers be just as fixated on land, do you think?"

"Well, no one leaves their village to migrate without a reason: having no land, or wanting to make their fortune, or the land tax being too heavy. So the farmers who come here are all going to want their own land, aren't they?"

"Peasant" means a resident of a farming village; whether craftsman or merchant, if they live in a farming village they're a peasant. If they live in a town, they're a townsperson.

"In other words, unless the farmland is distributed, no one will be satisfied?"

"We don't know any way of living but that, so being made to do something else would only trouble us. I'm indebted to you, Secretary-General-dono, so I won't raise an uprising, but who's to say about those who come later."

"Trying to forcibly spread too novel a method won't go well anyway. Since none of us, myself included, can possibly keep up with understanding it, we couldn't even judge whether it's good or bad, and would simply reject it, I'd think."

"As they say, 'sesame oil and peasants yield the more, the harder you squeeze.' If you create a situation where the peasants have to rack their brains, the harvest increases too. People are selfish creatures, after all. When it's their own land, they put in the effort."

Everyone opposed the collective farm. Owner-farmers, a bourgeois, and a feudal knight: it's only natural they'd oppose socialism.

"In other words, the best course would be to use the existing system as is, and only distribute the land a bit more generously, since the land is a dungeon structure and takes little effort to manage. Is that it?"

"If the land tax rate were low on top of that, there'd be nothing to complain about, but if that made the honbyakushō of other villages abscond, it'd cause trouble, wouldn't it?"

"Quite right. And more than other villages, my own fief would be the first to empty out, which would be a problem. Still, since you and the others can't do all the work yourselves, the officials need stipends and the merchants need to be paid, so in the end the land tax becomes necessary after all."