The Myth of Edo Japan’s Class System

Samurai, Farmers, Craftsmen, Merchants? No!

If you’re a bit familiar with Japanese history, you might have come across the popular, well-known fact that Japanese society in the Edo period (1603 - 1868) had a strict hierarchy of four classes. From top to bottom, they were Samurai, Farmers, Craftsmen, and Merchants.

Edo’s social pyramid

The reasoning is pretty simple. Samurai were at the top because they were the ruling class. Farmers were right below them because Japan was an agrarian society. And merchants were at the very bottom because we all know salesmen are greedy parasites who don’t make anything.

But when you look into it a bit, some things don’t make sense.

Not all commoners were farmers. The idea that Japan was an agricultural society is so deeply ingrained that people seem to think 99% of the population were always ankle-deep in mud whispering to rice stalks. Now most people were farmers, for sure, but people did all sorts of other stuff too. You had fishermen, salt-makers, blacksmiths, potters, sake brewers, and any other kind of D&D profession you can think of. Japan had them all, and they all contributed to society.

There’s another problem with having a social pyramid based on professions, and it’s the same problem that I have with the movie Divergent. I haven’t read the books, but I assume it’s not too different.

The society in Divergent is split into five factions, each one representing a single human quality. There’s a smart faction with only smart people, a brave faction with only brave people, a nice faction with only boring people, and so on.

Well, it’s kind of hard to boil down a person to only one trait, isn’t it? People can be both smart and brave, just look at me. The Edo social pyramid implies that people only did one thing. Farmers farmed. Merchants merchanted. Samurai abused commoners. No multiclassing allowed. But if these were strict classes, were farmers banned from making tools or selling them?

They were not.

You think farmers just sat around waiting for rice to grow? Many farmers (people with farming as their main occupation) did other things in their free time. While his crops were busy growing, a farmer might spend time making shovels to sell at the market. People seemed to move between classes pretty easily. Even low level samurai had to farm or sell tools they crafted to survive.

This idea of the four classes is starting to sound strange if people could move freely between them.

The reality

In reality, this class pyramid was made from playing cards. Historians believed it up until the 1990s, when someone sneezed and toppled it. Nowadays, Edo’s four-class hierarchy has been removed from Japanese textbooks.

The idea came from that ancient vending machine of ideas in Asia: China. It was called the Four Occupations, thought up by Confucian philosophers who had a lot of time on their hands and chose to spend it making shit up.

They believed that society thrived on the backs of four professions. From top to bottom, they were:

1. Shi (士) - scholar-officials, basically the elites of Chinese society

2. Nong (农) - farmers

3. Gong (工) - craftsmen

4. Shang (商) - merchants

These occupations harmonized with each other to create the ideal society. Japanese scholars from the 1300s were already familiar with this idea. In Japan, they changed it a bit to this:

1. Shi (士) - samurai

2. Nō (農) - farmers

3. Kō (工) - craftsmen

4. Shō (商) - merchants

Shi nō kō shō was a common phrase when talking about the four classes, always in that order. Another common term was shimin (四民), or the four classes/estates.

Thing is…the classes were never put into law in Japan (nor in China, I believe). Yes, samurai were definitely of a higher class than the others, and had special privileges. But farmers, craftsmen, and merchants were more or less equal in the eyes of the law.

The four classes was a philosophical idea that intellectuals repeated, but was never a reality. Many Confucian scholars thought society should have been structured that way, and even wrote as if society was structured that way. Meanwhile, reality was out back working and wondering what these philosophers were on about.

You can see why this would be confusing for modern academics and history influencers.

The terms shi nō kō shō and shimin were most often used just as another way to say “the people,” or “society.” Like instead of saying, “The people are suffering,” you could sound more intellectual by saying, “Alas, the four estates are suffering. Indubitably.”

Edo scholars used the idea of the four classes to make moral arguments. They defended villagers, people who lived in the countryside rather than the city. Cityfolk looked down on rural folks as ignorant country bumpkins.

Edo intellectuals thought this was rude and wanted to white knight for the ignorant inbred bumpkins, so they wrote things like, “Hey you guys, let’s treat them with respect. In ancient times, farmers were above craftsmen and merchants, you know.” Even though this was never the case in ancient times or any time.

They also used the shi nō kō shō idea to attack people they thought were bad for society, like entertainers and prostitutes. “These occupations are not part of the Four, therefore they will lead to the downfall of society.”

So yes, these classes were a myth, but did you know Edo law did actually divide people into a social hierarchy? For a bonus, because I love you, here they are, from top to “bless their hearts”:

1. The imperial family

2. The nobility

3. Samurai

4. Priests

5. Commoners (villagers and cityfolk)

6. Outcasts

There’s another myth that’s been going around the internet about what a Japanese emperor said of his cat, and most of the posts about it are just wrong. Click here to see me correcting the internet.