1979/01/01 by J. Mark Ramseyer · 15 citations
Social Sciences · Psychology · #Japanese History and Culture #Diligence #Constitution #History #Period (music) #Law #Code (set theory) #Genealogy #Political science #Set (abstract data type) #Art #Computer science #Psychology #Aesthetics
paper · doi:10.2307/2384323
published in Monumenta Nipponica 34(2), 209 (Sophia University)
openalex publication_date 1979/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
T s HE Hakata merchant, Shimai Soshitsu, left his descendants a set of instructions which he claimed should be 'as important to you as the Great Constitution of [Shotoku] Taishi.'1 He wrote those instructions in 1610, about the same time as the trader, Suminokura Soan, established a series of rules for the sailors whom he employed for voyages overseas.2 These codes are among the very earliest house laws written by merchants. Military houses, of course, had possessed written codes far earlier;3 merchant houses had not. In fact, merchant house codes did not begin to appear in large numbers until the eighteenth century, and even then, they generally existed only in wealthier and older merchant houses.4 Although there were exceptions to the rule-one popular economics text of the nineteenth century even includes a model code for the use of its readers5-usually only the established merchant houses compiled them. Generalizations based on these codes are thus precarious. Not all merchants wrote codes. Further, attitudes changed from generation to generation: the seventeenth-century traders did not think in the same way as did those of the bakumatsu period. Merchants varied from place to place: a man from Omi did not necessarily agree with one from Edo or one from Osaka. Merchants differed according to the type of work in which they were engaged: copper-mine owners did not necessarily hold the same views as hardware-store owners or sake brewers. And merchants may have ignored their own rhetoric: they may not have believed everything they wrote.