Vol. 18 | Demise and edamise Part 3

Reading the full series? Browse all volumes here.

Before diving in — Vol. 2 sets out the author’s framing and caveats.

The Ohmi Shonin kept their honke — the equivalent of a head office — in Ohmi, the province corresponding to present-day Shiga Prefecture, while extending demise and edamise, their equivalents of branch outlets, across the whole of Japan. This series is at present examining that nationwide expansion. Alongside demise and edamise, the merchants relied on the following:

Peddling
Demise and edamise
Joint-stock trading

The previous volume noted that Japanese merchant houses were ordered into ranks: shujin (master), banto (head clerk), tedai (clerk) and decchi (apprentice). On this point there was little to separate Ohmi from the rest of the country.

Promotion, however — from decchi to tedai, and from tedai to banto — was another matter, and here Ohmi diverged from other regions. Elsewhere, much as in a modern company, a man rose by accumulating a record of results, or by being singled out by a superior.*¹

So what of the Ohmi Shonin?

Zaisho-nobori: the system that shaped an Ohmi Shonin’s career

To repeat a point made earlier in the series, the Ohmi Shonin were not merchants who did business in Ohmi. They were merchants who kept their base in Ohmi, or who came from Ohmi, and who traded across the whole of the country. That, one might say, is precisely why demise and edamise were needed in the first place. And, again as noted before, an Ohmi Shonin’s demise and edamise were staffed entirely by men from Ohmi.

Since these men worked in demise and edamise far from Ohmi, opportunities to return home had to be built into the arrangement. According to Kunitoshi Suenaga,*² a boy who entered service as a decchi at twelve would undergo the genpuku ceremony at fifteen or sixteen, and only then be permitted his first visit to his parents. Genpuku was the rite marking a man’s passage into adulthood, practised in Japan until roughly the nineteenth century.*³ This first homecoming was known as hatsu-nobori.

Having completed his hatsu-nobori, the decchi became a tedai. After several years in that rank, if his work was judged sound, he was granted a second homecoming, called naka-nobori; on his return to the shop he was promoted again. The cycle then repeated. An Ohmi Shonin who began his career as a decchi advanced a step each time he was given leave to go home. This was the zaisho-nobori system.

For those of higher rank, the leave granted could run to fifty days. The summit of the career was to become a banto, or to be permitted to establish a bekke — a branch household — and become a master in one’s own right. Suenaga explains that, given this cycle of homecomings and promotions, an Ohmi Shonin was not usually permitted by his master to marry until around the age of thirty-five.

That, though, is the general case. Gihei Iida, an Ohmi Shonin, learned of the diligence of a man named Shinshichi — then a servant at a shop in Kyoto, and later the founder of the department store Takashimaya — and in time took him as his daughter’s adopted son-in-law. Shinshichi was twenty-six at the time.*⁴ Thirty-five, in other words, is no more than a model case; and, as the previous volume also described, men of tedai rank and above were sometimes singled out as candidates to head the next generation of the house. The reverse held as well. Some men advanced slowly, and some fell away altogether — leaving the shop before they had reached even hatsu-nobori or naka-nobori.

During Japan’s period of high growth in the second half of the twentieth century, observers abroad said that the Japanese valued work above family. The author does not believe that for a moment. That Japanese workers tended to give more of their hours to work than to their families, however, may well have been true — though a good deal has changed in recent years.

Something resembling corroboration can be glimpsed in the Ohmi Shonin’s model of a career.

Demise and edamise accelerated shokoku sanbutsu-mawashi

The nationwide web of demise and edamise that the Ohmi Shonin threw across Japan helped them capture greater profits.

Even today, with the internet moving information at remarkable speed, the same good can fetch different prices in different parts of any country of reasonable size. It was no different in the Japan of the Edo period (seventeenth to nineteenth centuries), when the Ohmi Shonin were at their most conspicuous. Their demise and edamise allowed them to read local price levels and, among other things, to move goods from regions where they were cheap to regions where they were dear.

This is the shokoku sanbutsu-mawashi described in Vol. 14.

It is worth looking at a concrete example or two.

There is a phrase that captures the character of the people of Kyoto, long the capital of Japan: Kyo no kidaore — that a Kyotoite will spend himself into ruin on kimono. In a city that fond of kimono, the price of second-hand clothing falls, because so much of it is in circulation.

So the Ohmi Shonin carried Kyoto’s second-hand clothing to Tohoku and sold it there. Demand was there, the volumes moved, and at times the goods fetched a higher price than they would have in Kyoto.

Vol. 14, mentioned above, dealt chiefly with the Ohmi Shonin’s shipping, and noted that marine products from Hokkaido were among the goods they procured by sea. Such products were sold in those parts of Japan where the same goods were hard to come by, and were also exported to Qing China as tawaramono, the collective term for marine products packed into straw bales for export.*⁵ The Ohmi Shonin are said to have carried the marine products destined to become tawaramono as far as Nagasaki.

This series will turn to the Ohmi Shonin’s ventures overseas in a later volume. Already in the Edo period, then, they had some hand in export.

OHYASHIMA is seeking information about the Ohmi Shonin

In connection with this series, OHYASHIMA welcomes information about the Ohmi Shonin. The author would be particularly grateful to hear from:

Museum curators and archivists — in Japan or elsewhere — who hold collections related to the Ohmi Shonin
Those who work for companies with ties to the Ohmi Shonin, or whose own ancestors were Ohmi Shonin
Those who know of Ohmi Shonin merchants who conducted business outside Japan

OHYASHIMAは近江商人に関する情報を求めています

本連載にあたり、近江商人に関する情報を募集しています。たとえば、下記に該当する方はぜひご存じの情報をお寄せください。