Satsuma Country, Kagoshima Castle.
Mitsuhisa Shimazu, the grandfather of the Satsuma clan lord Shimazu Tsunaki, is now known as a recluse, but in fact he still holds great power, even more than when he was the feudal lord.
Because when you are a feudal lord, you have to attend court meetings and go to Edo regularly to serve the Tokugawa shogun. Edo is too far away from Kagoshima Castle in Satsuma, so the time Mitsuhisa spends on the road and living in Edo is far longer than the time he spends handling government affairs in Kagoshima Castle.
At that time, Japan's domestic communication conditions were very poor and there was no postal system. It would take several months to send messages from Satsuma to Edo. Therefore, in the era when Shimazu Mitsuhisa ruled in the name of the feudal lord, his control over the feudal kingdom was not as strong as it is now!
However, no matter how powerful his control over the Satsuma Domain was, he could not change one of the basic "domain sentiments" of the Satsuma Domain - too many samurai!
Samurai have two definitions in Japan today: one is status; the other is profession.
As long as a man comes from a samurai family, as long as he does not become a monk, he is a samurai. No matter how poor he is, he is still a superior samurai with the right to wield a sword and a surname. If a civilian offends a samurai, the samurai still has the right to kill them!
Of course, having the right to kill people does not mean that you can kill people at will. Because civilians also have masters, it depends on the master when beating a dog, let alone killing a person? Generally speaking, unless it is one's own subjects, there will be a lot of trouble after cutting it down. The lord of the civilian who was hacked to death will definitely come to cause trouble. If the lord of this civilian is unlucky to be a general, then the samurai who hacked the person will be tied up in the prison, waiting for the verdict... A dignified samurai will be killed. People were kidnapped in large numbers and awaiting execution, and maybe they were even given to people for viewing. How shameful was that?
If the civilians who were beheaded belonged to a powerful but hard-to-talk vassal, then the samurai who beheaded the people would most likely be hacked to death by the vassal warriors sent by the vassal. The civilians who paid taxes to the lord of the lord were all beheaded, and the lord of the lord still had them beheaded. How to collect taxes?
Moreover, the lord of the feudal lord also wants to save face. If the civilians below are killed casually by outsiders, what will happen to their face? If you don't cut it back, then it won't be a laughing stock?
In short, there is a way to cut down on human rights, but it’s best to think carefully before doing so, and don’t end up having to cut your belly to apologize—that hurts!
Another definition of samurai is profession. The Japanese samurai originally had a job as the servants of the ministers. It was only later that they counterattacked and took power, overthrew the ministers, and seized political power, and they became arrogant. After becoming a cow, in order to solidify the class, there was a threshold for becoming a samurai through reincarnation. But there will always be more people who can be reincarnated than people who can become samurai!
Because the number of samurai is limited, and samurai families do not engage in family planning, they are free to have children!
In addition, samurai still have some privileges, look quite majestic, and have more opportunities to rise to prominence, so few people are willing to quit the group.
Therefore, in all Japanese feudal lords, there is a trend of more and more samurai (referring to status). However, the salary that each vassal can send out and the territory that can be allocated are limited. Generally speaking, the number of samurai employed by each Japanese vassal is linked to Ishigao. Usually ten thousand stones high can support up to 250 warriors - this is only the theoretical maximum! Because there are many places where the feudal finances spend money, they cannot all raise samurai, and the feudal lord himself also has to spend money!
Even if the feudal lord can make pickled vegetables for meals every day, the feudal lord's pomp and the cost of attending the pilgrimage cannot be saved.
In addition, the salary of a samurai also has to be high or low, not even. The samurai who received less money could only get twenty or thirty koku of brown rice every year, while those who had more money could get several thousand koku!
Therefore, 10,000 stone stones can usually support only a few dozen warriors. Taking the Satsuma clan's 725,000 stone stones as an example, raising 3,400 or 4,500 warriors is enough to support the sky.
But in Satsuma Domain, there are too many people with samurai status!
Because the Satsuma Shimazu family was once prosperous during the Warring States Period. During the reign of Shimazu Yoshihisa, the sixteenth generation head of the Shimazu family, the Shimazu family almost unified Kyushu. Later, due to Toyotomi Hideyoshi's Kyushu conquest, he had to surrender. As the price of surrender, the Shimadzu family's territory was reduced to 605,000 koku. Later, because of the dispatch of troops to Ryukyu, the Tokugawa shogunate converted the Satsuma domain's rights and interests in Ryukyu to 120,000 koku, for a total of 725,000 koku.
Compared with the situation when the Shimazu family was in its heyday, when almost all Kyushu was owned, the Satsuma clan's current family business is in miserable decline.
But this is not the worst thing. The worst thing for the Shimadzu family is that Toyotomi Hideyoshi can reduce the Shimadzu family's territory, but the Shimadzu family cannot cut off retainers at will, let alone deprive others of their samurai status!
The size of the retainer group during the Shimazu family's heyday was very large. It was not large and could not occupy most of Kyushu's territory!
These retainers are all heroes who followed Shimazu Yoshihisa and Shimazu Yoshihiro to conquer the world. You can't just lay off employees just because they are laid off! Even if you can cut off some of them, you can't take away their samurai status!
Therefore, since the establishment of the Satsuma Domain, there has been a problem of too many samurai - there are too many feudal scholars with salaries, and many villagers without salaries (without salary, Shi has the right to sword and the status of a samurai, is allowed to engage in agricultural production, and does not have to pay annual tribute) of samurai) more.
Among the five to six million people in the Satsuma Domain, there are as many as hundreds of thousands of people with samurai status! Among them, there are at least tens of thousands of warriors who are strong, capable of serving as officials, and capable of killing people!
Among the tens of thousands of samurai, there are only three or four thousand samurai who can be hired as feudal lords. The so-called strong Satsuma feudal lord actually means that the feudal lords are strong (there are many people!) and the feudal lord is weak (losing money). The country's fiscal year is in deficit every year, so it can only survive by borrowing money.
And those samurai who have no chance to be hired are mostly in a difficult situation, and they are looking forward to one day becoming an official!
The dream of this group of samurai can only be realized under one condition, that is, the Satsuma clan launches a war to overthrow the Tokugawa shogunate and challenges the authority of the Tokugawa shogunate.
As long as the Satsuma Domain can successfully counterattack, everyone will be able to receive generous salaries and become a leader with no worries about food and clothing!
If it fails, haha...
After Shimazu Mitsuhisa returned to the feudal clan and lived in seclusion, instead of improving the finances of the Satsuma clan, there was a greater deficit due to the shrinking trade of the Ryukyu Kingdom - the 120,000 koku that the Satsuma clan received from Ryukyu was not the output of the land, but It is calculated using trade income. Now that the Ming Dynasty was founded, Japan has also stepped up its efforts to open up, so the Ryukyus controlled by the Satsuma Domain will inevitably decline, and Satsuma's foreign trade revenue is close to drying up.
Under this situation, the Satsuma Domain had to find ways to tighten expenditures, and the tightening caused the income of the lower-level feudal lords to drop... So the Satsuma Domain lords who were originally satisfied were now starting to make moves, not only not helping Shimazu Mitsuhisa suppressed the lower class, and many people were affected by the so-called Toyotomi legacy and began to have dreams of the fall of the curtain.
Every now and then, someone with a weak mind would write a white letter to Shimazu Hisamitsu, suggesting that he contact the Chosu Domain, which hated the shogunate, and summon the loyalists in the domain to raise the banner of overthrowing the emperor... .
Just when financial problems and a group of confused feudal lords and countrymen made Shimazu Hisamitsu anxious, his nephew Nie Kiyo suddenly arrived on the bay outside Kagoshima City on a Spanish sailing ship, and It also brought a bolt from the blue to Shimazu Hisamitsu!
The Spanish had just expelled the Ming Dynasty's commercial supervisor in the Ryukyu Kingdom. The Ryukyu Kingdom is now shared by the Satsuma Domain and Spain!
"Lord, there is nothing we can do!" Mitsuo Kiyo, the head of the Shimazu family and the elder of the family, knelt down in front of the stunned Shimazu Mitsuhisa and said with tears, "Now you just jump into Kagoshima Bay outside the city. I can’t even clean it!”
"Can't you wash it off?" Mitsuhisa Shimazu pretended to be calm, "What should I wash off?"
"Of course he is suspected of colluding with the Spaniards to collapse..."
"I, I am innocent, I have not colluded with the Spaniards, and I do not believe in Catholicism!"
Ni Nekiyo sighed: "But while expelling the Ming Dynasty forces, the Spanish protected the Satsuma clan's interests in the Ryukyu Kingdom..."
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