Shōen

A shōen (荘園 or 庄園, shōen^?) was a field or manor in Japan. The Japanese term comes from the Tang dynasty Chinese term "莊園" (Mandarin: zhuāngyuán, Cantonese: zong1 jyun4).

Shōen, from about the 8th to the late 15th century, describes any of the private, tax-free, often autonomous estates or manors whose rise undermined the political and economic power of the emperor and contributed to the growth of powerful local clans. The estates developed from land tracts assigned to officially sanctioned Shintō shrines or Buddhist temples or granted by the emperor as gifts to the Imperial family, friends, or officials. As these estates grew, they became independent of the civil administrative system and contributed to the rise of a local military class. With the establishment of the Kamakura shogunate, or military dictatorship, in 1192, centrally appointed stewards weakened the power of these local landlords. The shōen system passed out of existence around the middle of the 15th century, when villages became self-governing units, owing loyalty to a feudal lord, or daimyo, who subdivided the area into fiefs and collected a fixed tax.

After the decay of the ritsuryō system, a feudal system of manors developed. Landowners or nameholders commended shares of the revenue produced (called shiki) to more powerful leaders often at the court, in order to be exempted from taxes and to subvert the Chinese-style "equal fields" system, whereby land was redistributed after certain periods of time. In the Kamakura period a hierarchy of nameholder, manor stewards (jitō), shugo (military provincial governor), and the shogun in Kamakura had evolved. These shōen were completely free from interference from the government, which therefore had no say or control of what occurred within the shōen's boundaries.

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