Enclosure Without Capitalism: Distribution, Domination, and Land Tenure in Japan, 701–1947

This article argues that Japanese land tenure history from 701 to 1947 CE exhibits a persistentoscillation between two structural logics: distribution — the state's attempt to allocate landequitably to cultivators — and domination — the concentration of land by political andeconomic elites as a means of controlling people and surplus. In a civilization where wet-riceagriculture made land the irreducible basis of survival, every regime was compelled to addressthe tension between these logics, and the earliest recorded polity began from a distributivepremise. The post-743 formation of the shoen (private estate) system — structurally identical toEnglish enclosure — demonstrates that dispossession occurred in eighth-century Japan withoutproletarianization, market formation, or industrialization, confirming Robert Nichols'stheoretical disaggregation of primitive accumulation. The oscillation's lack of net directionalityover thirteen centuries constitutes a counterexample to Marxian periodization, which treats thecommunal-to-private transition as a one-way passage from feudalism to capitalism. The conceptof kochi komin ("public land, public people"), which Japanese textbooks present as thefoundational principle of the ritsuryo system, appears in no primary source of the period and wasconstructed to serve a Marxist developmental narrative. I propose that thedistribution-domination tension is not uniquely European or capitalist but a structural feature ofany agrarian civilization in which land sustains life and power simultaneously.