Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 6.djvu/177

 rupted trade between the two countries. Japan had then nothing to send to China except rice and marine products, and the export of the former staple was always liable to be interdicted in time of scarcity.

During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when the Ashikaga Shōguns ruled in Kyōtō, officialdom showed itself at once merciless and unscrupulous in its manner of exploiting the trading class. Monopolies of all the principal staples were sold to individual merchants, or associations of merchants, at prices highly remunerative to the Government. This was the beginning of the guild system in Japan. Its foundations had been laid when the Hōjō Shōguns limited the number of tradesmen admitted to the city of Kamakura, but the sale of declared monopolies was an Ashikaga device, and, after the manner of signal abuses, it remained long operative. The guilds were joint-stock corporations, their shares being transferable by sale or bequeathable from father to son. It is easy to see that at a time when means of communication were very defective, monopolies must often have produced great hardships. The exclusive privilege of brewing saké (rice-beer), for example, granted to a priest of Kitano at the beginning of the fifteenth century, caused a violent depreciation of the price of rice in districts where brewing had to be abandoned, and serious riots resulted. But the Ashikaga rulers gave themselves little concern about riots.