Matsudaira Sadanobu: Frugal Reform and the Shared Landscape of Nanko

Matsudaira Sadanobu is associated with frugality and restrictions on luxury. Yet Shirakawa also contains a lake he developed and opened for people to enjoy: Nanko, created in 1801. His work extended beyond the policies of restraint most readily attached to his name.

Warriors and commoners could share the scenery. Understanding why the same reformer created such a place requires looking beyond his years in shogunal office. The lake belongs to the later stages of a career that cannot be bounded by the Kansei reforms alone.

Securing rice during famine, preparing for future shortages, assisting people and regulating their conduct were related but different activities. Frugality does not describe all of them with equal precision. The adopted accounts allow those functions to remain visible alongside restrictions.

Shirakawa City, the National Archives and cultural-property explanations guide this account. The question is not only what expenditure Sadanobu reduced, but what provisions, institutions and records he sought to leave for the future. Nanko supplies one place from which to ask it.

Sadanobu became lord of Shirakawa in 1783 and chief senior councillor of the shogunate in 1787. Shirakawa City also discusses unrest in Edo in its account of the reforms’ background. His responsibilities now extended to a much wider political setting.

Food scarcity, hardship and urban disorder were connected concerns for the authorities. Governing a large city involved questions of livelihood as well as security. This helps explain why the reforms cannot be separated neatly into an economic programme on one side and policing on the other.

Obtaining food for Shirakawa and making policy from the shogunate involved different geographical and institutional scales. Both nevertheless raised questions about preparation for crisis and the governing of people. They should be connected without being treated as the same operation.

Selecting relief alone would make restrictive measures disappear behind praise for a benevolent ruler. Selecting restrictions alone would obscure what the reserves were intended to address. The account keeps assistance, regulation and provision in view rather than assigning the whole programme one simple character.

The seven-tenths fund did not mean taking seventy per cent of a townsman’s income. Shirakawa City explains a system in which Edo neighbourhoods reduced their communal expenses and set aside seven tenths of the savings achieved through those reductions.

The base was consequently neither total income nor the entire previous neighbourhood budget. It was the amount saved. Distinguishing expenses, their reduction and the share retained is essential to describing the policy without changing its meaning.

The city connects these accumulated resources with securing unhusked rice against famine. Reviewing current expenditure and preparing food for a future crisis thus appeared within the same arrangement. The financial reserve and the provision it could support were linked but different things.

The city’s two adopted explanations give different starting years, 1791 and 1792. This article retains the difference instead of selecting one as settled. It explains the relationship between neighbourhood expenditure, savings and reserves without inventing an exact modern-currency equivalent.

Reform also concerned learning. The National Archives places the first gakumon ginmi examinations in 1792 as part of the Kansei reforms. The explanation describes an arrangement for assessing learning rather than simply praising study in general.

Preliminary and main examinations were followed by rewards for good performance. The original document shown in the exhibition belongs to 1867, not the first examination in 1792.

Publication policy had a more restrictive aspect. Shirakawa City describes instructions to the publishing trade to check content in 1790, followed by punishment of Tsutaya Jūzaburō, Santō Kyōden and others in 1791. These measures concern a different activity from the examinations.

Encouraging knowledge and controlling words entering circulation were both present in policy. The article retains that combination without treating examination and publishing regulation as a single institution. The dates and purposes provide distinctions within a cultural policy too easily reduced to one label.

Nanko was developed from wet ground called Ōnuma. Shirakawa City’s cultural-property explanation describes making use of an existing embankment, building up the bank and dredging the marsh. The landscape emerged through work on an earlier place rather than from an empty site.

Surrounding hills, mountains and open ground became part of the view, with pines, cherry trees and maples planted around it. Human work and existing scenery were combined in creating a place to enjoy.

A distinctive feature was its opening to commoners, unlike a garden confined within a castle or private residence. The city presents the idea of shimin kyōraku, shared enjoyment by warriors and commoners. That provides a specific description of access in the adopted account.

It does not mean that the entire status system was abolished. Present shrines, shops and later garden facilities also cannot be placed automatically in the landscape of 1801. Shared enjoyment and the site as it appears now answer different historical questions.

Another undertaking associated with Sadanobu was the survey and recording of old treasures in Shūko Jisshu. The cultural-property explanation describes scholars and artists copying paintings, objects and inscriptions at temples, shrines and other locations.

Names, locations and dimensions accompanied the pictures. The work appeared in 1801 in eighty-five volumes, covering categories including bronze objects, weapons, musical instruments and writing equipment. Its method involved information as well as visual representation.

This was not the same institution as rice reserves. It can nevertheless be considered as another kind of work directed toward leaving something for the future. That is an interpretive comparison, not a claim that all Sadanobu’s projects shared one administrative system.

The article uses designation explanations and catalogue information. It does not claim that all original printing blocks or every volume have been independently deciphered. A set’s volumes, surviving printing blocks and the separately catalogued copies of one category are different counts.