I don't think this guy is Kisume's father though... But earlier in the comic, her parents did sell her to him so they won't starve to death, while she works for him in return. The poor girl...
I don't think this guy is Kisume's father though... But earlier in the comic, her parents did sell her to him so they won't starve to death, while she works for him in return. The poor girl...
It wasn't an uncommon practice even through the Meiji Restoration for farmers and other families on hard times to sell or rent their children. The boys usually wound up on fishing boats that would be out at sea for weeks or months at a time, while the girls usually wound up in geisha houses. This was largely due to the extreme economic immobility of Japan at the time, as well as a series of famines that had afflicted Japan and had greatly damaged the peasant class.
It wasn't an uncommon practice even through the Meiji Restoration for farmers and other families on hard times to sell or rent their children. The boys usually wound up on fishing boats that would be out at sea for weeks or months at a time, while the girls usually wound up in geisha houses. This was largely due to the extreme economic immobility of Japan at the time, as well as a series of famines that had afflicted Japan and had greatly damaged the peasant class.
But it said "several hundred years ago", and Meiji Restoration was only about 140 years ago. Wasn't the tax imposed on the peasants relative to the size of their harvest up until Meiji Restoration? And wasn't changing that so that the state could get a stable income what mostly caused all of those problems? Here, however, we can see that the amount of taxation is probably not in proportion to the harvest size, so I don't know.