From the very start of their rule, the samurai lords of Tokugawa Japan fought bitterly against the commercialization of agriculture. Over the course of the 17th century, the shogunate issued multiple laws limiting the production and consumption of tobacco, oilseed, and cotton, among other commercial crops. Officials wanted to keep farmers focused on making rice. After all, rice was the staple grain, essential to life, and, perhaps more importantly, the basis for the entire tax system. For samurai, no rice meant no food and no money. In the second half of the 17th century, however, the expansion of the commercial economy broke down this restrictive regime, marking the first triumph of a vibrant, peasant-driven market economy over a conservative seigneurial economic system. Or so the story goes.

In Honjō Masanori's 2012 book, he challenges nearly every aspect of this narrative. He shows persuasively that the shogunate had in fact fully incorporated commercial agricultural products into the tax system from the early 1600s. Shogunal officials even encouraged cotton production - perhaps the most important of all commercial crops in early modern Japan - by taxing it at a lower rate than rice. Moreover, the famous bans on oilseed, cotton, and tobacco from the middle of the century, he argues, were not permanent measures but temporary expedients in the face of a major famine in the 1640s. Earlier bans on tobacco were not meant to push farmers away from commercial agriculture, either. Rather, they were motivated by the widespread moral panic that surrounded the new drug in Japan's rapidly growing cities. Townspeople with bad smoking habits often caused costly and life-threatening fires, prompting shogunal regulation first on the consumption, then the production of tobacco. This ban on tobacco was gradually phased out of existence by the second half of the 17th century. No consistent policy forbidding the planting and sale of commercial crops ever existed.

In Japanese high school history textbooks and commonly used reference works, however, the 17th century ordinances are presented as a general ban on the free planting of crops other than grains, called the denbata katte-zukuri no kinrei. But the key phrase "free planting" (katte-zukuri), Honjō demonstrates, occurs exactly 0 times in all extant shogunal decrees from the period. The 17th century ban is a historiographical artifact, a myth that coalesced into historical orthodoxy during the Meiji period.

Outside the obligation to pay tax rice - an obligation, as Honjō illustrates in his first book, that never stopped many Tokugawa farmers from devoting all or nearly all of their land to commercial crops - subjects of the shogun were free to plant what they liked, when they liked, and the shogunate was more than happy to meet them where they were - including all kinds of commercial agriculture within the very rice-based system of taxation so often seen as restricting the samurai authorities' capacity to extract revenues from the expanding economy. In other words, the growth of commercial agriculture did not challenge the fiscal foundations of Tokugawa authority. Nor did the late 17th century necessarily mark a key turning point in the relationship between state and commerce. In this way, Honjō challenges us to reconsider the very nature of Tokugawa attitudes towards the market and the role of the state in Japan's preindustrial economic growth.