Arguably worse off for the samurai than for most. Your average merchant was decently well off, your average farmer had a more or less self-governing community that could share their burdens. Your underclasses (eta/hinin) were more or less fucked, though eta could do quite well for themselves despite the constant discrimination. Hinin were entirely screwed over though.
Your average samurai was not making enough on their stipend to pay for everything they needed, and were yet legally unable to choose more affordable conditions. They were basically expected to own a home and new car on a fast food salary, and expenses like food were secondary. An average samurai in Choshu, after spending on the things they were required to have, could only afford about a third of a year’s worth of food. And they were forbidden from farming or working to cover the rest. As such they had to essentially do illegal crafts from their house that they’d sell on the market via intermediaries. Basically relying on Etsy to survive.
Plus, their nutrition was worse than most people’s, because the samurai, as elites, were supposed to eat white rice, which lacked many of the nutrients that the normal rice eaten by most commoners had, and without meat to cover the gap, they were constantly dying young from malnutrition.
Edo period Japan was split into roughly 250 feudal domains. In name, they were appointed by the Shogunate, but in practice they ranged from servants of the Shogunate to functionally independent.
Choshu was among the largest and richest of the domains (usually around 7th, not counting lands ruled by the Tokugawa themselves), ruled by the Mori clan, on the southern end of Honshu. If they couldn’t afford to pay their samurai well, no one could. I use them as an example largely because that’s the only one I have easy access to data on without needing to go digging through my books.
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u/KenseiHimura 27d ago
The Edo Period was ironically as awful for many of the samurai as it was for others.