Hello and welcome to the history of Japan podcast episode 563.

You got a fight for your right to party,

part two. You have to imagine that from a certain perspective, something like the great Tenme riots of 1787 might seem like an act of God. If you were a samurai living in the

Shogun's capital city in that year, you probably had been

educated in Confucian philosophy, where one of the signs that a government is faltering and losing

its mandate from heaven to rule was an uptick in uprisings by the commoners.

And probably you didn't have the highest opinion of the commoners in general.

They were an unwashed, uneducated

mass who existed primarily to provide their betters with sustenance and to be morally improved by the

virtuous acts of their superiors. They certainly didn't do things on their own or act independently.

After all, that was why it was so important when they did get

Uppity to find out who was organizing the masses and to make an example of those people.

And this perhaps explains why when in the fifth lunar month of 1787, the peasants of Eddo

began to riot and burn huge chunks of the city, one of the most commonly seen

refrains in samurai commentary was that some sort of divine presence was assisting them.

To be fair, the sheer scale of what was happening probably lent it all a sense of heavenly judgment.

The first riots, driven by increasing hunger among the city's poor, began in the neighborhoods

of Asaksa, Honjo, and Fukugawa.

In other words, the poor areas of the Stamachi, the lower town outside the well-manicured

warrior neighborhoods at the heart of Edo.

However, when the northern and southern city magistrates, the officials responsible for managing

Edo in that year, respectively Magari Bucci Kagetsugu and Yamamura, Takakira, dithered on how to

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