The Edo Landlord Was a Hired Manager | Room Hunting, Then and Now: Edo ⑥

This is the English edition of our Japanese series 「お部屋探し今むかし」 (Room Hunting, Then and Now). 日本語版はこちら ／ All English articles

In rakugo, Japan’s traditional comic storytelling, the row-house landlord is a familiar figure. He scolds the tenants, looks after them, and is a big name in the neighborhood. Naturally I assumed he owned the row house. He did not.

The official name was “yamori”

The proper word for an Edo landlord is yamori, literally “house keeper.” A dictionary defines it this way: a person who managed land and houses on behalf of the landowner or house owner, and collected the ground rent and house rent (Digital Daijisen).

The owner was someone else, and the landlord was the owner’s agent. A Japanese history dictionary published by Yamakawa says the yamori received a “yamori wage.” In other words, a manager working for pay.

More than collecting rent

Collecting rent was not the whole job. The yamori was also stationed at the jishinban, the neighborhood guard post, and handled the town’s public duties. He took on the owner’s civic obligations too.

The same history dictionary describes the relationship with tenants as a “fictive parent-child relationship.” A stiff phrase, but it is the old saying known from rakugo: “The landlord is as good as a parent, the tenant as good as a child.”

In Edo ③ I wrote about landlords going to ask around an applicant’s old neighborhood before letting them move in. If you are going to be a stand-in parent, of course you choose carefully.

An unexpected source of income

Besides the wage, there was one more source of income: the night soil that collected in the row house’s shared toilets.

In Edo this was valuable fertilizer. Farmers from the surrounding area bought it, and the money is said to have gone to the yamori (Edo Ginmi Mondō Hikae, official commentary of the Edo Culture and History Certification Test).

The more tenants, the more income. I cannot think of a better reason to care about full occupancy.

In today’s terms, a property management company

Collecting rent on the owner’s behalf, looking after the building, listening to the tenants. Today that is the work of a property management company.

I also manage properties entrusted to me by their owners. That makes the yamori my Edo-period colleague. Although today’s management companies do not do the civic duties, the parenting, or the fertilizer sales.

When you rent a home in Japan, your point of contact is often the management company and not the owner. That separation between owner and manager is a tradition going back to Edo.

A note on sources: for this article I relied on dictionary and encyclopedia entries, and on an article presenting the certification test’s official commentary.

Next time: the shared spaces of the row house. The well and the rubbish pit.

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Please note: Lease contracts and the legally required explanation of important matters (jūyō jikō setsumei) are provided in Japanese.