Hyakushō

The hyakushō, the peasants, came second in shinōkōshō, the Confucian scheme of four occupations adopted from China: samurai, peasants, craftsmen and merchants. In Tokugawa Japan peasants were the great majority of the people, usually put at about 80 per cent, under a hereditary samurai class of about 5 per cent. Older scholars read the scheme as a ranking, but studies since about 1995 have found that peasants, craftsmen and merchants were equal beneath the samurai, a classification rather than a pecking order, and the old hierarchy chart has been removed from Japanese history textbooks.