Epoch Lives

Epoch Lives / Meiji Japan

The Last
Ledger

A warrior class dissolved not by the sword, but by the pen.

Recorded by Katsura Jirō, domain clerk of Kagoshima

Japan, 1868 – 1877

Visual Essay

Stipends, Bonds, and the Death of a Class

The samurai class was not destroyed by war but by accounting: stipends converted to bonds, domains merged into prefectures, privilege replaced by institutions.

Katsura Jirō was a lower samurai and stipend clerk in Kagoshima—Satsuma domain. He recorded the ledger lines. He was also one of them: a man whose family had drawn a stipend for eleven generations, erasing names he had known since childhood.

Stipend Ledger Act I / The Restoration 1868
Total Annual Stipend 6,170,000 koku
Active Domains 12 of 12
Domain Stipend Allocation Total 6,170,000 koku
3,847,000
Act I

The Silence After

I kept the ledger for twenty-one years. I recorded every name, every stipend, every conversion, every erasure. My hand was always steady. That was my duty and my shame.

— Katsura Jirō

By 1877, the ledger was empty. Where 400,000 families once breathed as lines of ink, there were institutions: an army, a navy, schools, railways. The same money, the same land. A different civilization.

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