Rakuichi Rakuza — the Opened Market
Strip away the za's monopoly so that anyone may trade in the market — rakuichi rakuza is the most famous experiment in opening a place in Japanese history. The Azuchi ordinance has thirteen articles: the first exempts dues and za levies, the second obliges merchants to use the road through the castle town, the thirteenth concentrates the horse trade of Omi province at Azuchi. It is not only exemption; it is a design for drawing the flow of people and goods toward the town, which grew to some six thousand people. People and goods gather in an opened place — an instinct that produces a scene remarkably like the marketplaces of four hundred and twenty years later. There is no source connecting them directly, so this map draws only a thin line of its own reading, as a resemblance.
The myth, corrected
Rakuichi rakuza was Nobunaga's policy of dissolving the za and creating a free market
First, the words «raku-za» do not appear anywhere in the Azuchi town ordinance of 1577. The four-character phrase is attested nine years earlier, in the 1568 notice board for the Kano market. Second, the famous correction — that Rokkaku Sadayori came before Nobunaga — has its own doubts: the 1549 document shows only that the new market at Ishidera was already treated as raku, not that Rokkaku established it. And the largest point is the substance. Recent scholarship finds that «raku-za» in practice meant exemption from the za's dues, not the dissolution of the za as an organisation, and Nobunaga went on protecting other za. Researchers now read the policy not as deregulation but as a warring-states lord's reorganisation of economic control. Lift the received view and there is another received view underneath.