For centuries, Japan's major source of income had been agriculture. The _samurai_ were local landholders who employed peasants to grow their rice and who were beholden to a local _daimyo_ for protection. Money played no large part in the economy, since most daily needs could be obtained by barter. But the sudden wealth brought into being by the European traders had nothing to do with the amount of rice a _samurai's _peasants could produce; it accrued instead to the merchants in port cities. Furthermore, the accommodations required to keep the _daimyo _and their families in the capital city of Edo called for artisans and merchants in great number. Thus the Tokugawa government had mistakenly decreed the agricultural _samurai_ and peasants the backbone of the economy at the very moment in history when Japan was finally developing an urban, currency-based culture. Predictably, the urban merchants, who were at the bottom of the Confucianist social system, soon had their supposed social betters, the _samurai_, completely in hock. The Tokugawa struggled hard to keep the townspeople, now the controllers of the economy, in their place. Merchants were forbidden to build elaborate houses or wear elaborate clothes, and they were expected to defer to the penurious _samurai _in all things. Japan had never before had a bourgeoisie--the traditional divisions were aristocracy, warriors, and peasants-- and consequently popular taste had never really been reflected in the arts. Much to the dismay of the Tokugawa (and to the detriment of classical Zen culture), this was changing. While the aristocrats and warrior families in Kyoto preserved the older arts of Zen, in the bourgeois city of Edo there were new popular art forms like the Kabuki theater and the woodblock print, both eons removed from the No and the monochrome landscape. Classical Zen culture was largely confined to aristocratic Kyoto, while in boisterous Edo the townspeople turned to explicit, exciting arts full of color and drama. In spite of this democratic turn of events, the Zen aesthetics of Kyoto continued to be felt, largely through the tea ceremony, which had been officially encouraged in the Momoyama age of Hideyoshi. Later in the Tokugawa era the poetic form of Haiku developed, and it too was highly influenced by the Zen idea of suggestiveness. Domestic architecture also maintained the ideals of Zen, as did Ikebana, or flower arranging, and the Japanese cuisine, which employed Zen ceramics. Thus Zen aesthetics seeped into middle-class culture in many forms, tempering taste and providing rigid rules for much of what are today thought of as the traditional arts and crafts of the Japanese.