Kaga Domain

The Kaga Domain (加賀藩, Kaga han), also known as Kanazawa Domain (金沢藩, Kanazawa han), was a Japanese domain of the Edo period. It is associated with the provinces of Kaga, Noto and Etchū in modern-day Ishikawa Prefecture and Toyama Prefecture on the island of Honshū.

In the han system, Kaga was a political and economic abstraction based on periodic cadastral surveys and projected agricultural yields. In other words, the domain was defined in terms of kokudaka, not land area. This was different from the feudalism of the West.

History

Maeda Toshiie was a distinguished military commander, a retainer of Oda Nobunaga and a close friend of Toyotomi Hideyoshi. A member of the Council of Five Elders who ruled Japan during the Sengoku period, he was granted the Kaga Domain in 1583. His eldest son, Maeda Toshinaga, supported Tokugawa Ieyasu in his rise to power and was rewarded by an increase in his lands to 1.25 million koku. Except for the Tokugawa holdings, the domain was the richest in the nation.