In 1549, some regional lord legalized free trade in his territory. Nobody remembers his name now. In 1567, a 34 year old warlord named Oda Nobunaga copied the idea and ran it across his whole territory. Everyone remembers his name. Before any of this, getting goods to market in Japan was brutal. Near Ise Shrine there was an 18 km stretch of road with 60 toll checkpoints on it. Sixty. Merchants paid a tax at every single one just to keep walking. And even if you survived the road, you still couldn't just sell stuff. You had to join a guild called a "za." The guild paid temples and nobles for the right to control who got to trade. If you weren't a member, you were locked out. Didn't matter what you were selling. Nobunaga ripped both systems out by the root. Checkpoints, gone. Guild monopolies, gone. Anyone could show up and sell. This wasn't kindness. He needed cash and soldiers, and an open market makes both faster than a controlled one. Killing the guilds also starved the temples and nobles who lived off that money, which happened to be his political rivals. A 16th century samurai ran one of the first large scale deregulation campaigns in recorded history, then used the tax revenue to build an army.