Preferred Citation: Ooms, Herman. Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1996 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0000034x/

Tokugawa Village Practice Class, Status, Power, Law Herman Ooms UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © 1996 The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Ooms, Herman. Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1996 1996. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft0000034x/

In memoriam Maria De Buyser, boerendochter

Acknowledgments

A number of people have assisted me in giving shape to this book, personally through comments, unknowingly through publications, or anonymously through institutions. I wish here to gratefully acknowledge their contributions.

My greatest intellectual debt is to Pierre Bourdieu for helping me to think my way through a number of important subjects taken up here. His writings, of great help in orienting my interpretations in Tokugawa Ideology , provided me with fresh angles of analytical vision in the present work as well. A second scholar to whom I owe my thanks, first for his writings and then for his personal assistance, is the local historian Ozaki Yukiya from the city of Ueda in Nagano prefecture. The heavy concentration in this book of material from Kita-Saku district in Nagano is due in part to his publications. I am grateful for his generous assistance in gathering data in Mochizuki during a brief visit in the summer of 1991 and his readiness to reduce my ignorance by answering numerous queries.

Once the manuscript had taken form, Tom Keirstead and Anne Walthall generously offered their comments at a critical moment when, simply happy that it was all on paper, I had lost all perspective on the project. Also of great help were those who read and commented on particular chapters: my wife Emily Groszos Ooms, Mark Ramseyer, and graduate students at UCLA. I would like to mention especially Christine Schoppe, who was always putting things together in unexpected ways, and Jason Creigh, a close reader of texts. Others I have to thank collectively for engaging with my ideas when I presented some of the chapters as papers: at Harvard University; at a mini-conference

called "Learning the Rules: Schooling, Law, and the Reproduction of Social Order in Early Modern Eurasia" at the University of Minnesota; at two international workshops on the topic "Social Embeddedness of Japanese Law" at the University of California, Los Angeles; at a seminar at Otani University in Kyoto organized by Professor Okuwa^[*] Hitoshi, where Maeda Ichiro's^[*] critique changed my thinking on some important points. I also owe my thanks to Yoshiko Kainuma, Eiko Ikegami, and Kurozumi Makoto for assistance in deciphering and translating some recalcitrant material, to Frank Upham for some helpful suggestions, and to Chase Langford for producing the map of the Kita-Saku area.

Finally, this study was made possible by financial support from a number of institutions over almost a decade: a fellowship from the Japan Foundation, a research fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a research grant from the Social Science Research Council, a research travel grant from the U.S.-Japan Friendship Commission, travel and research funds from the UCLA Center for Japanese Studies, and UCLA Academic Senate research funds.

Abbreviations

KDJ Kokushi daijiten. Edited by Kokushi daijiten henshu^[*] iinkai . 15 vols. Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1979-94.

MK Mibun to kakushiki. Nihon no kinsei , 7. Edited by Asao Naohiro . Chuokoronsha^[*] , 1992.

NAK-KS2 (1) Nagano-kenshi: Kinsei shiryo-hen^[*] , Vol. 2, Toshin^[*]chiho^[*]: , 2: . Edited by Nagano-ken . Pt. 1. Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1978.

NAK-KS2 (2) Nagano-kenshi: Kinsei shiryo-hen^[*] , Vol. 2, Toshin^[*]chiho^[*]: , 2: . Edited by Nagano-ken . Pt. 2. Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1979.

NAK-T 4 Nagano-kenshi: Tsushi^[*]4 (Kinsei 1 ) : 4 ( 1). Edited by Nagano-ken . Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1987.

NAK-T 5 Nagano-kenshi: Tsushi^[*]5 (Kinsei 2): 5 ( 2). Edited by Nagano-ken . Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1988.

NAK-T 6 Nagano-kenshi: Tsushi^[*]6 (Kinsei 3 ) : 6 ( 3). Edited by Nagano-ken . Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1989.

NKR 12 Kinsei no jikata-machikata monjo · . Nihon komonjogaku ronshu^[*], 12 (Kinsei 2). Edited by Nihon komonjo gakkai . Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1987.

NNS 3 Ken'i to shihai. Nihon no shakaishi , 3. Iwanami shoten, 1987.

NNS 4 Futan to zoyo^[*]. Nihon no shakaishi , 4. Iwanami shoten, 1986.

NNS 5 Saiban to kihan. Nihon no shakaishi , 5. Iwanami shoten, 1987.

NRT 3 Kinsei. Nihon rekishi taikei , 3. Edited by Kodama Kota^[*], Nagahara Keiji , et al. Yamakawa shuppan, 1988.

NSSS 14 Buraku. Nihon shomin seikatsu shiryo^[*] shusei^[*], 14. Edited by Harada Tomohiko et al. San'ichi shobo^[*] , 1971.

NST 27 Kinsei buke shiso^[*]. Nihon shiso^[*] taikei , 27. Iwanami shoten, 1974.

NST 36 Ogyu^[*]Sorai. Nihon shiso^[*] taikei , 36. Iwanami shoten, 1973.

TKKk Tokugawa kinreiko^[*]koshu^[*]. Edited by Ishii Ryosuke^[*]. 4 vols. Sobunsha^[*] , 1959-61.

TKKz Tokugawa kinreiko^[*]zenshu^[*]. Edited by Ishii Ryosuke^[*]. 6 vols. Sobunsha^[*] , 1959-61.

Map 1.
Provinces of Tokugawa Japan

Source : Conrad Totman, Green Archipelago:
Forestry in Pre-Industrial Japan (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989).

Map 2.
Kita-Saku District, Shinano

Introduction

Class, status, power, and law are not new topics to non-Japanese macrostructural treatments of Tokugawa society (1600-1868). Scholars have described well their historical specificity, though often without discussing their interrelationship. Together, as a cluster of general questions, they constitute a Marxian-Weberian problematic perhaps so familiar that it seems disingenuous to persist in treating them still as questions. Indeed, one might ask what the point is of returning to them if they are in reality answers given long ago posturing posthumously as questions—an "answeramatic" disguised as a problematic. How is this book situated within the fields of Tokugawa history and general sociological theory? A second question a reader acquainted with my previous interest in Tokugawa ideology might raise concerns my new orientation.^[1] Why this shift from intellectual history and representations of reality to social history and institutional practice?

Post factum justifications for what one has gotten into in the first place without clearly knowing why, except that it looked interesting, partake of retrospective fiction. This is especially true for questions regarding one's intellectual trajectory. With the proviso that reflections of this genre never get at real reasons, I can offer some rationale that one may expect from an introduction.

Previous scholarship, including my own analysis of ideological constructs, approached the issues of class, status, domination, and so on, from a position that was located in the political center. The scholar's

[1] My book Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680 was published by Princeton University Press in 1985.

totalizing perspective—"modernist" some would call it now—from such a vantage point is the cognitive equivalent of the rulers' reach of dominion. Past works described how the system of governance was set up, how it functioned, reproduced itself, collapsed—and begat modernity. Even when I argued that the ideology of the times was not produced or even commissioned by the rulers, my emphasis was clearly that it served their interests. Perhaps less explicitly, I also implied that ideas or social representations mattered as much as they did because of their direct link to practice.

I formulated some of those structuralist and functionalist interpretations on the basis of insights gained from Pierre Bourdieu's writings. His writings have further led me to turn my attention to ways in which institutions, like laws, not only constitute sites of ideological embodiment but also define fields of practice and power contests. To a considerable extent, institutions circumscribe, directly, with less mediation by ideology than one might think perhaps, what people are, do, can be, can do, or feel instinctively to be unthinkable or impracticable. This simple truth calls for a kind of history that focuses on what people do within and with institutions. In regard to Tokugawa Japan, this insight translated for me into a desire to examine what peasants did and could do in their villages. How did the institutional setting of a military regime influence intravillage power distributions? Conversely, did village politics affect institutions?

Questions of this genre have received hardly any attention in Western scholarship, and although Japanese historians have produced a staggering amount of work about local rural history, very little of it has crossed the language barrier. Thomas C. Smith's admirable classic The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan touches only briefly on intravillage politics. Scholars writing about peasant resistance (Bix, Kelley, Vlastos, and Walthall) deal mainly with what peasants did when they left their villages to protest extravillage authority and only occasionally with the allocation, use, and contestation of power within villages. These studies are also limited to the mid and late Tokugawa period, when the most dramatic collective protests took place.

Class has been discussed far more than status by these scholars, who either emphasize its growing importance or argue its irrelevance. Either way, the assumption has been that status may explain collective action in the first Tokugawa century but not later, when class in-

terests prevailed (or, according to an anticlass argument, when less stable group alliances cut across various social strata). Schematically, class either replaced status as the motor of social stratification or failed to do so contrary to expectations. In either case the issue was class, not status.

My critique of this kind of diachronic dichotomizing is inspired by Bourdieu's reworking of the Weberian categories of class, status, and power through his flexible model of convertible capital (economic, social, and symbolic). Within this perspective, class and status, far from being mutually exclusive, constitute forms of power that are complementary and occasionally substitutable for each other. Chapters 2 and 3 of this book address this class-status question and, like the two concepts, are hard to separate. In chapter 2 I concentrate on the role of class-based rural power even in the early period, following in this principally the lead taken by the Japanese historian Mizumoto Kunihiko. In chapter 3 I examine the manipulation of power through status positions in village political struggles throughout the period.

Some time ago class ceased to be an almost obligatory subject for social historians, many of whom were attracted to insights promised by discourse analysis or the new cultural history. Bourdieu's work, however, has opened up possibilities to engage the topic anew by "bringing in" status. In an interesting turnabout, in 1992 the well-known British historian David Cannadine also called for a reengagement with class analysis, via the study of status.^[2] I share this point of view.

When discussing class, it is important to maintain the distinction, however elementary, between objective socioeconomic conditions shared by a number of people or groups and subjective awareness or practice (not to be taken for granted) based upon a recognition of those conditions. Too often, either a subjective class is postulated automatically on the basis of the existence of objective conditions (in doctrinaire Marxism) or the significance of an objective class is belittled because of the absence of class agents (in anti-Marxist arguments). An objective class is an analytical construct that is simultaneously the initial impetus for a query and its final result. Although classes in seventeenth-century Japan (or France) obviously do not look the same as modern classes—a

[2] See David Cannadine, "Cutting Classes," New York Review of Books , Dec. 17, 1992, 52-57, esp. 57.

fact that is often forgotten in class analyses of Tokugawa Japan—their absence clearly is hard to argue.^[3] An example of an objective class in this study is the dogo^[*] , or rural magnates, which Japanese historians, long interested in class, have identified as existing as an identifiable socioeconomic stratum from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Yet even the term that names and thus constitutes this group as a group is a modern scholarly creation. When, however, dogo^[*] organized armed resistance against land surveys in certain regions toward the end of the sixteenth century they acted subjectively as a class.

In the seventeenth century there are numerous instances of peasants agitating around issues of village governance. Analysis identifies these peasants as belonging successively to different socioeconomic strata and acting to further shared interests by submitting group petitions. In this instance also, it is justified to speak both of an objective property class and a subjective social class, although their membership is not identical. The objective class may be identifiable across whole provinces, while peasant demands were always limited to the immediate environment; thus theirs was a social class consciousness expressed in practice but embedded in and circumscribed by the village.

Often these village disputes concerned issues of status. At a macro and official level, Tokugawa Japan was, of course, a society of "orders" (Stände ), legally defined status groups. Thus, all villagers were commoners, and most of them belonged to the status order of peasants. Yet this commonality, sanctioned legally by the state (from a distant center), should not be reconfigured into an equally distant image of village solidarity. On closer examination, it is clear that villagers always differentiated among themselves within a clearly marked hierarchy comprising multiple status gradations. This status was in part indirectly sanctioned legally by overlords (and thus an "order"), in part locally generated (and thus closer to the modern meaning of social standing).

This intravillage status hierarchy, expressed in prescribed forms of social interaction and normative gradations of material consumption, was closely related to economic power as either an addition to or a

[3] For a cogent defense of the need for a class analysis of seventeenth-century France, a "society of orders" like Tokugawa Japan, see William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 1, esp. 7-9.

substitute for it. That economic power translates into political control, which it supplements with privileges (often based on tales of ancestry), thus creating and securing rare status positions, is not difficult to understand. Once the dog grew a tail, however, the tale could whip the dog. Status could be made to function as a first line of defense of political privilege, even when economic underpinnings had given way, by holding off new claimants who, pointing to their new wealth, insisted on a share in the control of village affairs. This tug of war for political power between peasants differentiated by economic and social status can be documented throughout the Tokugawa period.

The discussion of status and power in villages is limited in this book to those aspects of this dyad that were the subject of explicit written regulations and contestations. This means that the players discussed here are households, not individuals. It goes without saying that within households too power was distributed and exercised according to status, in this case along gender and age differentials. This is the area of (mostly un- or undercodified) dispositional habits, which does not belong to a study of explicit social and economic stratification that, moreover, extends beyond intrafamilial roles.

This limitation does not mean that I hold a monolithic view of human agency. Individual identities are plural, not singular, because they are constituted by multiple differences in kin, gender, age, lineage, neighborhood, and regional systems. In the public political realm, however, such multiple identities are simplified and channeled to create single group agents in accordance with the needs of policymakers—or their challengers. In Tokugawa Japan this was especially true of households, neighborhoods, and lineages. They were politically overdeter-mined by extravillage lordly authority. Many a village dispute centered around the way power was distributed through these institutions.

Status is a system of stratification through socially recognized honor, esteem, and privilege. The positive connotation of these terms, however, is misleading since such a description of a status system is the work of an outside observer who perceives grades of more or less honor, esteem, and privilege and relates to the whole hierarchy at once. This structuralist gaze is of a different quality than the experience of those who occupy a position within the status system. Status holders always relate to the system differentially, from a specific position that determines the scope and intensity of their interest in other positions, especially neighboring ones. One can at least say that, while they enjoyed public social

honor and esteem from those below them (and private envy and resentment as well), status holders must look down upon occupants of lower positions (with fear perhaps) as undeserving of such recognition, as embodiments of dishonor. Things are obviously more complicated than this dichotomy indicates. Even in a rigidly stratified society like Tokugawa Japan not all of the aspects of social interaction were patterned on status prescriptions. For instance, the "outcastes," too often still referred to by the pejorative term eta , were not treated as polluted in every social encounter. The point is that a status system is always also a system of socially sanctioned dishonor.

This is particularly true in the case of the outcastes, victims not only of social disrespect but also of stigmatizing ostracism and outright discrimination. For the last two decades, Japanese historians have produced a monumental body of research about the Tokugawa history of today's burakumin (in part descendants of the outcastes), a subject virtually untouched by non-Japanese scholars. This record, however, is not only a collection of particular histories of individuals, families, or communities. It also reveals changes and developments in the status of outcastes as such over the whole Tokugawa period and suggests that other factors besides cultural prejudice were at work.

Obviously, a study of status cannot neglect the subject of outcastes, although I almost did. Only after the other chapters were written did I become aware of the need to address this difficult issue. This near oversight is not without its own significance. The outcastes lived with their own headmen in hamlets near but apart from peasant villages and, in eastern Japan since the 1720s, under the direct jurisdiction of their seminational leader, or Danzaemon (an office name), in Edo. Since they formed a "society outside society," as Japanese historians often put it, they have usually been treated separately in modern historiography as well. Their serious study has been a ghettoized subdiscipline until very recently. Thus, it is possible to read endlessly about status, class, and power within Tokugawa villages without encountering them. And yet, as I argue in chapter 5, the treatment of these outcastes in Tokugawa and modern times constitutes perhaps the clearest and ugliest example of the operation of status.

The topography of power within villages was not shaped solely by intravillage factors. Extravillage lordly authority helped draw some of the lines over which confrontations took place. This authority interfered as a source of prestige and power, directly by creating "titled

peasants" and the village offices of headman and neighborhood heads and by issuing village laws, indirectly by allowing the officialization of village-generated statuses as they appeared on documents drawn up locally and by sanctioning through noninterference separate, "autonomous" village codes.

Nevertheless, it has often been said that villages were self-governing to a very high degree. A headman and the neighborhood heads who assisted him constituted the core of the village council (where only titled peasants had a seat), which took care of all public affairs, foremost the delivery of tribute and corvée to the overlord's district intendant but also many judicial and penal matters. In domains of the daimyo and shogun a district intendant (a bannerman in the shogunal houseland, a special port, on of the shogunal domain) was in charge of from a dozen to over a hundred villages. Often there were also village group headmen, who channeled communication between the headmen of a number of villages and the intendant. Tribute and population registers were kept at both the village and the district level. Matters that could not be settled by the neighborhood heads or by the village council or headman could be taken to the district intendant (via the village group headman) in the form of petitions or suits or, ultimately, to shogunal or domainal higher-ups, usually in Edo. Defendants were routinely invited to respond to the accusations in writing, thus completing the record of the plaintiff's lawsuit. The written testimonies of witnesses or interested parties would be taken into consideration by the authorities as they tried to reach a solution—a verdict or an ordered settlement. It should be understood that at all these levels administrative and judicial functions overlapped; Tokugawa Japan did not have an independent judiciary and was a society without lawyers.

Although the sketch above may blur distinctions between locality and center, the degree to which Tokugawa villages enjoyed autonomy has long been debated among Japanese historians. This debate has centered mainly on the structural position of village regulations within the overall power distribution of society. Did these codes constitute limits to, or were they vehicles for, the penetration of supravillage authority within the village? I engage this question in chapter 4, where I supplement the traditional approach, which is based almost exclusively on the study of legal texts, with an analysis of actual practice. This perspective emphasizes the articulation within a single juridical domain of two specific legal authorities, a supra- and an intravillage authority,

which created a distinct space that allowed each one to choose whether to use the other explicitly or implicitly.

This strategic area, where village headmen or district intendants exercise some discretion in deciding which laws to apply, overlook, or subvert (and to what extent) is, of course, hard to explore. We usually know only the outcomes of such deliberations, not the processes by which they were reached. Local historians, however, have discovered diaries, notes, and queries by village headmen that reveal strategies they weighed or used in applying, interpreting, or circumventing existing regulations. All too often one feels obliged to choose between a "naive" view that equates written law with actual practice and a skepticism that questions the effectiveness of laws. Headmen's private papers provide an escape from this simplistic dilemma. They reveal judicious appraisals by historical actors of the relative power of law and other circumstantial constellations of forces.

The approach to the study of Tokugawa law followed here is twofold and aims at the interplay between the normative power of laws and actual social practice. On the one hand, in the final chapter I attempt to sketch a general macro picture, not of Tokugawa laws, but of the juridical field and the specific power generated by laws. On the other hand, most of the other chapters are constructed to a large extent around lawsuits and law cases, where one can witness how laws figured in various local power struggles and contestations. To change unwanted situations, the peasants relied far more frequently on suits and petitions than on mass protests or uprisings. One cannot avoid the impression that lawyerless Tokugawa Japan was far more litigious than the Japan of today.

Even though contention often took the form of litigation, one should keep in mind that the distinction between petitions or requests and what we would call suits or legal action is not at all clear. There are several reasons for this. Suits were always drawn up according to an official format in a formal language of entreaty ("with fear and trembling") as supplications professing in advance willing subjection to the good will of the authorities.^[4] Furthermore, there were no attorneys

[4] The phrases "formal language of entreaty" and "willing subjection" are taken from Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8, 45 His description of tenth- and eleventh-century France applies well to Tokugawa Japan, perhaps not surprisingly given the "feudal" character of these two societies: "Petition and concession, humility and grace, dependence and domination; these were the categories that expressed the fundamental political relations of the tenth and eleventh centuries" (81).

available, and the governing authorities (village councils or overlords) were the "judges." The outcomes of suits/petitions, rather than being "verdicts," were often conciliations or compromises without clearcut winners or losers, reached with the help of appointed ad hoc mediators. Because restoring social order was more important than conforming to an abstract rule of law or justice, apologies were often the decisive moment in legal closure.

Since petitioning or litigating is only one way for individuals or groups to exercise power, a regional study of such action viewed against a detailed background of other forms of social and economic power would be ideal. I was led to explore that possibility after coming across a particularly well documented case of a poor peasant woman engaged in a protracted confrontation against all levels of village and even supravillage authority. The woman was from a village in Kita-Saku district in eastern Shinano (Nagano prefecture). I begin the book with her story.

Ultimately, however, my goal was a more comprehensive statement than an area study would allow. Although much is to be gained from regionally controlled research, I abandoned this way of organizing my project. Nevertheless, I was able to use much of the material thus gathered, often in the form of other cases presented throughout this book, giving it a strong regional emphasis. Thus, in good part, this is a study in rather than of a region.

A legal case usually yields a narrative, a fragment revealing what people cared about and why. Knowledge of circumstantial detail is often essential for an adequate understanding of the issue. An analysis of practice through a number of case studies with ever-changing actors and settings, however, can be taxing to the reader. The detail can at times be bewildering and overwhelming. Yet, the alternative of a quick summary of the issues to please the hurried reader sacrifices too much of what makes history—an old-fashioned idea—interesting and what reminds us that cases are about people.

It is just as appropriate to remind oneself that we get to know those

people because others, namely, local historians, have retrieved their stories. Without their assiduous efforts, a study like this, which touches upon the history of many locales, would be impossible. With this in mind, I have chosen not to relegate their names to footnotes in order to protect a seamless narrative and uninterrupted analysis. The reader will have to bear with this reminder in the text that it is the work of these historians that carries the study forward.

To a considerable extent, this book is a collection of essays that can be read independently and in almost any sequence. Linking the different topics and chapters, however, is the fact (and I use the term without hesitation) of inequality and often the reality (again, no apologies) of social suffering as they were institutionalized in the communities of Tokugawa villages. The frequent description of villages as harmonious and consensual is a misrecognition if not an outright denial of these realities.

1
"Mountains of Resentment"
One Woman' s Struggle against Tokugawa Authority

Follow your judgment.
Ken, 1757

In this study I often rely on data from Nagano prefecture, formerly Shinano province, especially from the Saku district in the east (since 1624 split into a northern, Kita-, and a southern, Minami-, half). This is in part accidental and in part by design and deserves an explanation. (For provinces, see map 1; for Kita-Saku, see map 2.)

Learning of my interest in Tokugawa village law, my colleague Anne Walthall recommended an article about a peasant woman who sued officials in Makibuse, a village in Kita-Saku. As it turned out, this case provided an unusually well documented entry into village politics. Additional reading drew me further into a study of the region, which, I soon found, had been explored by many prominent historians of the early Tokugawa period, including Kodama Kota^[*] , Miyagawa Mitsuru, Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , and the pathbreaking local historian Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] . Independent scholars continue this tradition of local history today. Ozaki Yukiya is one of them.

Like Ichikawa before him, Ozaki until recently supported his passion for local history by his work as a high school teacher. He wanted to become a professional historian, but in the immediate postwar period his father, convinced that science was the wave of the future, steered his son in the direction of physics and chemistry. Fortunately, Ozaki was able to squeeze some courses on Tokugawa documents into his schedule at the university. When I established contact with him in 1991, he was teaching high school science by day and researching and writing local history by night and on weekends.

Initially interested in questions of discrimination against burakumin , Japan's indigenous minority, Ozaki organized a club in the mid sev-

enties to explore the history of Mochizuki, the town into which Makibuse has been incorporated. He taught this small group of retired history buffs how to read the difficult Tokugawa texts, and together they began collecting, cataloging, and reading tens of thousands of documents from the storehouses of descendants of Tokugawa village headmen in the area.^[1]

In the storehouse of the descendant of Makibuse's headman, Ozaki came across dozens of documents referring to a woman named Ken. Intrigued, he devoted a great deal of time to piecing together the fragments of her story. I retell it here, following the trail of documents, supplemented with relevant historical data from other sources.^[2]

The Registration Incident: 1761-1763

Our point of entry into Ken's story is an incident involving the population register of Makibuse that is neither the beginning nor the end of Ken's story (see table 6 for a chronology of Ken's life). I chose this incident because often long-simmering questions regarding status surface in the historical record as disputes around the proper entry in village population registers, which were updated every year. These registers recorded not only a person's name but also his or her social and

[1] Currently the group is writing a multivolume history of the town and its surrounding villages. In the fall of 1992 Ozaki resigned from his high school teaching position to accept an appointment with Nagano's new prefectural museum, scheduled m open near Nagano city at the time of the 1998 Winter Olympics. As director of historical acquisitions for the Tokugawa period, he is at last pursuing his passion for local history on a full-time basis.

[2] Today Makibuse is part of Mochizuki, a township with some 3,100 households and a population of 11,300 that since 1959 has included a number of surrounding villages, each of which in turn comprises what were once several Tokugawa villages. For the materials on Mochizuki, see Mochizuki-machi kyoiku^[*] iinkai, Mochizuki no burakushi , nos. 1-5 (1976-79), and Mochizuki no chomin^[*]no rekishi , nos. 6-15 (1980-91). The documents related to Ken are still in the possession of the descendant of the Tokugawa headman of Makibuse village, who was reluctant to allow me access to them on my visit there in the summer of 1991. Fortunately, Ozaki had made copies, which he graciously put at my disposal. Ozaki published his findings on Ken in two partly overlapping but mostly complementary articles: "Kenjo oboegaki: Kinsei noson^[*] joseishi e no kokoromi," Mochizuki no chomin^[*]no rekishi 8 (1983): 61-100; and "Shinshu^[*] Saku-gun Makibuse-mura Kenjo ikken—Kinsei noson^[*] joseishi shikiron m shite," Rekishi Hyoron^[*] 419 (1985): 45-66. References to sources other than those directly pertaining to Ken's story are my own. The story has become famous locally through a play based on it.

legal status. Individuals contesting their status might cause delays in the village headman's submission of the registers to the higher authorities, or they might escalate the confrontation into a lawsuit, in either case leaving evidence for historians to examine. In Ken's case, we are well informed about the immediate issue she was raising and the pressures applied to her to conform. Behind this incident, however, lies the story of a peasant family, which adds a number of other dimensions to this incident.

Population registers, along with village laws and land cadasters (chronologically the earliest of the three), were the most important documents the supravillage authorities ordered the village headmen to keep up-to-date. Titled peasants had to signal agreement with the registers and laws for themselves and their dependents by affixing their seals.^[3] In principle, the laws were read at least once a year to all the villagers, sometimes, as in Makibuse, at every formal meeting of the village council.^[4] The list of signatures attached to these laws eventually evolved into separate, complete population registers (jinbetsu aratamecho^[*] ). The earliest such register in Kita-Saku dates from 1642. A record of Buddhist affiliation, required nationwide since 1665, was first added to these population registers but came to be drawn up separately and known as shumon^[*]aratamecho^[*] .^[5] These lists often functioned as population registers with increasingly detailed information on the age, provenance, and whereabouts of each co-resident of each household and his or her relationship to the household head. By the 1720s a full-fledged, nationwide population census was being conducted every six years. The headman, assisted by the kumi heads (the heads of the official neigh-

[3] On the process of diffusion of these laws from the lord to the peasants and their ratification by the village, see Yokota Fuyuhiko, "Kinsei sonraku ni okeru ho^[*] to okite," (Kobe^[*]Daigaku daigakuin bunkagaku kenkyuka^[*] ) Bunkagaku nenpo^[*] 5 (1986): 150-55.

[4] Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*]Edo jidai no nomin^[*]seikatsu (Nagano-ken Minami Saku-gun Nozawa-machi: Saku Insatsujo, 1955), 24. As is so often the case with Tokugawa institutions, however, some of these laws antedated the bakufu order: the oldest one in Shinano is from Kyowa^[*] , a village five kilometers west of Makibuse, and dates from 1628 (ibid., 15).

[5] For an introduction to the shumon^[*]aratamecho^[*] , see L. L. Cornell and Akira Hayami, "The shumon^[*]aratame cho^[*] : Japan's Population Registers," Journal of Family History 11, no. 4 (1986): 311-28. For a recent discussion of the development of population registers, see Yokota Fuyuhiko, "Kinseiteki mibun seido no seiritsu," in Mibun to kakushiki , ed. Asao Naohiro, Nihon no kinsei, 7 (Chuokoronsha^[*] , 1992), 41-78, esp. 55-78 (hereafter MK).

borhood groups, the goningumi ), was responsible for drawing up a new register every year and having each entry properly verified and certified with each household head's seal. (For special terms, please consult the Glossary.)

In Kita-Saku district, as elsewhere in bakufu , or shogunal, territories, the yearly population check took place in the third month.^[6] A copy of the register remained with the headman, the original being forwarded to the lord's chargé d'affaires, who for Makibuse in 1763 was quartered at an office in Shimogata village, the administrative center for a shogunal bannerman's (hatamoto ) small fief by the same name.^[7]

Thus, on 1763/2/8,^[8] a woman named Ken refused to certify her household's entry with her seal. A yearly routine had taken on the dimensions of an event. No doubt greatly annoyed by this flagrant case of insubordination by a mere woman, which would reflect badly on his own governance and certainly trigger an investigation from above, the headman, one Chuemon^[*] , had no way of concealing the matter, so he reported it to the Shimogata office.

Why was a woman's seal required? Usually the male head of the household held legal authority for all its members, whether affines, cognates, or other co-residents. And Ken was neither single nor a widow. In 1756, then thirty-seven, Ken had married a man a few years her elder. He was from Mochizuki, a way station on the Nakasendo^[*] inland highway between Edo and Kyoto, located across a low range of hills

[6] Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 70.

[7] Between 1702 and 1765, Makibuse was one of thirteen villages in the area that together constituted the five-thousand-koku fief of Shimogata (see Nagano-ken, ed., Nagano-kenshi: Kinsei shiryo-hen^[*] , Vol . 2, Toshin^[*]chiho^[*] , pt. 1 [Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1978], 724 [hereafter NAK-KS₂ (1)]). Its overlord history, like that of most villages in the fertile Kita-Saku plain, is a complex one. Villages were shifted numerous times, sometimes even divided, among various lords. Makibuse started as a village of the fudai domain of Komoro (first under the Sengoku house, 1590-1622; then under the shogun's brother Tadanaga, 1622-24; then under a Matsudaira, 1624-47). Between 1648 and 1661 it was entrusted as a shogunal possession (azukaridokoro ) to the Aoyama. Subsequently it was part of the Kofu^[*] Tokugawa domain until 1700. After two years of incorporation in the shogunal domain proper (tenryo^[*] ) under an intendant (daikan ), it was transferred to the jurisdiction of the Shimogata bannerman's fief until 1765. From that year until the end of the Tokugawa period it was again part of the tenryo^[*] .

[8] Dates are referred to by year first, followed by the lunar month and the day according to the traditional Japanese calendar.

some two and a half kilometers due west of Makibuse. His name was Rokuemon, formerly Yohachi. Two years before the incident, however, in the winter of 1761, he had left Ken, and his whereabouts were unknown.

At the time of the first registration after her husband's disappearance, in the spring of 1762, Ken requested to keep him on the rosters as the in absentia household head. The following year, however, she officially petitioned the headman, in a document legalized with the seals of her relatives and kumi members (the same persons, since in Makibuse lineages overlapped with neighborhood kumi),^[9] to take him off the rosters, leaving her the head of a single-member household, for her parents were no longer alive and she had no heir.

This Ken did on 2/6, that is, only two days before she surprised the headman by refusing to affix her seal to the population register. Had her relatives suspected the trouble she was to cause, they certainly would never have signed the petition. Instead, they would have placed her under the fiduciary authority of one of them, as she had been before her marriage. Did they not know Ken well enough to foresee this? Was this why she had sought legal authority? What lay behind this surprise move?

In his report to the Shimogata magistrate, the headman carefully explained the futile efforts by the village authorities (himself and the four kumi heads) to make this recalcitrant woman comply with shogunal law and also recorded Ken's reason for her behavior:

Ken did not affix her seal to this year's population register. What was the reason for this delinquency? We asked her to please affix her seal, there being regulations concerning the population register. Even if I did it, [she said,] come fall I intend to leave the village, so there is no need for my seal. In any case, [we said,] it is an offense not to affix your seal this year. All the village officials urged her strongly to quickly affix her seal, but no matter what, she did not listen and [just] went home.^[10]

The headman also mobilized the members of the next authority level down, namely, Ken's kumi members/relatives, asking them to persuade

[9] Kumi is short for goningumi , the term for a five-household neighborhood association, an official administrative subdivision of a village. Their membership was supposed to cut across, rather than overlap with, lineage membership. Makibuse had four kumi.

[10] Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," 47-48.

her, but they were equally powerless. He finally ordered her to appear in person in Shimogata, about seven kilometers to the east of Makibuse, across the hills, in the open plateau of Kita-Saku, on the other side of Gorobe-shinden, near the Chikuma River.

But Ken did not budge. "If this is an offense, then it is one I have been looking for that suits me well (ochido ni ainarisoro^[*]mo, saiwai nozomu tokoro ni gozaro^[*] )," she replied, according to the headman's report, "and even if I receive the death penalty or banishment, no matter what punishment [might await me], I have thought this over very well [and taken all such possibilities into consideration]." Thus Ken not only categorically refused to appear before the Shimogata magistrate—she interpreted the order to do so as a threat—but used the occasion to impress upon the headman again the depth of her determination, countering his order/threat by warning him that threats would be of no use. At least this is the headman's view of the confrontation, aimed at impressing his superior with the particular difficulties he was having with this woman.

Ken's leaving the village would result in the disappearance of a household, which was always an extremely grave matter, for it affected the distribution of tribute that the village as a whole owed the lord. The lord, who "owned" the land, which "owned" the people on it, did not let them go easily. Yet the land under Ken's name was minuscule, a mere 0.19 koku , three-quarters of it a dry plot attached to the homestead.^[11] The reassignment of her land to another peasant in order to produce the apportioned part of the village tribute quota could not have been the only thing at stake. As we shall see, there were in the village poverty-stricken peasants in need of land who presumably would have gladly taken over the holding. It seems particularly nasty of the headman to deny this woman her request to leave the village. Was he getting back at her for some unspecified reason?

When moving to a domicile out of one's locale of registration (village or township), one had first to secure a certificate of leave (okurijo^[*] , or "sending document") in order to properly register in one's new resi-

[11] The term koku , a measure of volume equivalent to 180 liters or 44.8 gallons, refers to the putative rice yield of fields, the basis for the computation of tribute. All property, including dry fields and homesteads, was converted into koku equivalents for tribute purposes. Ken's property was thus registered as equivalent to a mere 34 liters of rice.

dence. Ken knew the procedure; she had followed it a year earlier, without, however, being granted her wish. This time she seemed to have changed strategy, hoping, perhaps, to force the hand of the village authorities or at least to cause trouble by exploiting the jurisdictional division between village and district.^[12]

In 1762/3, only a year earlier and thus around the registration time when she had kept her absent husband recorded as household head, Ken had petitioned to leave the village but the petition had not been granted, possibly because her husband still held legal authority for the household. In 1763, however, she held the title and seal of household head. The petition of 1762 read as follows:

In the winter I was asked [by her lineage and kumi members and possibly also by the village officials] m establish a successor for the household [through adoption of an heir or remarriage], but I do not want to do that. I want to work the fields but cannot even become a tenant. So I have no alternative because I have trouble paying the tribute and performing corvée. Thus I request to donate the residence land, paddies, dry fields and woodland, all of it, to my family temple, the Baikei-in [in the adjoining village of Iribuse]. If this request is honored, then I and Rokuemon [my husband] will have to be taken from the population register. I want to leave Makibuse. By making this request, [I hope] I am putting an end to your order [to establish a successor]. There is no need to call me and talk to me about this again and again. Would you please examine my proposal.^[13]

This petition throws some light on the headman's ill will. He refused to grant Ken's request to leave after commending her property to a temple because she had balked at his order to establish an heir. There is evidence here of the same uncompromising, blunt determination that comes through in her refusal to sign the register a year later, when she defiantly told the headman that "I do not care for my life, no matter

[12] Peasants crossing domain boundaries en masse resorted to a similar strategy on a larger scale. Perhaps the most famous such mass exodus was an 1853 crossing from Nanbu to Sendai domain led by Miura Meisuke (see Herbert Bix, "Miura Meisuke, or Peasant Rebellion under the Banner of 'Distress,'" Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 10, no. 2 [1978]: 18-28).

[13] Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," 48. Makibuse did not have a temple. The village may have split off at some time from Iribuse, where, according to the 1671 population register, 74 of the 133 inhabitants of Makibuse were registered with the Baikei-in; 49 were registered with a temple in Mochizuki (doc. 351 in NAK-KS2 [1]: 779-80).

what happens to me; I am not in the least afraid; there is no need for me to go to the [Shimogata] office."^[14]

This was an angry woman who, all by herself, challenged every level of authority: the shogunal magistrate, the village headman, the kumi heads, her kumi members, and her relatives. She stood up against them by refusing to straighten out the succession of the house, sign the register, and appear before the Shimogata magistrate. The headman reports that when her lineage members put pressure on her in the registration incident, "it was useless, she would not consent and started even saying slanderous and irresponsible things." Taking another tack, they pleaded understanding for their own plight: as the group responsible and liable for its members' behavior they would face difficulties because of this incident. But she responded to this plea as she had to the headman's threat, retorting that this was precisely the point: "I have been waiting for this opportunity with the population register in order to cause trouble for the goningumi (goningumi nangi itashisoro^[*]tame ni gochomen^[*]inkei no setsu to aimachi makari arisoro^[*] )." Ken had planned this. What in Ken's past had brought her to this bold confrontation?

Goningumi, or official neighborhood groups, were not supposed to overlap with family networks: the first article of laws of some villages in the area, like Makibuse also under bakufu jurisdiction, specified that these kumi ought not to include only kinsmen or close friends, kith and kin (shinrui naka yoki mono ).^[15] This rule obviously was aimed at preventing collusion of interests and increasing local control. In the neigh-

[14] Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," 49.

[15] Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] (Saku chiho^[*] , 13-63) studied forty-one goningumicho^[*]zensho , or village laws, of Saku district covering the whole Tokugawa period. Included in these are four versions of the Makibuse village laws, from 1687, 1784, 1801, and 1857. He discovered great similarities, if not complete identity, among many of them across jurisdictions (domains and bakufu territories of various kinds) in three chronologically distinct periods separated by the 1660s and the second decade of the eighteenth century. He appended to his study the full text of the standard version of each period: the laws of the bakufu village of Shimo-Sakurai, nine kilometers east of Makibuse, of 1640 (21 articles), 1662 (56 articles), and 1766 (also 56 articles). (The first two of these laws are translated in appendixes z and 3.) Among the Makibuse laws, the one of interest to us is the first one, dated 1687, which according to Ichikawa is identical, down to the number of articles, to the 1662 version from Shimo-Sakurai. When citing articles of the village law of Makibuse, it is to this text (appendix 3) that I refer. The article about the proper composition of goningumi is the first one in the 1640 version of Shimo-Sakurai village law (appendix 2).

boring village of Kodaira, kin-exclusive kumi had led to trouble;^[16] in Makibuse also family networks and kumi overlapped: the six households of Ken's lineage all belonged to the same kumi. In this region, shogunal law clearly had failed to break the power of the local self-governing bodies of the lineages.

One of Makibuse's Poor Peasants: 1719-1744

Ken was a native of Makibuse, the daughter of a peasant named Rihei, whom we shall refer to as Rihei II since her grandfather bore the same name (hence we will call the grandfather Rihei I). Born in 1719, she was forty-four at the time of the registration incident. Her mother was from Yawata village, a station on the Nakasendo^[*] two and a half kilometers east of Makibuse (the last station in the Kita-Saku plateau before the highway winds its way westward into the mountains to the next station, Mochizuki, where Ken's husband had come from); Makibuse's northern border also touched the Nakasendo^[*] . In 1694, at the age of sixteen, slightly earlier, perhaps, than was usual for girls, Ken's mother had married Rihei II.^[17] She bore him a son, Shinzo^[*] , in 1700; a daughter, Ine, twelve years later; and finally Ken, her last child, seven years after that, in 1719.

Ken's father died the year she was born. By then Shinzo^[*] was nineteen, old enough to work the fields, and Ine, seven, could help care for her baby sister. At age fifteen, rather young, Ine married out to Yawata, where her mother (and paternal grandmother)^[18] were from, perhaps to reduce the number of mouths to be fed in the family.^[19] Ken's first

[16] See the discussion of this issue in chapter 3.

[17] Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] (Saku chiho^[*] , 113) found that the average marriage age in the area was twenty-three to twenty-four for men and sixteen to seventeen for women. These are a couple of years lower than Hayami's findings for another district in Nagano or Smith's findings in his study of Nakahara (Hayami Akira and Nobuko Uchida, "Size of Household in a Japanese County throughout the Tokugawa Era," in Household and Family m Past Time , ed. Peter Laslett [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972], 502; Thomas C. Smith, Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717-1830 [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977], 94-96).

[18] See the sixth entry in the 1671 population register of Makibuse, in NAK-KS2 (1): 771.

[19] Smith (Nakahara , 93-95) found that daughters of wealthier families married considerably younger than those of poor families. He suggests that this may have to do with the fact that the poor spent time as servants to supplement family income. In other circumstances, however, early marriage of daughters may have been a solution to the problem of too many mouths to feed.

Plate 1.
Makibuse Village. Facing west toward Mochizuki, some three hundred
meters south of the Nakasendo^[*] . Photograph by author.

marriage, in 1737 at age eighteen, brought her to Mimayose, two kilometers beyond Yawata on the Nakasendo^[*] , leaving her mother and unmarried brother in Makibuse.

Shinzo's^[*] bachelor status at age thirty-seven needs some comment, although a specific psychological or other personal explanation is not available. Perhaps he had been married and was divorced; we do not know. The thought that he might have been an unattractive prospect seems culturally incongruent. Males must have had the strategic advantage in a society like that of Tokugawa Japan. It is possible that Shinzo^[*] could not afford a wife, that the reason of his bachelorhood was sociostructural rather than personal. In 1671, at least, the only bachelors of marriageable age in the village were indentured ser-

vants.^[20] A socioeconomic explanation would thus point to the near-poverty situation of the family, although even "landless," that is, tenant, peasants did marry, as did Ken.^[21]

Outmarriage was quite common in Kita-Saku district from fairly early in the Tokugawa period, contrary to Smith's assumption of a "village rule of endogamy except for high-placed families who had to go outside the village to find marriage partners of comparable family rank."^[22] The 1671 population register of Makibuse recorded thirty-two peasant households (including fourteen titled peasants), all but two headed by couples (see table 1). In addition, there were seven married sons, brothers, and nephews of titled peasants co-residing with their main families in an extended-family pattern, which makes a total of thirty-seven couples. Only seven of the thirty-seven wives were from Makibuse; all the others had inmarried from villages in the same district or, in one case, from another district. Yawata tops the list of villages as sources for wives, with five. As for outmarriage, fourteen daughters or sisters of current household heads married out. Only two Makibuse women married out to the Kita-Saku plain; the rest settled in the mountain area. On the other hand, ten wives came from the plain. All twenty-three bond servants (genin and fudai ) came from the mountain area, from within a radius of eight kilometers.

Thus, the number of women marrying within the village (seven) was

[20] According to the population register of 1671, none of the bond servants (genin and fudai) were married. There were nineteen indentured servants (genin) in Makibuse—twelve males ranging in age from thirteen to thirty-four and seven females between fourteen and twenty-three—and four lifetime servants (fudai) between the ages of nine and twenty-two (see NAK-KS2 [1]: 771-80).

[21] Smith (Nakahara , 92) found that the probability of male celibacy in lower-class peasant families (those with holdings of less than four koku) was from two to ten times as high as that among wealthier peasants (67 percent for the cohort aged thirty to thirty-four and 41 percent for those aged thirty-five to forty-nine). Pierre Bourdieu discusses the structural necessity of bachelorhood of nonsuccessor males for reproducing the social system in the late nineteenth century m the Béarn in southern France in "Célibat et condition paysanne," Études rurales , nos. 5-6 (1962): 32-135.

[22] Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), 61, 62-63 n. 1. My occasional critique of this excellent study should be understood in light of the vast amount of Japanese scholarship produced in the last thirty years. In Nakahara (133-34, 143) Smith reports only that "nearly all daughters were married our of the family" but gives no figures for out-village marriage. See also the following note.

only half of that marrying out, and this in a community where thirty-seven wives were needed for households to reproduce. If one adds all marital liaisons in and out of the village, the total is fifty-one, out of which only seven, or 14 percent, were endogamous to the village.^[23] This contrasts sharply with 50 percent and 75 percent for other villages in the area (Komiyayama in 1669 and Wada in 1713, respectively), as Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] relates.^[24] He also concludes that the average marriage age in the district was twenty-three to twenty-four for men and sixteen to seventeen for women, and he notes that almost all of the indentured servants (genin) and lifetime servants (fudai) were unmarried.^[25] In 1671 none of Makibuse's nineteen genin or four fudai were married.^[26]

Let us return to the narrative. In 1742, five years after her first marriage, Ken's name reappears on Makibuse's family register, which means that she had left Mimayose and her husband, although it is unknown whether this was a divorce. The household she returned to, however,

[23] Finding a wife appropriate to one's economic status, which might necessitate liaisons outside the village, does not seem to have been a motive either. After the 1670s the overwhelming majority of the peasants in Makibuse were very small landholders. The seven marriages within Makibuse that were recorded on the 1671 population register were as follows (honbyakusho^[*] means "tired peasant"; kakae refers to a branch house in a lineage):

1. Headman (29 koku) and daughter of honbyakusho^[*] (5 koku; 21 koku before partition)

2. Honbyakusho's^[*] son (6) and kakae (4) daughter

3. Kakae (2) and kakae (5) daughter

4. Kakae (2) and kakae (5) daughter

5. Honbyakusho^[*] (5; 23 before partition) and kakae (5) daughter

6. Kakae (5) and honbyakusho^[*] (7) daughter

7. Honbyakusho^[*] (7) and kakae (10) daughter

[24] Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 83. On the other hand, Makibuse's geographic distribution of spousal provenance is very similar to that of Kodaira (a village studied in more detail in chapter 3), some four kilometers to the east. The latter's population register of 1694 lists fifty-four couples, in only six of which both partners had been born in Kodaira; in the other forty-eight, one spouse, usually the wife, came from within a radius of twelve kilometers, thirty-six from within a radius of four kilometers (see Komonjo kenkyukai^[*] dai ni han, "Genroku-ki no shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] o miru," Mochizuki no chomin^[*]no rekishi 12 [1988]: 64-65).

[25] Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 110, 113.

[26] See n. 20. For comparative data on lifetime servants and indentured servants in the area, see ibid., 108, 120 ff.

consisted now only of herself and her mother. Shinzo's^[*] name had disappeared from the register. The possible reasons for such disappearance are limited to a few: death, outmarriage to another locale (temporary employment elsewhere would be duly recorded and not cause removal of the name), petition by relatives and kumi members for reasons of disinheritance (kando^[*] or kyuri^[*] ), or abscondence to an unknown destination. The authorities kept a close tab on the whereabouts of all subjects.

The previous year's register offers no clue about Shinzo's^[*] fate. Ken's return, however, may have been prompted by the need to take care of her mother, then sixty-four years old (or seventy, according to the entry of that year), and the minuscule plot of land (0.19 koku, the equivalent of 2 ares or 0.04 acres, of medium-quality dry fields) for which her mother was responsible in the village. Or was this a pretext to get out of a marriage that was not working? Ken was left completely alone when her mother died in 1744, two years after her brother's disappearance. She was then twenty-five.

The death of her mother brought a change in Ken's "civic" status, as we know from the next year's entry. Until then the household had been registered as a kakae , or branch family, of her uncle Gendayu^[*] , her deceased father's younger brother. Kakae literally means "embrace" or "hold in one's arms" and refers to the client-patron relationship of dependency between branch and main houses; the term will be rendered hereafter as "branch house," "fully established branch house," or simply "client." Now she was legally incorporated into her uncle's household and entered under his name (she was thus chonai^[*] , or "on [his] register," that is, co-resident), although it is unclear whether she actually moved into his house, since she had one of her own.

In order to grasp the significance of this change, one needs to understand the highly structured village social and political hierarchy. First, there was the great divide between peasants and nonpeasants, perhaps as great as the divide between rulers and ruled in the society at large. The nonpeasant population increased throughout the Tokugawa period as craftsmen, doctors, and others took up residence in the countryside in increasing numbers.^[27] But these nonpeasants were marked in the registers as belonging to an inferior class: all of them were registered as clients or bond servants (genin).^[28]

[27] For Saku district, see ibid., I44-46.

[28] Ibid., 128.

The first article in the village laws, including Makibuse's, reveals this hierarchy in the context of certifying that no Christians were present in the village: "Art. 1. Re: Christians. Following the investigations of the past, each and every one, down to the last person, has been thoroughly examined: not only (moshioyobazu^[*] ) house owners [but also] men, women, children, servants and semi-independent branch houses (kadoya ), renters, fully established branch houses (kakae), down to (sono ta ... itaru made ) Buddhist monks, Shinto priests, mountain priests (yamabushi ), ascetics, mendicant monks with flutes or bells, out-castes, common beggars and registered beggars (hinin , "nonhumans"), etc...." (see appendix 3). This comprehensive list is clearly hierarchized; none of these undesirables seem to have resided in Makibuse.

Nonpeasants were second-class citizens within the village, yet some peasants also fell into this category. At the bottom were mizunomi-byakusho^[*] , literally, "water-drinking peasants," without land of their own, pure tenants whose number increased over time. Next were non-titled landholders, who, although they were autonomous proprietors, were incorporated into a political dependency relationship as real or fictitious fully established branch houses (kakae) to main families, lineage heads, or patrons (kakaeoya ). Thus were constituted lineages and sublineages, crisscrossing or overlapping the kumi (as in Makibuse). All landowning peasants, even immigrants, belonged to a "lineage." Prior to Ken's mother's death, her household was a kakae under her uncle Gendayu^[*] .

The titled peasants (honbyakusho^[*] ) constituted the village council, and all lineage heads were titled peasants. In the eyes of overlords, they were the official tribute deliverers. The two categories of landowning peasants—fully established branch houses and lineage heads—often had a number of dependents: lifetime (fudai) and indentured (genin) servants, semi-established branch families living in a separate dwelling on the premises (kadoya), renters, and dependent co-resident members, like Ken after her mother's death.

This multilayered class, status, and social hierarchy, which allowed for some controlled mobility (specified later for Makibuse), was thus from the bottom up: nonpeasants, lifetime servants, indentured servants, co-residents, pure tenants, semi-established branch houses, fully established branch houses, titled peasants (who allowed for further power combinations with the suprahousehold authority positions of lineage head, kumi head, and headman).

In 1721 Makibuse counted thirteen titled peasants (the same number as in 1647 but three fewer than in 1700 [see table 4]) and thirty-six others, among whom were four landless peasants who first appear on the rosters around 1710 (see table 1). In 1721, moreover, of the forty-five landholding peasants sixteen had holdings of less than 1 koku, eighteen had between x and 4 koku, and eleven had 5 or more koku. Ken's household was among the poorest in Makibuse. With its 0.19 koku, it was dangerously close to landless status. Ken was not a titled peasant, and her shift in status from fully established branch house (kakae) to co-resident (chonai^[*] ) meant the loss of an already very circumscribed control over her own life.

Failed Marriages, Misfired Forgeries:1745-1756

A year after her mother's death, in the winter of 1745, Ken married someone from Kannonji-shinden, six kilometers northwest of Makibuse, into the mountains. This second marriage, however, was not one that would provide her house with a male head or successor because she had married out . Apparently, in this case, unlike in 1762-63, the village authorities put no obstacles in the way of Ken's leaving. Could the only difference have been that this time she seems to have had no plans to transfer her land to a temple? Ken was supposed to take up residence with her husband in Kannonji-shinden. Yet, oddly enough, she did not seize this opportunity to leave the village, because she either returned very soon to Makibuse or remained there all along.

The reason for this short-lived union was recorded as having to do with Ken's husband's postponing the building of their new house because of some problems with its proper geomantic orientation. One is led to believe that there was procrastination and deliberate reluctance on Ken's part because her patron uncle and relatives showed impatience, making her sign a promise in 1746/3 "to move without fail (soinaku^[*] ) to Kannonji-shinden by next spring." This time her lineage wanted her out badly, but she did not want to go—the opposite of the situation in 1762-63. The population register of two years later (1748), however, indicates no change: Ken had not moved to Kannonji-shinden, and she remained listed as co-resident under her uncle Gendayu^[*] . Ken's return did not signal a firm determination to remain in Makibuse, though, because she went on a three-year stint as a servant

in two places quite different from Kannonji-shinden: Hirabara and Komoro. This absence, however, did not sever her ties with Makibuse, where she remained registered.

Kannonji-shinden was a very small village of Komoro domain, that never amounted to much as it expanded quickly to its full capacity of a meager sixty-four koku.^[29] Ken's places of employment were not in the mountains but in the wealthier Kita-Saku plain. She worked first for one year in Hirabara, some fifteen kilometers northeast of Makibuse, then for two years in the castle town of Komoro, the center of the small fudai domain some thirteen kilometers almost due north (gradually reduced by 1700 to 15,000 koku from an original 50,000), of which Makibuse was a part for some time (1590-1647). Both Hirabara (a sizable village of 1,474 koku in 1647, 2,018 in 1834, with a population of 602 in 1760) and the town of Komoro (with 357 households and a population of 3,620 in 1746) were situated on the Hokkokukaido^[*] , the highway that splits off to the north from the Nakasendo^[*] in Oiwake at the foot of Mount Asama (see map 2).

It seems that, after her misfortunes, Ken sought to escape from her kin and had no intention of continuing the household by adopting an heir or remarrying.^[30] Nor did she want to leave the village for good by marrying out to a rather remote place in the mountains like Kannonji-shinden. After her service, she reappears on the village register in 1752 as a resident, and then we lose track of her until her third marriage, in 1756.

There is a short document dated 1755/12 that was signed by the priest of a temple from Koshigoe, some sixteen kilometers northeast of Makibuse, beyond the mountains in the neighboring district of Chiisa-

[29] Originally, Kannonji-shinden was part of Innai village, which in 1624 had a kokudaka of 526 koku, to which 88 koku of new fields (shinden ) had been added by 1703. It remained unchanged until the end of the Tokugawa period (at least until 1834). By 1703 Kannonji-shinden had split off as a separate village with 64 koku, which also remained unchanged. Its population was registered as seventy-nine in 1760. For these figures, see NAK-KS2 (1): 7, 27, 120; and Nagano-ken, ed., Nagano-kenshi: Kinsei shiryo-hen^[*] , Vol. 2, Toshin^[*]chiho^[*] , pt. 2 (Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1979), app. 53 (hereafter NAK-KS2 [2]).

[30] There may have been some affinal connection explaining Ken's choice of Hirabara, although this is sheer speculation. According to the 1671 population register, Heijiro's^[*] wife came from there and Heijiro^[*] (C^[4] of fig. 1) was a brother of Rihei I (C ), Ken's grandfather.

gata, south of Ueda city. It is a certificate of leave addressed to Makibuse village officials, and it mentions Shinzo's^[*] name. Ozaki Yukiya discovered several irregularities in the composition of this certificate, especially when compared with a similar one dated a mere eight months later (1756/8):

Paper (issatsu no koto )

Re : this Shinzo^[*] . He is a person who was born in the village of Naka-Maruko. There is no question that [his family] has been registered with this temple for generations. Now he is moving to your village as a successor [to a house there]. Therefore, as the original guarantor of his religious affiliation, [I submit] the above document.

Horeki^[*] 5/12 [1755/12], Koshigoe village
Zenbo-in^[*] temple (seal)
[To :] Makibuse village officials.

Certificate of Leave for Rokuemon

Certificate of leave Re : Yohachi, 39 years old
The above mentioned person was born in this village and is certified as such. He is moving to your honorable village as successor to Rihei. Please add him to your population register and put him under your jurisdiction. For future reference, this sending document is as stated above.

Horeki^[*] 6/8 [1756/8],
The [Nakasendo^[*] ] Station of Mochizuki,
Omori^[*] Hisazaemon, headman (seal)
[To :] Makibuse headman, Tsuchiya Chuemon^[*][31]

The second document is addressed to Makibuse's headman (not to the village officials, as the first document is) by the headman of origin, Mochizuki (and not by the person's family temple, as in the first document), where the person in question, Yohachi (or Rokuemon), was registered. It records Rokuemon's age and the house (Rihei's) to which he will succeed in Makibuse, both of which are missing in the former document, and requests that his name be added to the population register in that capacity (also missing in the former document). The second document is more formal and complete.

Next to be noted is the name of Shinzo^[*] , the same name as Ken's brother, who had disappeared thirteen years earlier, leaving the house

[31] Both documents are cited only in Ozaki, "Kenjo oboegaki," 67, 68. The title of the second document was added on a separate sheet by the headman for filing purposes.

without a male head. Ken's two divorces and her seeming reluctance to adopt another husband had put the continuity of that house in jeopardy. If someone by that name were now to be recorded in Ken's household, it would appear that the original Shinzo^[*] had returned. Everything points to a forgery in the making. Ultimately the attempt must have been abandoned, because no Shinzo^[*] appears on subsequent population registers in Makibuse, and the forged document might inadvertently have been filed among the headman's papers. As noted, only one year later, in 1756/8, Ken married Yohachi/Rokuemon from Mochizuki (her third husband).^[32] The second document is the one Rokuemon brought with him when he moved to Makibuse (the Rihei mentioned is none other than Ken's father).

It should be pointed out that this kind of document, a notification of a marriage union, does not mention the wife. Is it too much to interpret this as indicating the absence of a legal status for women as contributing to a man's identity as his wife? The two legal entities that are united here are a male and a house. Presumably, if the person being sent were a woman, she would be spoken of as joining a male, as acquiring a new identity as someone's wife. Is the phrase "successor to a house," as Bourdieu suggests, writing of Berber heirs in a similar situation, "an official euphemism allowing people to name the unnameable, that is a man who could only be defined, in the house that receives him, as the husband of his wife"?^[33]

Rokuemon's arrival brought another change in Ken's "civic" status: she was promoted from co-resident to head of a fully established branch house (kakae). Moreover, her patron/lineage head was now Juzaemon^[*] (E⁴ of fig. 1), not her uncle Gendayu^[*] , her legal guardian for twelve years, since her mother's death.

Shifting Power Within a Lindeage: 1670-1756

At the time, Ken's lineage was subdivided into two sublineages, headed by two patrons: Gendayu^[*] and Juzaemon^[*] . It had not always been that

[32] Anne Walthall, upon reading this, made the interesting remark that while Shinzo^[*] was presumably too destitute (0.19 koku) to take a wife, Ken succeeded in adopting a husband, which was supposed to be more difficult than marrying a woman. Ken's obviously strong personality may perhaps partly explain this.

[33] Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), 179.

Fig. 1.
Genzaemon's Lineage, 1629-1756

^a village headman (plus lineage head and titled peasant)

^b lineage or sublineage head

^c household in dependent relationship with C line lineage

^d household in dependent relationship with D line sublineage

^e possession of one horse

Source : Adapted from Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," table 4 (p. 57).

Notes : The total yield of the lineage property held by Genzaemon (A)
in 1629 is 20 koku; that held by 7 households in 1756 is 22 koku.
Note that Ken switched sublineages: she is not dependent on D² but on E⁴ .

way. Originally Ken's paternal ancestors had headed the lineage. Since around 1670 there had been four households, headed then by Rihei I, Ken's grandfather (C¹ of fig. 1) Around 1700 there were five households (D¹ —D⁵ ) headed by two patrons, Ken's father, Rihei II (D¹ ), being patron to two units, and Rihei's cousin (D⁵ ), to one. By the 1750s, however, power within the lineage had shifted further away from Rihei's line, for now Rihei II's cousin's son Juzaemon^[*] (E⁴ ) was patron to four households (E¹ , F, E³ , E⁵ ), while the other "patron," Gendayu^[*] (D² ), had Ken "registered under him," but not as a fully established branch house, so that he was, properly speaking, no longer patron of a segment of the lineage.

As mentioned above, the patron-client (or main house-branch house) lineage structure was a strictly internal village affair, not regulated by shogunal law (although disputes concerning it, unresolvable in the village, could come before intendants). That it was private or informal from the lord's point of view does not mean that lineage practice was not formalized and regulated locally. The distinction between private and public does not pertain to the presence or absence of political regulation as such; rather, it defines the modality of jurisdictional recognition between two social units one of which encompasses the other. Thus the famous revenge of the forty-seven ronin^[*] of Ako^[*] , masterless samurai who avenged their lord, was for the bakufu not a private but a public act and therefore under its jurisdiction. The bakufu left lineages alone, recognizing as legal entities only neighborhood kumi as public institutions at the subvillage level. Nevertheless, as we shall see repeatedly, lineages were crucial for the communal organization of villages.

Every peasant household in the Kita-Saku area had to be accounted for intramurally in a patron-client relationship; none could function otherwise. Even new settlers from outside had first to secure a sponsoring patron in addition to the village council's approval. Since political power was limited to titled peasants, who held access shares to irrigation, common grass or mountain land, and so on, and lineage heads were always titled peasants, a client's access to power and its benefits was totally dependent on his or her relationship to a patron and the latter's position and standing among the titled peasants. A client who had serious complaints about his or her patron or lineage head could ask the village council to switch the household to a different patron.^[34] Such change, together with the reasons for it, was duly recorded in the village.

Ken was able to elevate her status from co-resident back to branch house, as it had been when her brother and mother were still alive, by securing a male head and eventual successor to the house through marriage. This increased her autonomy vis-à-vis her lineage patron. Ken's switch to Juzaemon^[*] as her new patron was a double blow for

[34] For examples of newcomers seeking a patron, clients wanting m switch lineages (in the neighboring villages of Gorobe-shinden and Yawata}, and other cases illustrating the position of clients, see Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , Kinsei sonraku no kozo^[*]to ie seido (Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1968), 125-37.

Gendayu^[*] , for now he lost control over Ken's household and his status as patron, for he had no other clients. The whole lineage, except for himself, because he was a titled peasant, was now controlled by Juzaemon^[*] , who had five branch houses as his clients.

The reason for this change was recorded as "disharmony (fuwa )" between Ken and her uncle: "Horeki^[*] 6 [1756]. Ken is taken out as coresident from under Gendayu^[*] . There being disharmony with her uncle [Gendayu^[*] ], Ken is also removed as client and will be client of her cousin [in reality her linealogical third cousin] Juzaemon." Ken's failed marriages and her three-year absence from the village must have been related as cause or effect to this "disharmony," but relations must have been very strained for her to want and to be granted severance from her uncle. We know the real reason from a petition she submitted to the headman in the summer of 1757, a year after her marriage to Rokuemon.

An Open Secret Publicized After Seventeen Years: 1757

On 1757/7/22 Ken made the rounds of all her kumi/lineage members, the three kumi heads and the headman, in other words, all the authority figures in Makibuse. She told them that she had a request to make. This was obviously a serious matter, because that day the headman started keeping notes of meetings, recording also the absence of any officials and the reason for it, as well as occasional quotations of who said what.^[35] He obviously was creating a paper trail to cover himself, for Ken's request concerned the violent death of her brother, Shinzo^[*] . The headman recorded that he consulted with two villagers that same evening. Two days later he got in touch with the Shimogata magistrate.

Thus prepared, before Ken had even made her request officially known, and most likely having agreed among themselves on a strategy, the village officials took the first steps four days later, on 7/28. On that

[35]  

day the gathered officials (the headman and the four kumi heads) called all Ken's relatives for a hearing. When Rokuemon, Ken's husband, was asked whether he agreed with Ken, he replied that "she had not involved him at all (watakushi e wa issai kamawase mosazu^[*] soro^[*] )." While his answer may sound implausible, it is not impossible that he knew nothing about this matter. He had moved to Makibuse to marry Ken only eleven months earlier. His answer was important, however, because it was certainly irregular for a wife to engage in public action that took on the appearance of a lawsuit without her husband's consent, since he held legal authority over the household.

The interrogators must have known that this was a wedge they could possibly drive into Ken's intentions. In Rokuemon's written affidavit taken three weeks later, it is indeed clearly stated that "I did not know anything about it" and that "I am not of the same mind [as Ken] on this (ichien doshin^[*]tsukamatsurazu )."

His wife's pursuit of a lawsuit, with or without his knowledge or assent, must have humiliated Rokuemon, for it showed his inability to keep order in his own household as was his duty. Moreover, lawsuits were to be avoided at all cost. Those who resorted to them were written about in the village law as being on a par with other troublemakers and thus as people who should be reported: "Art. 16. People who are not engaged in cultivation, trade, or any other occupation, or withdraw from consultation with the village, or like quarrels and lawsuits, or do all kinds of bad things should not be hidden [but reported]" (see appendix 3 ).

Rokuemon left Ken in 1759/2, a year and a half after Ken's lawsuit. He may have returned to his native Mochizuki, which was very close. There is also a written pledge from around this time to stay away from sake; his problems must have led him to drink. All his in-laws and the household heads of the Juzaemon^[*] group tried in vain to bring him back. Shortly thereafter, Ken added her voice and persuaded him to return.^[36]

Obviously, life in Makibuse had become unbearable for Rokuemon, yet Ken prevailed for a while in keeping him home. Finally, he could not take it any longer, and two years later, in 1761, he disappeared for good. Ken, however, must have had problems too, for around the same time she started petitioning to leave the village. Indeed, as we shall see,

[36] The history of Rokuemon's earlier disappearances is discussed only in Ozaki, "Kenjo oboegaki," 72.

her first request coincides with the moment she understood that her suit had failed.

As mentioned above, Ken directed her accusations against her relatives, among others, especially against her uncle and former guardian, Gendayu^[*] . This suit, which had been on her mind for some time, sheds light on Ken's second and third marriages. Her second one came to a quick end because her move to another village under a different jurisdiction (Komoro domain) would have made a suit nearly impossible. This marriage would have removed the only voice critical of what had happened to Shinzo^[*] .

Perhaps Ken sensed that this arranged marriage was an exile in disguise, which may explain her resistance under the flimsy pretext of inauspicious geomantic matters. Yet her reinstatement as Gendayu's^[*] coresident robbed her of the voice she needed if she intended to file a suit, especially a suit against him. Once registered under him, Ken was legally as incompetent as a child, and "hierarchy suits," in which children might sue fathers or retainers might sue their superiors, were outlawed.^[37]

Ken's third marriage, to Rokuemon, however, solved the problem of legal voice, because it gave her back her status as a member of an autonomous household. It is quite possible that through this marriage she intended not so much to put the minds of her relatives to rest by securing the succession to her house (especially since later she would categorically refuse to take the necessary steps for establishing an heir) as to dissolve her total dependency on Gendayu^[*] , block any interference by him, and gain the necessary authority to act publicly.^[38] Rokuemon, perceived by others and perhaps himself as having been used by a scheming woman, lost his bearings, fell apart, ran away, and finally fled for good.

Ken was present at the hearing of 2/28, but she was not asked about

[37] Dan Fenno Henderson, Conciliation and Japanese Law, Tokugawa and Modern , 2 vols. (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1965), 1:118: "Whether they were family or feudal, the rule was that suits brought by inferiors were not accepted."

[38] I would like to record Professor Yokota Fuyuhiko's cautious reservation as he communicated it to me in Kyoto in the summer of 1994 regarding my interpretation of the legal dimension of Ken's third marriage. In his opinion, universal registration in Tokugawa Japan created, in principle , the notion that everybody had the right to petition or sue, a "right" that was, however, thwarted in many practical ways. In this view, strictly speaking, Ken would not have needed that marriage to give her legal voice.

her "request." Instead, she was told that an oral request would not do: if she had a petition to make, she should put it in writing. The next day, a report of the investigation was sent to Shimogata, probably under the assumption that things had been taken care of. By insisting on a written petition, the officials must have aimed at more than a postponement of the case, calculating that without her husband's consent and assistance, and with the whole village against her, Ken would be unable to draft a formal document.

Ken, however, was a resourceful woman. A week later, on 8/5, in the evening, she delivered a written petition to the village authorities via the proper channel, that is, via Juzaemon^[*] , her patron and kumi head. Early the next morning, Juzaemon^[*] rushed the document to the headman, who convened the village officials that same evening. Ten days later the document was forwarded to Shimogata.

The first half reads as follows:

This is a request to hold the seventeenth memorial service for my elder brother Shinzo^[*] . I have mountains and mountains of grudges against Mr. Chuemon^[*] [the headman]. He called my relatives and he called the whole village together, deliberated with them, gave detailed instructions, and [thus] the innocent peasant of my house [my brother] was killed. If he had been guilty [of some crime], my mother or myself would have been told the details by my relatives. [But] because he was blameless they kept silent to us. He was killed [because the headman] had wondered what [other misbehavior Shinzo^[*] ] might engage in next, given the things he had been doing. Spite and vexation about this murder have piled up mountain high, which I kept in my heart until this year. I want to pray for the repose of his soul with a memorial offering so that your descendants may not suffer divine retribution. Anyhow, following my judgment (nanibun ni mo kono kata no zonji yori ni ), I request that a memorial service be held.

On 1741/11/ 6 [a week after the murder], my relative Shinzaemon [E¹ of fig. 1] called people together and I went [Ken must have returned to Makibuse from Mimayose] and heard details about this. Shinzaemon said that an order had come from the headman to have a memorial service held, since Shinzo^[*] had been killed. I returned home and told my mother the details [of what I had heard]. My sister also came from Yawata station [where she had married]. Anyhow, we thought of filing a suit for punishment with the shogunal authorities (gokogisama^[*] ). But I was young [twenty-three] and mother lost her mind because this had been too much for her, so that I abandoned the plan until this year.

I have mountains of resentment against Mr Gendayu^[*] [my uncle; D² ] in this matter. [At one point, Shinzo^[*] ] lost the horse of my sister's husband Jingoemon from Yawata and came to borrow money [to pay back his

brother-in-law], but my mother refused because they both [her son and son-in-law] were her children [she said], so he went to Gendayu^[*] , who lent him the money [on the condition] that [Shinzo^[*] ] henceforward stop dealing with horse people. All the relatives signed a note to that effect.

In addition, on 1741/16 his uncle had entrusted his own horse [to Shinzo^[*] ], who had [mishandled] it, so that it could nor be sold. For this reason [he] did not [dare to] come home. If he were to come home, my uncle, Mr. Gendayu^[*] , threatened to kill him. This being the case, Shinzo^[*] pondered setting out for another province, but the thought of leaving his old mother behind alone held him back. So he hung around in the area and stayed at a dry field [owned by the family] at the foot of Ichiyama. There, everybody [got together] and a big crowd drove him out, and so on 1741/10/31, in the evening, it was inevitable that he was killed (uchikorosaresoro^[*]wa bitcho^[*]gozaro^[*] ) beyond the great bridge of Momozawa.

Shinzaemon [E¹ ] delivered the first blow with a club, for which I heaped mountains of hatred on him. But now, after seventeen years, I shall forgive him. [They] were told [to kill] this innocent man by the headman, but they should [simply] have banished him. Dan'emon, who delivered blows, after seventeen years I can forgive. Uheiji [F] is without blame, but Bunkyuro^[*] [his brother], who died, he also delivered blows and is guilty. I do not know about Chokyuro^[*] [E³ ], Naoemon [peasant representative; 1.b of table 5], Iheie [kumi head; 5.F of table 5], Kichizaemon [kumi head; 13.v of table 5] and the people of the village. But those who participated in this murder must know about them.^[39]

Thus, the reason for the disappearance of Shinzo's^[*] name from the village population register in the spring of 1742 was that he had been clubbed to death by his relatives and fellow villagers a few months earlier. Ken heard about it, although perhaps not in great detail, at the time of the memorial service ordered by the headman, very likely to protect himself and all accomplices against Shinzo's^[*] avenging spirit. Together with her sister and mother, Ken had pondered the possibility of pressing charges with the shogunal authorities, a plan she abandoned, but only for seventeen years, as it turned out. Over time, Ken probably picked up bits and pieces of the story, which was a public secret. Realizing Gendayu's^[*] role in her brother's murder must have made life under him unbearable, a situation so perfectly euphemized by calling it fuwa , disharmony.

Ken's most serious accusations, however, were directed at the head-

[39] Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," 50-51. The second half of this document is discussed below.

man for allegedly ordering the murder of a man who, although admittedly a troublemaker, certainly did not deserve the fate that befell him. Ken deduced Shinzo's^[*] "innocence" from the silence of those who should have informed her and her mother of the reason for his death. Shinzo's^[*] troubles had centered around horse trading and gambling, both activities that were disapproved. Article 51 of the village law specifically warns against horse thieves and go-betweens in horse trading (see appendix 3). This angered most of all his uncle Gendayu^[*] , who seems to have used Shinzo^[*] as a middleman to sell his own horse, which Shinzo^[*] somehow must have spoiled.^[40] Understandably angry, Gendayu^[*] threatened to kill Shinzo^[*] , which implicates him heavily in this "death almost foretold," as Gabriel Garcia Márquez might put it. According to Ken, there had been malign intention to kill her brother: an order by the headman and a threat by Gendayu^[*] . She blames her relatives for having followed a death order rather than simply expelling Shinzo^[*] , and she names people who might know more about other participants in the murder. Although Ken stated her accusation within the context of a professed desire to hold a memorial service and a willingness to pardon some of those involved in the crime (about which more will be said later), she was seeking at least some justice—from the accused—for a crime committed seventeen years earlier.

If the village officials had ordered the murder as a punishment, they were in double or even triple jeopardy: for contracting a murder, for committing it, and for going beyond the bounds of their penal jurisdiction by issuing a death verdict, if, in fact, that is what they did. This last point is important, for as we know, in principle, "private justice" was forbidden by shogunal law.

The historian Mizumoto Kunihiko lists seventeenth-century laws (which did not change during the next century) at various jurisdictional

[40] In 1737 there were 16 horses in Makibuse, which then counted 12 titled peasants out of a total of 52 households, with a total population of 248. In 1750 the figures were slightly different: 12 horses, 11 titled peasants out of a total of 48 households, and a population of 242 (see table 1); thus there was almost one horse per titled peasant. The price of a horse is discussed as follows by Tanaka Kyugu^[*] (1662-1729) in his Minkan seiyo^[*] of 1721: "Peasants need horses, but their price has gone up in recent years. In the past, one could get a horse for one or two ryo^[*] . Now, however, there are no horses for that price ... now one cannot even get them for ten ryo^[*] " (Nihon keizai sosho^[*] , ed. Takimoto Sei'ichi, vol. 1 [Nihon keizai sosho^[*] kankokai^[*] , 1914], 261). In article 13 of appendix 4, a price of "from 3 bu to one ryo^[*] " is referred to in 1665.

levels prohibiting punishments such as wounding or killing by villagers: shogunal laws issued for intendants to be applied in their districts, bannerman laws for their fiefs, and bakufu-ordered village laws.^[41] The heaviest penalty allowed at the village level was banishment, although, as we shall see in chapter 4, scholars have recently discovered a small number of exceptions. In addition, Mizumoto cites instances of enforcement of such laws: in Okayama domain a headman was beheaded for having "secretly" (i.e., "privately" on his own initiative, without reporting it to the higher authorities), and with the help of others, killed a thief (1676); village officials in a shogunal fief were fined in 1778 for having "secretly" banished a thief to another province. Makibuse's village law explicitly prohibited the killing of evildoers (article 4) or the plotting by peasants of evil things (article 17; see appendix 3).

The officials in Makibuse saw their options for getting rid of this case disappearing fast once an official accusation of murder had been made. If behind the attempt to have Ken married out to Kannonji-shinden lay the intention to get rid of the one dissident voice against them, they had failed. Doing away with the evidence by eliminating the litigant was obviously much too extreme and risky. Besides, the recommended punishment for such a crime in shogunal courts was the death penalty, followed by gibbetting of the severed head.^[42] Persuading Ken to withdraw her suit did not work either. Hence, they had to transmit the suit to the Shimogata office because murder was a matter beyond village jurisdiction and the investigation and punishment had to be left to the higher authorities.

What the village officials resorted to, as already mentioned, was seeking secret advice from the Shimogata magistrate on how to handle this

[41] Mizumoto Kunihiko, "Kogi^[*] no saiban to shudan^[*] no okite," Saiban to kihan , Nihon no shakaishi, 5 (Iwanami shoten, 1987), 285-86 (hereafter NNS 5); the information on village punishment in the following paragraphs comes from p. 286.

[42] Kujikata osadamegaki (1742), art. 71, par. shi, tsuika of 1744 (Tokugawa kinreiko^[*]koshu^[*] , ed. Ishii Ryosuke^[*] , 4 vols. [Sobunsha^[*] , 1959-61], 3:419 [hereafter TKKk]). For an English translation of book z of the Kujikata osadamegaki , see John C. Hall, "Japanese Feudal Laws HI: Tokugawa Legislation, Part IV, The Edict in 100 Sections," Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan 41, pt. 5 (1913): 683-804. For a German translation of the whole work, see Otto Rudorff, "Tokugawa-Gesetz-Sammlung," Mittheilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Natur- und Völkerkunde Ostasiens in Tokio , supplement to vol. 5 (April 1889).

case before officially transmitting the suit to him. That much we know from Makibuse's headman's diary, but he did not record the nature of this advice. We can only follow the developments surmising what it might have been.

The shogunal legislation that would be applied in an eventual trial was as follows. The law provided for severe punishments, graded according to the nature of the murder, the perpetrators, their motives, their degree of participation, and the status of the victim. For example, accidentally killing a nephew was punished by banishment; but if the murder had been premeditated for gain, it was punished by death (shizai ). Contracting a murder was punished by death (geshunin ); executing a contract murder, by banishment. Among accomplices, the one who struck the first blow received the death penalty (geshunin), those who assisted were banished, and those who did not physically participate in the crime were punished by medium deportation (10 miles).^[43]

There existed some half-dozen different death penalties, of which shizai and geshunin were the lowest two. Death penalties were always beheadings, to which various additional degrees of nastiness could be added, such as exposure of the criminal, gibbetting, and so on. Shizai always entailed the availability of the corpse for sword practice (tame-shimono ) by samurai and confiscation of the criminal's property (kessho ). Geshunin, as a rule reserved only for commoners, was based on the retribution principle calling for the taking of a life if a murder has been committed; the corpse and property were left intact.^[44]

Investigating an Allegation

On 8/I6, a week after Ken's document was forwarded to Shimogata, Ken's relatives were called together by the village officials to ascertain their intentions. As was to be expected, they disagreed with Ken's statement, which again left her alone to face the whole village and its authorities. She had no allies.

The next day Ken was summoned by the headman and informed of her relatives' intention not to back her up, to which Ken apparently retorted, "If my request is not settled after submitting it to the [Shi-

[43] Ibid.

[44] Hiramatsu Yoshiro^[*] , Edo no tsumi to batsu (Heibonsha, 1988), 94.

mogata] public office (Goyakushosama negai age ), I shall go all the way to the Edo office (Edohyo^[*] )."^[45] The headman's ploy to keep the lid on this case foundered on Ken's forceful counterthreat to bring the case to court in Edo. Always upping the ante in her confrontations with authority, Ken invariably found ways to respond to official threats with threats of her own. Thus, the Shimogata office was officially informed of Ken's suit.

On 8/21 life came to a halt in Makibuse. Early that morning all those involved in Ken's suit, practically the whole village (the headman, the kumi leaders, and all the members of the kumi), were summoned to Shimogata for interrogation. Yet the question addressed to Ken was not about her allegations. It concerned Shinzo's^[*] relationship to his household and Ken's knowledge thereof: did Ken know that her brother had been disinherited? She testified that she had never been informed about it but added that if Shinzo^[*] had indeed been disinherited, "what I have said will have difficulty standing up (watakushi mosu^[*]bun aitachinikui tatematsuri zonji soro^[*] )." In other words, her indictment might be null and void.

Ken had married and left home four years before her brother's disappearance. Therefore, it is possible that she did not know that Shinzo^[*] had indeed been disinherited only a few months before he was killed. Shinzaemon, however, produced then and there the disinheritance deed. Seeing that the killers would escape prosecution, Ken spat out, "Now I hate you even more." We shall return later to this question of disinheritance (kyuri^[*] ). Let us first follow the investigation to its conclusion.

A second question pressed upon Ken was how she had drawn up the lawsuit. Her ability to do this, after all, had thwarted the village officials' plan to ever let it come this far. Ken admitted that she had paid someone to draft the document, but she was fierce in her refusal to reveal the name of the person who had assisted her. "I won't tell you," she fired back, "even if I lose my head for it."

A war was being waged here over knowledge of documents. The disinheritance deed nullified Ken's suit, and she was ultimately accused of lying when she maintained her ignorance of its existence. The officials, on the other hand, tried to prevent her from producing a docu-

[45] Ozaki, "Kenjo oboegaki," 76.

ment, the suit, in order to avoid an investigation, and they insisted (in vain) on knowing who had composed it. Ken's ignorance was the weapon used by the officials against Ken (she should have known about the disinheritance), that she was quick to use against them when she refused to reveal the name of the scribe.

Of course, we do not know who helped Ken. It is unlikely that it was someone from the village. If she had to find help elsewhere, however, she would not have had to search far. Her family temple in Iribuse, to which she intended to commend her property, was only one kilometer away. She could have gone to Yawata, where her sister was living and where her mother and grandmother had come from. By this time in the Tokugawa period there were literate people in most villages, some even with scholarly pretensions. For example, in Katakura village, two and a half kilometers beyond the hills west of Makibuse, one of the village officials had a collection of books and manuscripts, even a copy of a work by Yamagata Shunan^[*] , one of Ogyu^[*] Sorai's disciples.^[46]

There were thus ways to circumvent the village elite's monopoly on writing and on writing in proper form (which meant power in a regime that governed through documents). Ken's "petition," nevertheless, was not in proper form, for it gave too much vent to her resentment and hatred and was devoid of the obligatory deferential formulae, besides being extremely difficult to understand. It looks like a draft for a suit and allows a rare glimpse at a commoner's feelings, and rarer still, at a woman's confrontation with authority.

At this juncture, a senior retainer (karo^[*] ) from Shimogata joined the case and examined the evidence. Ken gave up her lawsuit, owing to the legal point made of Shinzo's^[*] disinheritance, and then requested to leave the village. She must have realized that life there would be hell, and those with the power to decide whether to release her or to consign her to the village for life must have realized it as well. She was given no final answer; instead, she was "entrusted" to her husband Rokuemon, a euphemism for house confinement. This closed the first round of the investigation. Now that Ken's allegations had been thoroughly discredited, the matter of Shinzo's^[*] violent death could be taken up—rather safely, one should add.

[46] Nagano-ken, ed., Nagano-kenshi: Tsushi^[*]5 (Kinsei 2) (Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1988), 251 (hereafter NAK-T 5).

A whole month went by before, on 9/21, Gendayu^[*] testified and admired to the murder as follows:

Shinzo^[*] was doing evil things [gambling] roaming about the mountain where he lived. Therefore, the lineage and the whole village banished him. They drove him out beyond the bridge at Momozawa, at which point Shinzo^[*] turned around, and because he raised his hand against me, I had to hit him with the club I held in my hand. In the commotion that followed, it was hard to tell who was doing what (dare to mosu^[*]koto mo naku bo^[*]nite uchimoshisoro^[*] ). Blows fell, resulting in his death.^[47]

Gendayu's^[*] legal ground for defense was built into his testimony, perhaps on the Shimogata officials' private advice. Shinzo^[*] had started the fight, and his death was therefore not premeditated; it was a rebuttal of Ken's attempt to impute intention to the accused. Moreover, he had been thrown out of the village for good reason (gambling), and it was his resistance to this punishment that had led to the tragedy. On Ken's own admission, the headman had wondered "what would be next, given that he does all these things."

That Shinzo^[*] "raised his hand first" was most likely crucial to Gendayu's^[*] defense—insofar as a defense was still needed. This had two legal consequences. First, it turned Shinzo's^[*] violent death into something other than murder: an unfortunate accident for which the victim was to blame (he had resisted expulsion from the village). And second, the alibi introduced an element that today would be labeled "justified and legal self-defense."

One article of the shogunal penal code read: "When, due to the unreasonable behavior of one party, one has no choice but to cut him or her down, if it is certain that the relatives and village headman of the victim acknowledge that he or she was ordinarily unlawful in behavior, offer no excuses for the person in question, and beg that the killer be pardoned, the punishment is to be medium deportation [i.e., a lessening of the sentence]."^[48] Moreover, although in principle arrests of criminals by official or private parties had to take place without the infliction of harm, if it happened that the criminals got killed under certain circumstances, the killers would not be held responsible.^[49]

[47] Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," 52.

[48] Kujikata osadamegaki , art. 72 (TKKk 4:1).

[49] Hiramatsu Yoshiro^[*] , Kinsei keiji soshoho^[*]no kenkyu^[*] (Sobunsha^[*] , 1960), 683.

Gendayu^[*] could not have known of this particular article of the penal code, because the code had been written that same year and was secret, meant only as a set of guidelines for judicial officers of the shogunate.^[50] However, the code was also based on previous practice, and an awareness of mitigating circumstances must have existed, at least among bakufu officials.

Perhaps advised by the officials at Shimogata, Gendayu^[*] may have aimed his testimony toward legitimate self-defense against an opponent of dubious reputation for whom nobody would speak up. There certainly was enough time to structure Gendayu's^[*] testimony that way, since a month had elapsed between the first and second hearings.

A Dubious Case of Disinheritance

At this point the question of disinheritance comes in. Kyuri^[*] was a distinctive Tokugawa form of disinheritance, different from an older type (kando^[*] ) although often confused with it even in Tokugawa times.^[51] It drastically changed one's "civic" status and is best understood in conjunction with other laws.

Japanese disinheritance practice has changed over time. Its main forms were gizetsu , kando^[*] , and kyuri^[*] . In antiquity, gizetsu ("cutting the obligation") meant expulsion from home and loss of all inheritance rights. During the Kamakura period (1185-1333) it was gradually replaced by kando^[*] ("right measure after examination"), applied for unfilial behavior to escape vicarious responsibility for crimes one is afraid one's children might commit, especially when their whereabouts are not known, or simply when parents decide to exercise this right. The descendant had to leave the house and was freed from all filial obligations and rights, including protection, but was not barred from official posts; and the decision could be revoked by the parents. In the Tokugawa period, official permission was required for kando^[*] , but now

[50] Dan Fenno Henderson, "Introduction to the Kujikata Osadamegaki (1742)," in Ho^[*]to keibatsu no rekishiteki kosatsu^[*] , ed. Hiramatsu Yoshiro hakushi tsuito ronbunshu^[*] henshu^[*] iinkai (Nagoya: Nagoya Daigaku shuppankai, 1987), 504-8.

[51] For the information that follows, see Kokushi daijiten , ed. Kokushi daijiten henshu^[*] iinkai, 15 vols. (Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1979-94), 4:253 ("kyuri^[*] ") and 3:884 ("kando^[*] ") (hereafter KDJ). See also F. Jouon^[*] des Longrais, L'Est et l'Ouest: Institutions du Japon et de l'Occident comparées (six études de sociologie juridique ) (Tokyo: Maison Franco-japonaise, 1958), 387-90.

there was also kyuri^[*] ("separation for a long duration" or "old separation"). Kyuri^[*] had the same prophylactic function against the consequences of possible crimes by absconded offspring. Official ratification was by the parents, kumi, village officials, and the intendant who ultimately permitted the fugitive to be taken from the population rosters, which automatically dissolved marriage and blocked any possibility of holding office.

Laws and institutions often have ambiguous functions. They steer practice along norms and paths to produce good and just behavior, which, however, may only be good and just in some respects but not in others. Hence, they also produce a need for additional laws and institutions to correct these "dysfunctions." Kyuri^[*] can be understood in such a way, as a response to the undesirable effects of two other laws. One was the stipulation, inherent in the Tokugawa feudal configuration of power, that crimes be judged in the jurisdiction of the criminal's registration. The simplest of these were domains or fiefs for peasants and samurai. Matters were more complicated for uncommon commoners like priests, registered beggars, outcastes, and the registered blind or for uncommon cases that involved two jurisdictions.^[52] The other legal practice with a direct bearing on kyuri^[*] was the custom of vicarious guilt or communal responsibility for misbehavior (enza ): the relatives, the kumi, or sometimes the village could be punished for a crime committed by any of its members. Hence they could suffer for a crime committed by someone who had absconded and over whom they had thus lost control.

Legally separating an absconder from the group responsible for him or her through official disinheritance prevented such injustice. Kyuri^[*] was thus both a punishment in absentia for someone who had illegally left the village and a protection against possible prosecution of his or her relatives and kumi members for crimes he or she might commit.^[53] It should be noted that in the second half of the Tokugawa period com-

[52] See Henderson, conciliation , vol. 1, chap. 4, esp. pp. 86-92.

[53] Oishi^[*] Hisakata (1725-94) discusses kyuri^[*] and kando^[*] in these terms. A former village group headman from Kyushu^[*] who traveled widely in Omi^[*] , Shinano, and the Kanto^[*] , he was hired m 1783 as coordinator of rural administration in the Takasaki domain (Gunma prefecture, east of Kita-Saku), where he composed for his lord a very detailed vade mecum for rural administrators, the Jikata hanreiroku (see Oishi^[*] Hisakata, Jikata hanreiroku , ed. Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , 2 vols. [Kondo^[*] shuppansha, 1969], 2:123-54).

munal responsibility was activated only for the most extreme crimes: killing one's lord or one's parent. Hence, "disinheritance" was rather dormant as protection for the legally accountable group.^[54] It served mostly as a means for the person legally responsible for an absconder to evade social criticism within the village. Also, kyuri^[*] could not be enacted against a status superior: one could not "disinherit" one's absconding parent. Such disinheritance was a publicly certified act. It had to be approved by the local headman, and valid reasons had to be stated. Since someone thus "disinherited" was erased from the village registers, this measure needed to be sanctioned by the higher authorities. It changed the official status of the person in question. A disinherited person was thus legally a nonperson and, because he or she was not attached to a legal group, perhaps the village equivalent of a ronin^[*] , or masterless samurai. Such a person was thus cut off from the village in all possible ways, having neither obligations to the village nor privileges, including the privilege of protection. He was an outlaw.

A remedy to the possible ill effects of another law, kyuri^[*] itself was insufficiently corrected by further laws against its own possible negative effects—except for the important general provision, central but implicit to Ken's argument, that life could not be taken. Article 4 of the Makibuse village law made this clear: "People who have killed someone, or strange people who hang out in shrines, forests, and mountains: the villagers, together with people from neighboring villages, should set out, arrest them, tie them up, and hand them over. If it is difficult to catch them there on the spot, then you have to pursue them however far and catch them where they settle. But no matter what kind of person they are, you cannot kill them" (see appendix 3). Kyuri's^[*] only other softening aspect was that it was revokable if the person affected by it mended his or her ways.^[55] In Shinzo's^[*] case we see how kyuri^[*] could be manipulated to prevent a violent death from being categorized as murder.

The next questions to be addressed are the reasons for Shinzo's^[*] punishment of disinheritance and banishment. Why the disinheritance, which was an action that ultimately only Shinzo's^[*] mother could have sanctioned? And why did the villagers and lineage members mete out

[54] KDJ 4:253.

[55] For an example of documents reversing prior verdicts of disinheritance and banishment, see Dan Fenno Henderson, Village "Contracts" in Tokugawa Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 190-91, 194.

what turned out to be, in Ken's eyes, deadly punishment for Shinzo^[*] —without trial, verdict, or, as reported by Ken, stated reasons? Ultimately, Ken was arguing degrees of appropriate punishment and maintained that they had no right to kill Shinzo^[*] .

Two documents exist requesting the disinheritance of Shinzo^[*] : one, signed by his mother and relatives, is addressed to the village officials and dated 1741/7; the other, bearing the seals of the village officials, is the one the village officials forwarded to the Shimogata office and is dated 1741/7/21, or barely three months before the murder. Since these documents were so crucial in the murder case, it is of course not unthinkable that they were fabricated post factum for that purpose—after the murder and even after Ken presented her suit.

If the disinheritance deed was a forgery, one might wonder how Shinzo's^[*] mother's seal was secured. The modern presumption that seals were always kept at home, however, does not apply universally to Tokugawa Japan. Ishii Ryosuke^[*] writes that it was not uncommon for a village headman to keep all the seals of all the households; some village laws even warned against the possible abuses of entrusting one's seal to others, even relatives.^[56]

Shinzo's^[*] mother's request reads as follows:

Written Petition Submitted in Fearful Deference

My son Shinzo^[*] , who made a living as a horse trader, was fond of heavy drinking and misbehaved in various places. Moreover, he did not engage in agriculture. In particular, last fall he left fallow the small dry field we have, leaving me almost starving [the following spring]. Again and again the lineage, united in its views, requested him [to change his ways], but it was of no use whatsoever and the problems remained.
This year on 4/13, he disappeared with Gendayu's^[*] horse without leaving a trace. I asked the lineage to look for him everywhere, but he has not been found to this day, and this matter has [still] not been settled. It is hard to gauge what other evil things he might be up to next. I therefore request the shogunal authorities to take him, starting this year, from the population register and disinherit him.

1741/7 The village of Makibuse
Shinzo's^[*] mother (seal)^[57]

This petition served as the basis for the official document forwarded to Shimogata, which is in three parts: Shinzo's^[*] mother's (rewritten) peri-

[56] Ishii Ryosuke^[*] , Inban no rekishi (Akashi shoten, 1919), 182, 184.

[57] This document to be found only in Ozaki, "Kenjo oboegaki," 77-78.

tion, an endorsement by her four kumi members/relatives testifying to the truth of her statement, and an addendum by the village officials including further explanations. The first two parts read as follows:

Written Petition

My son Shinzo^[*] has not worked in recent years and not supported me, which has made life very hard for me. Moreover, on 4/13 he disappeared, which is why I asked the lineage to look for him everywhere, but to this day he has not been found, and even if we look further, I am alone with nobody to support me. Therefore, I petition to remove [my son] from the population register.

The mother of Makibuse's Shinzo^[*]
1741/7/21

The abovementioned Shinzo^[*] , as stated in his mother's petition, made an unsubstantial living (fujittai yue yowatari ), which caused great hardship to his mother. Then, on 4/13, he disappeared with his uncle Gendayu's^[*] horse. We immediately started a search everywhere without results. On 5/21 we sought an official warrant [for an official search], and we ordered the neighborhood kumi to look for him. We have searched until today but not found him, and nobody has reported him, so that nobody from either the lineage or the kumi has been able to lay a hand on him.
The above is without fallacy. Without any discrepancy do the relatives and kumi endorse the mother's petition. Deferentially looking upward to the shogun (gokogisama^[*] ), we humbly request the removal [of Shinzo's^[*] name] from the population register.

1741/7/21 The village of Makibuse
petitioner Gendayu^[*] (seal)
petitioner Chokyuro^[*] (seal)
same Shin'emon (seal)
same Masaemon (seal)
[To :] The village headman
The elders [i.e., kumi leaders]^[58]

According to these documents, Shinzo^[*] had ceased to work the fields and instead had gotten involved in horse trading, with the result that he was unable to support his mother. He drank too much and caused trouble. Moreover, he disappeared with his uncle's horse. (Ken also refers to this matter in her petition, although rather obliquely). Private searches failed to locate him. After one month a complaint was filed; the kumi ordered an official search, with no results.

[58] This document is available only in Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," 53.

Fleeing became legal absconding only after a certified effort had been made to apprehend the fugitive. A certain amount of time (officially, six periods of thirty days) was fixed during which active searches were repeatedly ordered by the village or supravillage authorities.^[59] Hence the mention of the failed search in the disinheritance document (although fewer than six months seem to have elapsed between Shinzo's^[*] absconding and the disinheritance): disinheritance, as mentioned earlier, was a legally certified "punishment" for absconding, while absconding was the legally certified status of a fugitive.

The official petition, signed by Shinzo's^[*] mother and endorsed by her relatives, was forwarded to the Shimogata office by the village officials, who appended a note with more details to complete the work of character assassination. They mention his asocial conduct with reverberations in the community: drunkenness, general misbehavior, noncompliance with the "will of the lineage," mentioned by Shinzo's^[*] mother. Moreover, in the context of an investigation of theft conducted six years earlier (in 1735) by another shogunal office (one in Hiraga, some fifteen kilometers east, in the Kita-Saku plain), Shinzo^[*] had been questioned because he was a horse trader (bakuro^[*] ). Although Shinzo^[*] seems not to have been involved in the 1735 theft (otherwise it would certainly have been used more fully against him), and although this matter was six years old, one surmises that it was made part of the record to give more weight to the argument for disinheritance by establishing, through innuendo, a long record of misbehavior and bad companions. Following this investigation, the lineage had made him promise to abandon horse trading and return to tilling the fields, a promise he had not kept. This, presumably, was "the will of the lineage."

The previous fall, the officials also related, his absence of over twenty days had made him miss the wheat sowing time, which had endangered his mother's food supply. Moreover, on 4/13 he had led his uncle's horse away to sell it and had disappeared wearing his uncle's clothes. This last detail testifies, perhaps, to Shinzo's^[*] poverty: members of branch houses often relied on their patrons for material gifts or loans of daily necessity, so these clothes may or may not have been "given" to him by his uncle. His relatives looked for him quietly for one month, but then the kumi was ordered to undertake a formal search, which it did for an-

[59] Mizumoto, "Kogi^[*] no saiban," 307; see also Oishi^[*] Hisakata, Jikata hanreiroku , 2:113, 114, 119.

other month, without results. Fearing what Shinzo^[*] might be up to next, his mother had requested the removal of his name from the register.

The case against Shinzo^[*] is made again and again in these documents, at ever higher levels of authority: by his mother, his lineage, the village officials. This reiteration no doubt had a reinforcing effect, solidifying the case against him. Clearly, things were presented so as to put the blame for the removal of Shinzo's^[*] name from the registers and the concomitant disinheritance on Shinzo^[*] himself. But one senses also the pressure the lineage put on Shinzo's^[*] mother to take this drastic step. At this point, however, she could not have foreseen the tragic outcome only three months away. And perhaps neither did anyone else in the village, although there was the alleged threat by Gendayu^[*] . Moreover, since kyuri^[*] could be revoked, perhaps Shinzo's^[*] mother hoped for such a reversal when she consented to the disinheritance—if the document is genuine.

The Decline of a Prominent Peasant Household

In her disinheritance request, Shinzo's^[*] mother mentioned that the family's landholdings were minuscule. Indeed, they may have been too small to support her and her son, so that Shinzo^[*] had sought additional income in horse trading and perhaps also in gambling. How small was the property?

The family holdings Shinzo^[*] inherited at the death of his father in 1719, when he was nineteen, amounted to no more than 1.9 koku, or 1.6 tan , the equivalent of less than 0.4 acres. (His father, Rihei 11, had not managed the property too well: he had lost one third of it, since he had started out with 2.9 koku.) One koku of rice was the amount needed to feed an adult for one year, and one able-bodied adult could normally cultivate three tan.^[60] Shinzo^[*] was obviously a very poor peas-

[60] Nakane Chie, Kinship and Economic Organization in Rural Japan , London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, 32 (London: Athlone Press, 1967), 59. See also Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , Kyoho^[*] kaikaku no keizai seisaku: Dai ichibu, Kyoho^[*] kaikaku no noson^[*] seisaku (Zohoban^[*] : Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1978), 20. A similar estimate is given in NAK-T 5:143, where it is stated that a couple could cultivate seven to eight tan (the equivalent of about ten koku). Thomas C. Smith quotes a less productive ratio: four or five adults for one cho^[*] of arable (one cho^[*] equals ten tan), eight or nine for two, and twelve for three (Agrarian Origins , 6). A holding's kokudaka is only an indirect reflection of its size, for it refers to the computed putative yield of all products converted into rice equivalents, on the basis of which the tribute was calculated. This tribute, in turn, was paid neither in rice nor m any other natural products. After 1726, in all bakufu land in Shinano, the tribute amount, calculated as a percentage of the kokudaka, was converted into a cash amount at the going conversion rate (NAK-T 5:86).

ant with insufficient land to keep him fully occupied, but in this he was not alone in the village. With 1.9 koku, his was among the twenty-seven households, out of a total of forty-nine, with holdings under two koku.

In 1727, Shinzo^[*] started to dispose of the little land he had (see table 2), until by 1740 all the honden ("original paddies": first-grade paddies and first-, second-, and third-grade dry fields) and three-fourths of the newly developed dry fields were sold to two distant cousins (E¹ and E² of fig. 1, who, it should be noted, in the 1720s and 1730s more than doubled their property, to 8.9 koku and 5.7 koku, respectively). Shinzo^[*]

kept only a tiny lower-grade dry field in the mountains and the superior-grade dry fields of residence land, a total of 0.19 koku, or 0.04 acres. In other words, he wound up selling 90 percent of the land he had inherited, making him no better off than a landless peasant, as mentioned earlier. In her petition of 1757, Ken stated that her brother Shinzo^[*] "went to live in the mountain on his plot of land." This plot of land, at the northern outskirts of the village, beyond the Nakasendo^[*] , was the only one he had left besides the residence land. He was killed a year after he sold his last paddy.

In table z one can see that in 1727 Shinzo^[*] must have suddenly been in great need of cash. This was when he sold almost half of his prime paddy to his cousin. Two years later he disposed of all the newly developed (low-grade) dry fields, except for the tiny plot in the mountains, which he kept until the end. The next spurt of sales occurred between 1735 and 1740: first the main (honden) dry fields all at one time in 1735, then the remaining precious paddy piece by piece.

It is not clear when Shinzo^[*] began horse trading, but it is unlikely that he did so before he started to dispose of the land, in 1727. Until then he must have been working the fields he had inherited seven years earlier. In 1727 he fell into a spiraling circle of horse trading, gambling, drunkenness, and land sales. At least this is the picture one gets from the disinheritance document the village officials submitted to the Shimogata office. Yet these hardships seem to have come in spurts: the first one in 1727-29 (loss: 0.57 koku), the second and seemingly the greatest in 1735-37 (loss: 1.03), the last in 1739-40 (loss: 0.17). Ozaki surmizes that Shinzo's^[*] "reprehensible" behavior was most likely not the cause but the result of hardships that may have had something to do with the marriages of his two sisters. His sister Ine got married in this first period, his sister Ken in the second period.^[61]

These data Ozaki culled from records unrelated to the case. However, the 1763 incident (with the population register) triggered an investigation, possibly ordered by the Shimogata office. The report reveals a wider background to Ken's lineage and introduces us to some social and political dimensions of the history of Makibuse.

According to this report, Ken's ancestors had been peasants in Maki-

[61] Smith (Nakahara , 97) writes that for peasants "dowry was not normally a significant form of property." His source is late Tokugawa. Yet, the "chest of personal belongings" the bride usually took may have seriously taxed a poor peasant's resources.

buse for several generations, starting in the early 1600s with Genzaemon [A of fig. 1], headman at the time of the land survey in 1629. His holdings were listed at 20 koku, among the four largest land holdings, each between 20 and 24 koku. For four generations, down to Ken and Shinzo's^[*] father, Rihei II, the family had been very prominent in the village and no doubt jealous of its prestige, which may help explain the resentment provoked by Shinzo's^[*] behavior. What happened to the family between Genzaemon's time and Shinzo's^[*] ? The story mirrors the fate of many families in the area. One has only to remember that down to 1662 only three out of twelve families had holdings of under ten koku, while after 1721 that number was forty-six out of forty-nine (and thirty-four of the forty-six had three koku or less [see table 4]).

In the second generation, in the late 1640s, the successor (B) lost the village headship because of an unspecified village conflict, but his holdings were not affected negatively; in fact, they grew even larger (according to the resurvey of 1669-70, he had twenty-three koku).^[62] The third-generation successor (C¹ , or Rihei I) also held the village headship for one year, in 1689. In the transition from the second to the third generation, in 1684, the property was split among four sons. The successor to the lineage headship (C¹ , then the oldest son) received about one-third of the land, and the other three (C² , C³ , and C⁴ ) each received one-fifth. However, partitioning had already started more than a decade earlier. According to the population register, in 1671 the family had been split into four separate households: Rihei I (C¹ , then the second oldest son), Shinzaemon (B, the father), Heishiro^[*] (C⁴ , the youngest son), and Choemon^[*] (C⁵ , the oldest son, who disappears from the registers thereafter). The latter three, including the father , were all clients of Rihei I, their patron and also the only titled peasant in the lineage.^[63]

[62] Ozaki has discovered no further details concerning the village conflict that caused the headship to be lost to another lineage. The research by Mizumoto Kunihiko and Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki, introduced in chapter 2, suggests that most of the village disturbances of the 1640s were directed against the arbitrary use the village headman had made of the new power the lords had vested in them (Mizumoto Kunihiko, Kinsei no mura shakai to kokka [Tokyo^[*] Daigaku shuppankai, 1987], esp. chaps. 1 and 3 [hereafter Mura shakai ]; idem, "Murakata sodo^[*] ," Chusei^[*] no minshu^[*] undo^[*] ,Chuseishi^[*] koza^[*] , 7 [Gakuseisha, 1985], 289-307; Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki, "Kinsei shoki no nomin^[*] toso^[*] to muraukesei: nengukanjo^[*] sodo^[*] o sozai to shire," Rekishi hyoron^[*] ,no. 475 [1989]: 42-60).

[63] Ozaki ("Kenjo ikken," 57) charts the 1671 generation as one comprising three brothers (Rihei, 37; Shinzaemon, 64; and Heijiro^[*] , 34) and a fourth person (Choemon^[*] , 39), whose relationship m the other three is unspecified (respectively, C , B, C , and C in fig. 1). Three of these four were relatively close in age, but the fourth, Shinzaemon, was twenty-five years older than the oldest of the trio, which makes it possible that he was their father—assuming also that Choemon^[*] is a sibling. According to Ozaki's table, this Shinzaemon was the son of another Shinzaemon. My reasoning is based on the assumption that there is only one Shinzaemon, son of Genzaemon (A) and father of Rihei I and his brother(s).

It should be noted that the father moved out (a pattern of retirement sometimes called inkyo bunke , literally, "retirement branch house"), and the headship was passed on to a house that branched off but was legally the head of the lineage and inherited also the status of titled peasant. Primogeniture was by no means the rule in this region or, indeed, in most of rural Japan in the seventeenth century.

More and Smaller Peasants

In 1734 a bakufu official sketched a picture of the optimal ratio of land to people in an ideal village. Such a model community would have zoo koku (half paddies and half dry fields) and a population of 120 divided into 24 households, 60 males and 60 females, as well as 12 craftsmen or merchants and 6 horses.^[64] In terms of arable, Makibuse met this standard: in 1750 it had 205 koku (see table 1). Its population, however, was double what it should have been: 48 households with a total of 242 members and 21 horses.

This model was put forward at the time of the first of three large-scale reforms, the Kyoho^[*] Reforms of the 1730s, which attempted to arrest developments that had weakened the bakufu's economic base. The earlier edicts prohibiting the sale of land (1643) and the division of land into holdings of less than to koku (in the case of headmen, 20 koku) (1673) had failed to strengthen the rulers' grip on agricultural surplus. A significant increase in the number of large landholdings syphoned off part of that surplus as land rent paid to landlords by tenant farmers without land, or with too little land to support their households. The history of these two prohibitions—"thou shalt not accumulate" and "thou shalt not divide"—and their implementation is a complex one.^[65] Put simply, it is clear that the laws were circumvented in various ways.

[64] Nakane, Kinship , 42.

[65] See Oishi^[*] , Kyoho^[*] kaikaku .

The limitation on land partitioning was dealt with locally by officially (tatemae ) limiting the number of titled peasants and recording branch houses as working part of the main family's land (buntsuke ). This practice can also be found in Makibuse, for instance in Genzaemon's lineage. The 1677 cadaster shows the land registered under Rihei I's name and indicates the amount tilled separately (buntsuke) by each household of the lineage.

Oishi^[*] Hisataka, the eighteenth-century local administrator of Takasaki domain in a neighboring province, explained this "partition" as marking the division of inheritance but not separately established branch houses (bunke ).^[66] If branch houses were established, their heads would be titled peasants and would pay tribute and corvée directly, he wrote. In Makibuse, however, those households marked as buntsuke in the 1677 land cadaster had already been registered six years earlier in the 1671 population register as branch houses (kakae), that is to say, as separate branch houses under a patron. It is not clear whether these houses paid their tribute directly, as Oishi^[*] Hisataka suggested, or through their patron. What is certain, however, is that they were branch houses without being tided peasants. Over time, the number of titled peasants in Makibuse decreased somewhat, while the number of households providing tribute and corvée increased dramatically. Thus the bakufu's definition of a titled peasant (as seen through Oishi's^[*] eyes) was at variance with the village's. In the village of Makibuse, the title became a privilege and a mark of political, not economic, power. Like shares or stock that could be sold, titles were transmissible and negotiable. In order to purchase one, an individual needed "economic capital," but as figure z indicates, one could hold on to it as symbolic (and political) capital even if one's holding was less than 2 koku. Note that household L of figure z had only 0.4 koku, whereas the village headman had 33 koku, and they were both titled peasants.

As in the case of neighboring Kodaira, which is analyzed in detail in chapter 3, partitioning leveled economic differences between titled peasants or patrons and (nontitled) branch houses. Such partitioning of the lineage's holdings by establishing branch houses was a common practice in Makibuse. Other examples are the Iemon and Kichisaburo^[*] lineages (see table 3 and fig. 2).

[66] Oishi^[*] Hisakata, Jikata hanreiroku , 2:110. On Oishi^[*] , see above, n. 53.

The same leveling trend was manifested throughout the village (see table 4). Between 1647 and 1662 the distribution of holdings among titled peasants remained stable: four units had holdings of 20-24 koku (one of them being the A and B generations of Genzaemon's lineage), five units had 10-14 koku, two had 5-9 koku, and one had 3 koku. The one household with less than 1 koku in I647 had disappeared from the registers three years later, leaving a total of twelve titled peasant households by 1662.

By 1677, however, the situation had changed drastically, although official registration maintained a fiction of continuity: four households were shown to have more than 20 koku, four to have 10-14 koku, seven to have between 4 and 9 koku, and one with 1 koku, bringing the total to sixteen, an (official) increase of four. Yet, in reality, seven out of this total of sixteen holdings (each officially registered under one house) were divided among two to five households, usually evenly, resulting in a massive (unofficial) increase in the number of households owning 1-10 koku of land. The distribution was as follows: one house of 29 koku (that of Chuemon^[*] , the village headman); one of 11 koku and one

Fig. 2.
Kichisaburo's^[*] Lineage, 1700-1758

^a titled peasant

Source : Adapted from Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," table 7 (p. 61).

Notes : Nonce the kokudaka of 0.4 of title peasant L in 1758.
It will be remembered that the headman, also a titled peasant,
had over 30 koku. Smith (Agrarian Origins , 39 n. d) states that
to "ignore the minimum [below which partition was not practical]
was to invite ruin." Yet this is precisely what seems to have been
happening here and else where in the village. Hayami Akira wrote
that there were no cases of holdings under 5 koku being divided
("The Myth of Primogeniture and Impartible Inheritance m
Tokugawa Japan," Journal of Family History 8, no. 1 [1983]: 23).

of 10 koku; thirteen in the 5-9 koku range; and fifteen in the 1-4 range, bringing the actual total to thirty-one households, an increase of nineteen over the 1662 total.

In subsequent decades the partitioning of lineage lands continued. By 1721 the total number of households had risen to forty-nine (thirteen titled peasants, thirty-two branch houses, and four landless peasants), with two holdings above 30 koku; one of x4 and one of 10 koku; seven in the 5-9 koku range; eighteen in the 1-4 koku range; and sixteen with less than 1 koku. Four peasants were registered as without land of their own.

By 1700, when Ken's grandfather Rihei I divided his property (increased by 1 koku to a total of 9), some branches of Genzaemon's lineage were struggling to survive on very diminished holdings. Ken's father, Rihei II (D¹ ), received only 2.9 koku, and her uncle Gendayu^[*] (D² ), 6.3 koku. Her father's cousin (D³ ), with only 1.2 koku, soon disappeared from the land register. The other branch of the lineage was doing better: another cousin of her father's (D⁵ , who held 6.3 koku) formed a sublineage with yet another cousin (D⁴ , holding 5 koku) and the latter's two successors (E² and E³ ).

In 1703 Ken's father, Rihei II, transferred half of his already small holdings to his brother Gendayu^[*] , retaining only 1.5 koku for himself. He must have been experiencing financial difficulties, an indication that the decline of this line did not start with Ken's brother, Shinzo^[*] . Peasants in this situation had few options. Obviously, they lacked the means to develop substantial new fields. Moreover, the terrain may not have allowed further development. Over more than four generations, between 1627 and 1756, the lineage's holdings increased by a mere 2 koku.

One solution was part-tenancy, but it is not clear whether this was an option in Makibuse. There were only a few holdings large enough to use labor beyond the nuclear family (two holders of more than 30 koku, one of 14 koku, and one of 10 koku [see table 4]), labor that may have been provided by hereditary or indentured servants who do not seem to disappear, even though the population grew considerably and at a much faster rate than the village kokudaka (see table 1). On the other hand, branch house or client status no doubt included some duties for the lineage head or patron that may have been remunerated; indeed, some clients may have been quasi-tenants.

Another solution for surplus members of the household was to seek regular employment in towns or cities or short-term employment during the slack winter season.^[67] This is what Rihei II did. In 1712 he left his wife and daughter Ine (Ken was not yet born) and took twelve-year-old

[67] Seasonal employment m Edo during the winter months was customary in some areas in Nagano, even for villages far north, such as Yomase in Takai district. Documents show Yomase villagers petitioning to go to Edo from the ninth to the third month in 1701-2. In 1757 in Otsukoto (Suwa district), which had 130 households, the number of those who officially petitioned to spend the winter months in Edo was 33 (NAK-T 5:366). In Kodaira (see n. 24), exactly half of the peasants (9 out of 20 titled peasants and 18 out of 36 kakae) were themselves listed as being in service outside the village (all titled peasants but one, and no kakae, went to Edo); this, in addition to II of their children (see Komonjo kenkyukai^[*] , "Genroku-ki," 67).

(Table continued on next page)

Shinzo^[*] with him to Edo (some 180 km, or twenty-four way stations on the Nakasendo^[*] , away), where they worked together for two years. After his father returned home, Shinzo^[*] stayed in Edo another three years; then he worked a year in the tiny village of Gan (at the southern end of Makibuse's valley, some 7 km from home).

These efforts proved somewhat successful, for in 1716 Rihei II was able to "buy back" 0.5 koku from his brother, increasing his holdings to 1.9 koku. This is the amount of land Shinzo^[*] inherited three years later. However, when Rihei II sold part of his land to his younger brother Gendayu^[*] in 1703, he also relinquished, or very likely sold, to

him his inherited lineage headship and his status as titled peasant.^[68] Also, when Rihei II left for Edo, he had to step down from the village office of kumi leader, an office he would be unable to recuperate upon his return because he lacked the prerequisite status of titled peasant. Rihei II, whose great-grandfather and grandfather had been village headmen and whose father, Rihei I, had held the office for one year in 1689, had become an impoverished, untitled peasant.

A brief excursus is called for here regarding the link between village office and peasant status in Makibuse. As table 5 indicates, in the first half of the eighteenth century the number of titled peasants in the village decreased by one-third, from sixteen to eleven. These five households became clients of other titled peasants (household numbers 2, 4, 10, 14, and 15). On the other hand, some clients became titled peasants, trading status with their patrons. This is what happened between Rihei II (D¹ ) and his younger brother (D² ), and they obviously were not the only ones: see the three switches in the Kichisaburo^[*] lineage recorded in 1717, 1735, and 1764 (line II of table 5); see also figure 2. This table and figure also show younger brothers superseding their older brothers (e.g., in lines 7, 8, II, and 12 of table 5), although one must here distinguish between shifting the status to a different household headed by a younger brother (D¹ and D² in line 7) and keeping the status within the same household with the younger brother succeeding his older brother as the head of the household (K and M in line 11). It is also clear that these shifts do not occur in the more well-to-do lineages (lines 1, 3, and 5), which also are able to hold on to village offices more durably. It should be noted that after 1735 the office of elder was combined with that of kumi leader (which meant the lineage head, since kumi here were constituted along lineage lines).

Lineage Tensions

Let us recapitulate Ken's story in light of this information. Some time between his marriage in 1694 and the birth of Shinzo^[*] in 1700, Rihei II set up a separate household, leaving his younger brother Gendayu^[*] with

[68] In Kasuga, a village southwest of Makibuse, across the hills, the village law stipulated the price a client had to pay to his patron in order to be set free and become a titled peasant as 20 ryo^[*] (Nagano-ken, ed., Nagano-kenshi: Tsushi^[*] 4 [Kinsei 1] [Nagano-shi: Nagano-kenshi kankokai^[*] , 1987], 466 [hereafter NAK-T 4]). For a study of land pawning and redemption, see Shirakawabe Tatsuo, "Kinsei shichichi ukemodoshi kanko^[*] m hyakusho^[*] takashoji," Rekishigaku kenkyu^[*] , no. 552 (1986): 17-32.

Table 5. Titled Peasants and Village Offices, 1700-1764

SOURCE : Adapted from Ozaki, "Kenjo ikken," table 8 (p. 62).

NOTE : Column one is a guide to lineages diagrammed in other tables (for example, Table 4.Y = table 4, lineage Y). Letters representing household heads that appear in other tables are capitalized. All other peasants are represented by lowercase letters in alphabetical order. = village headman; ( ) = otonabyakusho[*] , which according to NAK-T 4:57 means hyakusho[*]sodai[*] , or peasant representative, usually a small peasant, but not in Makibuse or m Irebuse before 1760 as discussed m chapter 2; ____ = village elder, after 1735 kumi head; * = earlier client status with preceding titled peasant; = younger brother of preceding peasant; = becomes client of next titled peasant (note the decreasing number of titled peasants). Subscript figures indicate koku.

their mother. In 1700 Rihei was thirty-seven and Gendayu^[*] was eighteen. The division of the property greatly favored Gendayu^[*] , perhaps because he took care of the mother: Rihei received 2.9 koku, while Gendayu^[*] received 6.3, or more than twice Rihei's portion. As we have seen, the succession rules in the village were not hard and fast, least of all that of primogeniture. Nevertheless, because his brother got the lion's share, Rihei had to find ways to prevent his economic situation from declining further. It was perhaps as a means to reassert symboli-

cally the importance of his line over his brother's that Rihei adopted his father's name, thereby resurrecting his forebear and affirming his claim to the latter's power and position inherited as titled peasant, patron, and kumi head. Yet economic reality prevailed: Rihei wound up selling his titles and office to Gendayu^[*] , which further increased the gap between the two families, this time in terms of political power. This was part of the legacy he left Shinzo^[*] when he died at age fifty-six.

Shinzo's^[*] stay in Edo during his adolescent years must have changed his outlook on the world. He returned to a life as a poor peasant without hope of improving his lot by working the fields. To the great dismay of his lineage members, who counted village headmen among their ancestors, he sought his fortune in horse trading. Worse, he courted the company of gamblers and suspected thieves.

From Shinzo's^[*] perspective, however, it must have appeared that part of the reason for his misery lay with his uncle Gendayu^[*] , who had wound up with most of the family's property and with the family's titles. It should be noted that none of the land Shinzo^[*] sold in his seven separate sales went to Gendayu^[*] : it all went to the competing and rising sublineage (see table 2). The constant criticism of his ways by the lineage and their attempts to make him change his style of life must have further alienated Shinzo^[*] .

But the advice his relatives gave him carried more import than that of an ordinary uncle or aunt: as members of his kumi, they were responsible for his behavior in the eyes of the community and the authorities. Their opinions, therefore, constituted official admonitions. The head of his kumi was the representative of the village headman, behind whom stood the authority of the bannerman and ultimately the shogun. This being the case, it was difficult for Shinzo's^[*] mother to defend her son, and her agreement to request the disinheritance, if it was her doing, undoubtedly signified her public disapproval of Shinzo's^[*] course of action. She had to align herself with the village authorities. Yet, even thus isolated, Shinzo^[*] could not bring himself to leave the village, for which he paid with his life.

As Ken pointed out in her lawsuit, the legal grounds for killing Shinzo^[*] were open to question. The official effect of disinheritance was to relinquish communal responsibility, but it was revocable. Although expulsion from the village could have been a justifiable punishment for habitual gambling, it should not have meant irreversible exile. Yet it was pushed in that direction, ordered by the headman, given full lin-

eage support. That Shinzo^[*] resisted expulsion is understandable, but his resistance, if we believe Gendayu's^[*] version, resulted in his death.

Ken bitterly resented the outcome. Yet, when she challenged its legality, the disinheritance document saved the accused by giving Shinzo's^[*] violent death justification legitimized by authority (the Shimogata magistrate).

Protection Against an Avenging Spirit

In her efforts to bring this affair into the open and question its legality, Ken obviously could not count on any cooperation from within the village. She said she paid someone to draft the suit, although that may not have been true. Payment, however, made the relationship between herself and the scribe a business one, exculpating the scribe from any charge of sympathy for her case. But bringing it into the open must also have been a catharsis for Ken, as the second half of her petition/suit shows:

As for his memorial service, following my judgment (nanibun ni mo kono kata no zonji yori ni ), it should be held so that none of your descendants might suffer retribution. The service itself should consist of daily recitations at Zenkoji^[*] in perpetuity (kono yo aran kagiri ) and, also at Zenkoji^[*] , a forty-nine-day ritual; daily recitations in perpetuity at Koyasan^[*] and a lantern; at the family temple of Baikei-in, recitation of one thousand sutras in perpetuity.^[69] If things turn out that way, I shall sponsor all this. I shall go to Zenkoji^[*] [to arrange] for the service. I shall bring money from you and I shall contribute my own part (sesshagi mo kono setsu dodo^[*]itasu beku soro^[*] ). Koyasan^[*] is a place where women are not allowed, hence my husband Rokuemon will represent me. He will also, in a similar fashion, collect money, including travel expenses.
Although I am talking like this, I do not want to request even one sen. It would not be proper to do [as I say] if each and every one is not convinced [that it is the right thing to do]. You should all get together and follow your judgment (zonji yori ni nasaru beku ). I also am following my own. If you are convinced [of the rightness of this case], then Chuemon^[*] [the village headman], Gendayu^[*] , Shinzaemon [E¹ of fig. 1], Dan'emon,

[69] The forty-nine-day "ritual (tsukare )" probably refers to the period after death during which a number of purifying exorcisms are performed. The lantern may. refer to a standard stone lantern or to one used in memorial services. Zenkoji^[*] was famous as a Pure Land to which all souls were said to go immediately following death. On Zenkoji^[*] , see Donald F. McCallum, Zenkoji^[*]and Its Icon: A Study in Medieval Japanese Religious Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

Uheiji [F] should write a deed [of apology for the murder]. If that is what they think is right, then I shall write a document [to forgive them]. I also want a deed [of apology] from Chokyuro^[*] [E³ ] and all the other officials, and then I in turn shall write a document [to forgive them]. I [shall] feel no [further] resentment toward my relatives. I have no resentment toward Juzaemon^[*] [E⁴ ], Heihachi [E⁵ ], and, among the officials, toward Tadasuke [kumi head; 9.1 of table 5; the other two kumi heads were mentioned as guilty in the first half of the petition]. As for the people of the. village who did not show up here today, I do not need their monetary contribution for the service. I have nothing else to say. As stated above.

1757/8 Ken (seal)
[To: ] The village headman
The officials^[70]

Thus Ken had devised a number of rather extraordinary memorial events—perhaps commensurate in her eyes to the crime to be expiated—in order that the descendants of her brother's murderers might not suffer divine retribution. She hints at supernatural retribution and vents her resentment but is also determined and resourceful to overcome a difficulty she, as a woman, might encounter in executing her plan. Ken would take charge of it all and collect monetary contributions from everyone, but she wanted these only if people were convinced that the murder had been a mistake and were ready to apologize for it in writing. She appealed to everyone's conscience. She wanted a verdict from a tribunal less than she wanted an apology from everyone. That, however, she would not get.

For all those involved in Shinzo's^[*] murder, the deed of disinheritance had wrapped up the case. On 9/21, accused of false testimony concerning her lack of knowledge of the disinheritance, Ken was "entrusted" to her kumi; that is, she was restricted in her comings and goings and put under surveillance. A month later, on 10/26, she was summoned before the Shimogata authorities again and told that her suit was an "unspeakably impudent petition (iwarezaru daitan naru negai )" that on principle ought to be investigated. Instead, she was told, in the condescending voice of paternalistic authority, "you are forgiven because you are a woman [but] will be ordered house confinement because of your offense."

When the village officials received this order, they used it to restore

[70] This second half of Ken's petition is to be found only in Ozaki, "Kenjo oboegaki," 93-94.

"peace" in the village. Through the priest of her family temple, they promised Ken that they would not enforce the house arrest order if she reconciled herself with her relatives, that is, if she stopped harassing them—a second put-down, turning the victim into the cause of the trouble. This new proposal made Ken furious, and at first she resisted it forcefully. Finally, perhaps recognizing that it would be futile to further resist her relatives and the whole village, backed as they were by bakufu authority, Ken stated her intention to comply with their demands.

The failure to obtain an apology or win her lawsuit had not broken Ken's spirit. The trouble arising from her refusal to affix her seal to the population register in 1763 proves this. That year, it so happened, was the twenty-third anniversary (according to Japanese reckoning) of Shinzo's^[*] death, something that must not have escaped Ken. (Individual dead are memorialized with more than the annual rites at special anniversaries—the seventh, eleventh, thirteenth, and twenty-third.) This time Ken did not accuse her relatives or the village of wrongdoing, but pleaded hardship in having to work the fields, pay tribute, and perform corvée. She asked for understanding for her plight and proposed a solution, namely, that the fields she was supposed to work be removed from the tax register and commended to her temple and that she leave the village. In fact, Ken's solution was another expression of her total rejection of her relatives and her village, no doubt prompted by her unwillingness to accept their denial of any wrongdoing in her brother's murder.

In this she resisted, of course, the solution proposed by the village authorities, namely, to provide for an heir. This threw them into confusion once again, but they could not let a woman who had caused them so much trouble have her own way. The two sides were at an impasse again. The village wanted a successor to Ken's house and therefore did not want to let her go, so that the land would remain in the village. She did not want to stay, nor did she want her land to go to anyone in the village. There seems to have been more behind village officials' insistence that she establish an heir (part of a new agreement Ken signed, in which she also promised to continue as a peasant and keep the peace) than, as Ozaki surmises, a desire to comply with overlord law not to let peasant houses die out. Ken was not even a titled peasant; her holding was tiny, and many families could have used more land.

What came of this promise? Twenty years later, according to Maki-

buse's population register of 1782, Ken was still living alone. She also appears on the tax register of 1792 as a tribute payer. She still had not complied with the wishes of the authorities. Ken's tombstone, next to her mother's and Shinzo's^[*] , perhaps erected by her lineage in fear of their avenging spirits, records the date of her death as 1795/1/8. She lived alone in Makibuse until she was seventy-six. One can only imagine what her life must have been like during those last thirty years. The best way to describe it, leaving room for the imagination, is the way her life under Gendayu^[*] was described: fuwa , without harmony.

Conclusion

Through the story of Ken we have made the acquaintance, in unusually vivid detail, of a peasant woman and some salient events in her life. Ken's life and that of her family were tied to a past of increased economic hardship, which many others shared. It also unfolded in a wide geographic setting beyond the village, reaching all the way to Edo. There her father and brother hoped to accumulate savings to alleviate the family's plight, and there Ken thought she might eventually find justice. Ken was a stubborn and strong woman who followed her own conscience (see the several instances of kono kata no zonji yori ni in her petition). Her sense of justice was reflected in a trail of documents recording a series of confrontations with authority at various levels: her husband, her relatives as a lineage and as a neighborhood kumi, the village officials, the headman, and shogunal representatives.

Ken's sense of justice clashed with the authorities' concern for order. With a firm grasp of the system of governance, geared toward the maintenance of order, Ken succeeded more than once in strategically subverting it to pursue what she judged to be just. She manipulated two of her marriages this way. Although illiterate, she produced an important document, in format a petition for a memorial service, in reality a demand for justice in the form of an apology from the village authorities, in effect a lawsuit against them for murder. She knew how to gain a public voice to lodge this suit and how to embarrass the headman and her kumi. She threatened to wield the symbolic weapons provided by religion and by the courts to find retribution and justice from two faraway centers that she must have imagined as detached from the nasty world she experienced: Zenkoji^[*] , a nonsectarian Buddhist pilgrim center

Plate 2.
Ken's Tomb. Left to right : the tombstones of Ken, her mother, and
Shinzo^[*] . Photograph by author.

and also a transit point for the souls of the recently deceased; and Edo, a political center where powers and authorities converged and to some degree lost their local character.

Ultimately, this match between a woman seeking justice and a system seeking "harmony" was uneven. Authority was not to bend to law, and law was not to bow to reason, according to a Tokugawa saying. In practice, therefore, authorities did not issue public apologies, because only subjects could be in the wrong. Ken, who thought justice might be a concern of the shogunal authorities, found that they functioned with the same logic as her village superiors. Once she publicly forced the issue of an apology, the two levels of authority, intra- and extravillage, formed a common front. Then Ken's resistance turned passive. Within the village that became her prison, she kept control over her property and her life until the end of her days by not adopting an heir or a husband as her superiors would have had her do.

Power in a village, as we see it used by both sides in Ken's story, is social power that is steeped in public, official power. One's relatives and lineage provide an immediate social framework that has at the same

time a public character, because it overlaps with the official neighborhood system and its internal hierarchy of main and branch houses, which takes on an official dimension by the distinction between titled and nontitled peasant households. In addition, the manipulation of power at the village level has wider dimensions because of the strategic possibilities offered by the intersection of intra- and extravillage authorities. Here we can mention the attempts by the village authorities to prevent the petition/suit from leaving the village; the threats by Ken either not to appear before the extramural authorities (in the registration incident) or to bring her suit to them (in the murder case); the collusion between the intramural and extramural authorities with regard to the investigation of the murder; and the pressure on the part of the village authorities to extort promises by granting suspension of a punishment (house confinement) decided beyond the village.

Because Ken was a woman, her interactions with village authorities and the expectations she confronted must have been those of patriarchal power. Yet, in apparent control of her three marriages, firm and outspoken in her confrontations with her kumi members and village officials, and countering the headman's threats with some of her own, Ken flaunted those expectations. When the officials finally dug in their heels, denying Ken her request to leave the village and transfer her land to a temple, they put her in her place as a woman , which was to secure males (a husband or an heir) on the land to produce tribute. Ken, however, was equally firm in sticking to her earlier warning: "There is no need to come and speak about this to me again."

Ken must have been scolded often by her relatives and superiors. One clear instance was when the Shimogata authorities told Ken that she was not given the full punishment she deserved for her "unspeakably impudent" suit because she was a woman. Here condescendence yields, by way of scolding, the double profit of a feigned compassion and understanding and a real punishment. Scolding is perhaps the first means to activate explicitly when threatened, the (usually unformulated) power of doxa or common sense, which as it is used here is that of gender-asymmetrical propriety.

In all moves made by parties in the power field encompassing both village and supravillage authorities, written documentation played a crucial role. Conflicts and disputes revolved around, and were ultimately resolved by, the creation of legally recognized documents; for example, in the case of the headman's diary, the record of steps taken by him

could eventually be used in court. The following instances of the crucial role of documentation come to mind: the ability to write petitions in proper form; the manipulation of population records; the importance of written and certified disinheritance documents that were forwarded beyond the village; a petition for a memorial service that could not be suppressed because it contained a charge of murder; the many occasions where written promises were exacted (to not drink sake, to establish an heir, to move in with a new husband in another village, to live in harmony, to work the fields, etc.). Documents were indispensable for regulating conduct within the village. Village life was highly legalistic and formalized, a far cry from a Gemeinschaft governed by informal understandings, where the spoken word is binding.

Moreover, intervillage linkages of various kinds played an important role in defining networks that could be exploited for a number of purposes. Not only was Makibuse exogamous to a very high degree but some of its inhabitants spent long periods of time working outside the village. Its position on a major highway made Edo appear available and within reach to the villagers and must have increased the flow of information that could be put to use in various ways. Villages were less isolated than often imagined.

The question of village autonomy has been debated back and forth by Japanese historians, most of whom choose either to defend it or to deny that it had any substance. The Tokugawa political landscape, being neither homogeneous (which would make the village insubstantial) nor divided into two heteronomous spheres (which would disregard the grave imbalance of power between villages and lords), is perhaps best visualized as two fields of power that created at their intersection a space for manipulation from either side.

2
Class Politics

Privileges associated with past status are acknowledged, but times have changed.
Bannerman to village headman, 1650s

Class and status are introduced in two separate chapters in this book. The distinction between the two, however, hard to justify even analytically, should certainly not be taken as an objective separation, as the epitaph on status in this chapter on class suggests. It is merely a question of emphasis, of foregrounding one against the other. The simultaneous economic and political decline of Ken's line in Makibuse illustrates how inextricably related the two could be in Tokugawa village life. Yet status obviously is not a mere reflection of class: some of Ken's neighbors, although impoverished, were able to hold on to the status of titled peasant and the political power that came with the title. That micro narrative was firmly anchored locally, venturing only occasionally beyond the confines of the village. In this chapter the analysis moves inward toward the village from the wider class and power configurations that were shaping society mainly in the first half of the Tokugawa period.

A cardinal feature of Tokugawa society was the concentration of the new warrior rulers in urban centers, separated from the land and the people they had conquered in the last decades of the sixteenth century. The rulers' self-enforced spatial separation from the fruits of their conquest, which resulted in domination from a distance, made particularly acute the need for reliable, quantifiable data for the full exploitation of their new sources of revenue. Thus, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the land was measured and the people on it

Epigraph: Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki, "Kinsei shoki no nomin^[*] toso^[*] ," 53.

counted. This created two new public and universal (because divisible and exchangeable) values: land aggregates and populations. As value and data, the former had existed before, although in a different form, that is, less comprehensive and not measured in the equivalent of bushels of rice. Population data, however, were altogether new. In Tokugawa Japan everyone was to be accounted for.

The smallest unit for the collation, circulation, and exploitation of these values was the village as it emerged from the turmoil of a century of warfare. Further military conquests having become impossible, the victors turned their full attention to tribute, exacted now by decree rather than by the sword. The new rulers were not particularly interested in remote village affairs per se and, indeed, did not interfere beyond taking the minimal steps necessary to extract tribute and corvée.

This broad picture conveys the impression of an incorporation or cooptation of villages into the Tokugawa power structure with a minimal impact on them except for the new tribute system. In the past, agricultural surplus had flowed out of the villages in a number of different directions. Now it went only to a single class of beneficiaries. Such an interpretation is reminiscent of the conventional view of Tokugawa ideology, which assumes the appropriation of a ready-made doctrine, neo-Confucianism, that was just "waiting in the wings" to be mobilized for legitimating purposes by the new regime. Until recently, the Tokugawa village was also presumed to have been "already there," available for outside political exploitation. Scholarly historiographical exploitation in turn consisted in writing about this entity within a framework that, like that of the rulers, assumed stability.

More recently, however, historians have amended this view of the socalled Tokugawa village as a "natural community" typified by "village-level" tribute exaction, "consensual" decision making, and "autonomous" self-governance; they have historicized these qualifiers. This village, or more precisely, perhaps, because it is more image than anything else, the social reality that (mis)informed the above image, took six to twelve Tokugawa decades, depending on the region, to develop, and once established it continued to change, in unforeseen ways. In other words, the "Tokugawa village" (mura ) should not be conceived of as a stable entity, but as an ever-changing Tokugawa village practice, a practice driven by external and internal forces that were closely interrelated. A projection backward (and forward) has often informed the discourse, often structural, about the Tokugawa village: the outcome

of a long development during the Tokugawa period was assumed to have been there from the beginning (and to have remained throughout).

According to the perspective adopted here, one does not confront an entity only to record its history. Instead, one traces its genesis, which never ends, because, strictly speaking, time never produces lasting entities; they are produced only by administrative records, and the historians who read them, who often wind up in abstractions that relate only vaguely to practice.^[1] Concretely this means that a "village" in the early seventeenth century, economically self-sufficient and consisting predominantly of, and ruled by, a few extended families, had little in common besides its name with the form it took two hundred and fifty years later, when it consisted predominantly of numerous small, often impoverished families tied into a wide regional administrative network and a national economy.

Of course, change has not been totally absent from historical discourse on Tokugawa village society. The changes that have been identified, however, have been mostly economic, generated by a commercial economy that developed during the eighteenth century. From this perspective, the village has been viewed as a stable social formation, and change as externally generated, economic in nature, and historically late rather than internal, political, and ongoing.

Historians and other scholars who look into the past who profess an interest in change often wind up missing it in their analyses. I have discussed this problem at some length with regard to Tokugawa ideology, arguing that many students fell victim to both that ideology itself and their own presumption that there is a universal need for all societies to have an ideology formulated as a doctrine.^[2] What, then, one may ask, blurred historians' vision so often and for so long when they looked at Tokugawa villages, especially of the first half of the period? Why has

[1] These reflections on writing a history versus tracing a genesis are inspired by Michel Foucault's "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," in Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Interviews and Essays , ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139-64; and by Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 256-62.

[2] See my Tokugawa Ideology , as well as my "Neo-Confucianism and the Formation of Early Tokugawa Ideology: Contours of a Problem," in Confucianism and Tokugawa Culture , ed. Peter Nosco (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 27-61.

the myth of stable, undiversified, harmonious Tokugawa rural communities persisted for so long?

Diversifying the Picture of Early Tokugawa Rural Society

Some of the reasons are the same as the general reasons why "popular history" did not gain academic legitimacy until the 1960s. In a sense, while Japanese historians discussed at great length "the Tokugawa village," they did not see (into) the villages, because "real" history presumably was happening elsewhere.

In the West, Thomas C. Smith more than any other historian has been sensitive to the divisions and tensions (mainly, but not exclusively, economic ones) in seventeenth-century Japan. However, in 1958 he wrote that not much was known about the important political issue of allocating within the village "the tax bill among its individual holders."^[3] In his Agrarian Origins of Modem Japan , he elaborated further but still had only his historical and sociological imagination, which he used with great skill, to rely on because of a lack of data.^[4] Much research has taken place since the publication of Smith's classic study in 1959.

Mizumoto Kunihiko, whose lead I follow, has argued that postwar Japanese scholars remained stuck until the 1970s in the historiographical consequences of a Marxist structuralist interpretation of the rural policy that Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536-98) established and the early Tokugawa bakufu continued.^[5] This policy would have succeeded in dividing larger clan holdings into independent smaller ones.

[3] Thomas C. Smith, "The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period," in Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan , ed. John Whitney Hall and Marius Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 284, reprinted from Journal of Asian Studies 18 (1958): 1.

[4] Thomas C. Smith, "Political Conflict in the Village," in his Agrarian Origins , 181-83. Most of that chapter, however, focuses on the last century of the Tokugawa period, especially on conflicts centered on miyaza , or shrine associations, which were most prevalent in the Kinai region.

[5] Mizumoto Kunihiko, "Bakuhansei kozoron^[*] kenkyu^[*] no saikento^[*] —Asao, Sasaki-shi no shigoto o sozai hi," Atarashii rekishigaku no tame ni (Minka Kyoto shibu rekishibukai kikanshi) 131 (1973): 13-23. For a full historio-graphical survey, consult Kodama Kota^[*] , Nagahara Keiji, et al, eds., Kinsei , Nihon rekishi taikei, 3 (Yamakawa shuppan, 1988), 385-407 (hereafter NRT 3). Mizumoto presents his argument in the form of a critical assessment of Asao Naohiro and Sasaki Junnosuke's work, but his critique reaches beyond them to Araki Moriaki, Miyagawa Mitsuru, and even the prewar scholarship of Furushima Toshio: Asao Naohiro, Kinsei hoken^[*]shakai no kiso kozo^[*] (Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1967); Sasaki Junnosuke, "Kinsei noson^[*] no seiritsu," Iwanami koza^[*]Nihon rekishi: Kinsei (2) (Iwanami shoten, 1963), 165-221; Araki Moriaki, Bakuhan taisei shakai no seiritsu to kozo^[*] (Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1959); Miyagawa Mitsuru, Taiko^[*]kenchiron , 3 vols. (Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1959-63); Furushima Toshio, Nihon hoken^[*]nogyoshi^[*] (Shikai shobo^[*] , 1941). Many of these and other scholars formulated their interpretations of Tokugawa village society in essentialist Leninist terms, periodizing societies according to their dominant socioeconomic formation as determined by their particular mode of production. Lenin, in his Development of Russian Capitalism , used the Russian term uklad (literally, "structure") to refer to such socioeconomic formations. Many Japanese historians made a fetish of the term, using it as an explanatory device that obviated any need for further analysis. On the uklad theory, see also Mizumoto Kunihiko, "Bakuhanseika no nomin^[*] keizai," Nihon keizaishi o manabu: 2. Kinsei (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1982), 66-70. A handy summary of the debate can be found under "ukurado^[*] " in KDJ 2:56. According to this entry, the locus classicus is in Lenin's 1921 paper "On the Food Tax" and his earlier Development of Capitalism in Russia . Thus, the specific Tokugawa uklad was from the beginning one of independent, small landholders, created by Hideyoshi's national land survey, which presumably had the effect of a land reform. Asao and Sasaki later added a second uklad—of the extended patriarchal family—attaching differential values to the two uklads by arguing that local magnates, a negative historical force, were eventually overcome through struggles of small peasants aided by the bakufu (Mizumoto, "Bakuhansei kozoron^[*] ," 14-18).

Asao Naohiro, for instance, emphasized the crucial role played by the local leadership of the so -type^[*] villages, predominant in the Kinai region, around the capital, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. So^[*] villages were autonomous corporate villages or groups of villages (of one go^[*] , a medieval administrative district, or one shoen^[*] , or medieval estate) where part of the land was commonly cultivated and full administrative, judiciary, and often penal powers (including the death penalty) were held by an oligarchy of prominent peasants.^[6] The overlords subcontracted many of these corporate villages via their elite as official units responsible for the total tribute due from their territory. This for-

[6] An excellent brief summary of the history and operation of corporate villages can be found in KDJ, s.v. "soson" (8:565-65); see also the entries "jigeuke" (6:721), "sosho^[*] " (8:549), and "gosonsei^[*] " (5:424-25). For a case study of the most well-known so^[*] village (because best documented), see Tonomura Hitomi, Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan: The Corporate Villages of Tokuchin-ho (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). On jigeuke, see also Fujiki Hisashi, "Ikoki^[*] sonrakuron," in Nihon chuseishi^[*]kenkyu^[*]no kiseki , ed. Nagahara Keiji et al. (Tokyo^[*] Daigaku shuppan, 1988), 208-10.

mula of collecting tribute, then called jigeuke (perhaps best rendered as "land receivership"), was quite similar to the subsequent Tokugawa bakufu's policy of murauke ("village receivership"). The bakufu, Asao argued, was able to win this "corporate elite" to its own side and use it as the backbone of its local structure of domination. Thus, it would have been wealthy rather than small peasants who enjoyed bakufu support.

For Sasaki Junnosuke, the mura, or village, was a Tokugawa creation, headed by both the janus figure of the headman, or shoya^[*] (the link between village and supravillage authority), and village officials. Under a general rubric of establishing small, independent landholders, the bakufu would have implemented a differentiated policy toward local leaders, displacing some and supporting others. Sasaki's view was based on his interpretation of late Tokugawa ikki , or uprisings in which villages acted as a whole. He then applied this image of unified communities of small landholders fighting overlords in his discussion of the early period.

Mizumoto's critique is based upon a careful examination of early Tokugawa so^[*] village disturbances in the Kinai region. Small landholders did not confront rural magnates, nor did solitary villages confront their overlords. Rather, these peasant struggles were against the arbitrary rule of their own village leaders, struggles unrelated to official land policies.^[7]

The thesis of the bakufu's promotion of independent small landholders was based on an examination of land surveys and laws around the turn of the seventeenth century. Dissenting scholars, however, pointed out that the titled peasants officially established through these surveys were, regardless of size, yakuya , or corvée houses, selected by overlords to deliver village quotas of tribute and corvée (yaku ),^[8] a responsibility that also, because it was not shared by all villagers, functioned as a mark of local distinction and privilege. These titled peasants invariably not only controlled land but also had homesteads (yashiki ) and were often land magnates and local bosses, sometimes with a semiwarrior background, in other words, the village economic elite.^[9] Thus, the social picture of early Tokugawa rural Japan consisted of registered

[7] Mizumoto, "Bakuhansei kozoron^[*] ," 18-21.

[8] Mizumoto, "Bakuhanseika no nomin^[*] keizai," 65.

[9] Ibid., 63-64.

peasants/households, of whom some were singled out as accountable for tribute and others were not burdened with that responsibility. The former were "titled peasants" (not to be understood in the restrictive sense of title to land); the latter, although without homestead (muya-shiki ), often had some direct claim or perhaps merely a relationship of usufruct to land that was entered under their name.^[10] The picture was further complicated by the fact that some of the titled units were large extended families, while others were small households.

Mirco Struggles I: Headmen, Elders, and Small Peasants in Corporate Villages (So^[*] )

Mizumoto's discovery of internal tensions within early Tokugawa villages stimulated a reevaluation of the character of the kyodotai^[*] , or community, which historians assumed had been coopted by the new rulers. It was generally accepted that this incorporation had been achieved by the policy of extracting tribute on a village basis (murauke), the village being understood unproblematically as a "natural" community, its perimeters and internal compostion reflected in the land and population surveys from around the turn of the seventeenth century. Yet these so-called villages (mura) that served as units of tribute exaction were not infrequently artificially established territorial units created by the surveys, and not preexisting functioning communities (kyodotai^[*] ) merely recorded by them.^[11]

The village cadasters did not include land residents held outside the village but did list the names and fields of nonresident landowners.^[12] Some cadaster "villages," therefore, actually counted more outsiders than insiders. In Higashi-Tenkawa village, Settsu province (Hyogo^[*] prefecture), for instance, insiders (89) were outnumbered by outsiders (133), residents in ten different villages.^[13] At the time of the land surveys some communities were split up into several villages, some regrouped with neighboring ones to form a new unit based on the medi-

[10] Naito^[*] Jiro^[*] has stressed this point throughout his Honbyakusho^[*]taisei no kenkyu^[*] (Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1968); see, e.g., 28, 66, 178-79, 258-61, and 293.

[11] Mizumoto drew new attention to this problematic in Mura shakai , pt. 2, chap. 2.

[12] Mizumoto, "Bakuhanseika no nomin^[*] keizai," 76-77.

[13] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 145.

eval go^[*] , others simply moved to make room for castles, and many villages were brand-new, created on newly developed land (shinden mura ) or as way stations on the highways.^[14] These administrative interventions often triggered various forms of resistance, protest, and local maneuvering, if not to undo them, then at least to mitigate some of their negative consequences.^[15]

Mizumoto's analysis of early Tokugawa disturbances in corporate villages of the Kinai problematizes the notion of these "natural communities."^[16] "Early Tokugawa" has a very specific meaning here, referring to the decades between 1600 and the 1680s, a period further divided at the 1640s. Compared with the well-known peasant revolts of the mid and late Tokugawa, these early Tokugawa disturbances were distinguished by two characteristics. First, there were relatively few ikki, or large-scale uprisings, and they were almost all village affairs. Second, although similar to later intramural (or intra-mura) suits against abuses by village authorities concerning the calculation and allocation of tribute and corvée or their exemption thereof, the class identity of plaintiffs and defendants changed over time, roughly, in the 1640s and again in the 1680s. Before the 1640s, suits and petitions were signed only by the village elite, peasants who were from the same economic class as the headman but who directed their litigation at him. After the 1640s the suits targeted, besides the headman, that same elite, which now had gained power in village governance; the litigants now came from a new class of well-established landholders. Toward the end of the century the plaintiffs were predominantly peasants with very small holdings.^[17]

[14] For examples of split villages, see ibid., 139; for examples of several villages collapsed into one, see ibid., 146, and Mizubayashi Takeshi, Hokensei^[*]no saihen to Nihonteki shakai no kakuritsu , Nihon tsushi^[*] , 2 (Kinsei) (Yama-kawa shuppansha, 1987), 136; for villages displaced for the building of Komoro castle in Kita-Saku district, Shinano, see NAK-T 4:188; for shinden mura in the same area, see Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , Kinsei sonraku no kozo^[*] , chap. 3; for a recent work on such villages in the Kanto^[*] plain, see the first two articles under the heading "Shinden kaihatsu to minshu^[*] ishiki" in Chihoshi^[*] kenkyu^[*] kyogikai^[*] , ed., "Kaihatsu" to chiiki minshu^[*] : sono rekishizo^[*]o motomete (Yuzankaku^[*] , 1991), 137-94.

[15] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 137-90.

[16] Mizumoto, "Murakata sodo^[*] ," 289-307; idem, Mura shakai , chaps. I and 3.

[17] Mizumoto, "Murakata sodo^[*] ," 289-94; idem, Mura shakai , 7-17.

The predominant complaint in pre-1640s suits of corporate villages was about the arbitrary exercise of power by headmen, who made important decisions without consulting the sobyakusho^[*] ("all the peasants"). The inclusive nature of this formula is misleading, for it referred, not to all villagers, but only to the village elite and often to the core of that elite, the toshiyori , or elders. In pre-Tokugawa times that elite was not ruled by someone with special powers like those of a headman.^[18] It is important to keep in mind that in these early decades of the seventeenth century the "elders" were not village officials in the eyes of the overlords, even though they continued to play traditional, key roles in community and intervillage disputes.^[19] Headmen were established by the superordinate extramural (or extra-mura) powers in the 1590s and were picked from the ranks of the village elite. Thus, this elite came to direct its early suits against the member from its own circle who had been elevated to hold the new office of headman.

In the late 1640s, however, the character of these village disturbances changed in two ways: (1) the former plaintiffs were now made the targets of legal suits; and (2) these lawsuits became an integral part of efforts to shift the village basis of privilege and political power from pedigreed houses of tided peasants to households that were holders of taka , or tribute land. This new class of plaintiffs identified themselves no longer as so-byakusho^[*] , "all peasants," but as ko-byakusho^[*] , "small peasants"^[20] (a term I shall elucidate later; for now, let us stay with the defendants).

The complaints voiced by these "small peasants" concerned village heads and elders, who came to be officially incorporated into the structure of village governance around that time. On the yearly tribute rosters overlords sent to villages, they now appeared as a special category of addressees (besides the headman and "all the peasants") because they filled the new village offices of kumigashira , or kumi heads (of the five-household neighborhood groups created by the bakufu).^[21]

[18] Fujiki Hisashi disagrees with Mizumoto on this point and stresses a continuity of headmen from pre-Tokugawa to Tokugawa times in his "Ikoki^[*] sonrakuron," 208.

[19] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 19; see also Miyajima Keiichi, "Kinsei nomin^[*] shihai no seiritsu ni tsuite: 1. Chusei^[*] zaichiho^[*] no 'hitei' to 'naizai,'" Chihoshi^[*]kenkyu^[*] , no. 171 (1981), 1-11.

[20] Mizumoto, "Murakata," 297; idem, Mura shakai , 7, 20-22.

[21] Ibid., Mura shakai , 20.

The development of this institution clearly illustrates the transference of military organizational formulae to civil rule. In 1597 Hideyoshi introduced five- and ten-man units in his army to better check internal discipline. Tokugawa Ieyasu (1542-1616) used the idea to bring order to Kyoto in 1603, and his successor introduced the system in all bakufu territories. The five-household groups were adopted nationwide in the mid 1630s in order to establish multipurpose subvillage administrative units, which created new village power holders besides the village headman.^[22] This tightening of control within the village via a paramilitary institution has usually been understood as part of the bakufu's strategy against hidden Christians and troublesome ronin^[*] (masterless samurai). In light of Mizumoto's argument, however, other pressures were probably at work as well, because the creation of these political offices signaled a victory by the old elite over a former equal, the headman.

The overlords thus modified the intravillage power distribution in two significant ways. First, they undermined the traditional elite's oligarchic rule in corporate villages in matters of intravillage tribute and corvée allocation by appointing a headman. Then the overlords broke the headman's monopolistic power through the establishment of kumi heads. By specifying the elders' duties and prerogatives as kumi heads, the bakufu restored them to the political prominence they had all along believed to be rightfully theirs. Thus the power base in the village was broadened, even though the majority of the peasants were still left out.

This analysis modifies the standard picture of the relationship between village and state in the Kinai in important ways. Villages were not ready-made units that were simply subsumed by the new state structures. To a certain extent they were the creations of the warrior rulers, and not only because the surveys officially certified village borders. Yet these villages were not made once and for all either. They developed in ways unanticipated by their creators, because they constituted differential power fields whose members reacted to the new superordinate powers and forced those powers in turn to react to them.

Moreover, during the latter half of the seventeenth century village disputes in the Kinai region were political maneuvers by landholders for formal recognition as fully vested village members on a par with

[22] For a brief sketch of this history of the goningumi, see KDJ 5:936, and Kodansha Encyclopedia of Japan , 9 vols. (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1983), 3:45.

the titled peasants. As mentioned above, cadaster entries did not differentiate between peasants who held titles to land and others who did not, but between peasants with and without homesteads. The disputes of the second half of the century were new to the extent that they included attempts (with various degrees of success) by peasants, increasingly the small landowners, to shift the village political and status order from one based on privilege attached to some households (originally "homeowners") to one based on taka holding. I shall postpone the question why the new class of peasants could not simply argue that many of them now also had homesteads.

What were taka holders? Taka means "amount" and stands for kokudaka , "(rice) yield (measured) in koku," koku being equivalent to 4.96 bushels or 180 liters. Kokudaka refers, however, to assessed rather than actual yield. It was the official crop index, recorded in cadasters and yearly tax rosters and used to determine the yearly tribute (nengu ). This index was calculated by assessing the grade of the arable (superior, medium, inferior; sometimes there were as many as thirteen grades)^[23] and multiplying the assessed yield per square measure (e.g., per acre) by the actual size of the field. Dry fields and even the size of homesteads were also converted into koku equivalent. A taka holder was thus a peasant whose name was associated with some field listed on the cadasters, or more often, since few new surveys were made after the first ones, with some portion of the village tribute or corvée on the yearly tax registers. Thus, tenants without land of their own were not registered as taka holders, but their landlords were. It is of some importance to note that while taka has a close relation to plot size, it was not identical to it. The taka value—tribute or official value, which of course affected market value—of two plots equal in size differed if one plot had a higher assessed value than the other.

Village burdens could be allocated in a number of ways, depending on which constituent unit of the village—adults, households, "titled peasants," the taka value of holdings—was the basis of computation. The drive in the second half of the seventeenth century was for taka holders to be treated as titled peasants. More precisely, it was an attempt by newly established taka-holding households to join the ranks of the traditional "titled peasant" households, a struggle by a new class

[23] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 287.

and generation of peasants for fuller recognition by the old one. Implicit in this drive was the logic of the convertibility of economic power into political clout. The old guard's political importance was based on economic wealth; now, new landholders wanted the same for themselves.

The earliest recorded attempt, dating from 1649-51 in Kami-Kawarabayashi village, Settsu province, was not initiated by economically small holders (the number of similar disputes increased rapidly thereafter, peaking in the 1680s, when disputes clearly were led by members of the small peasantry).^[24] This early request to distribute various yaku (corvée and other burdens) per assessed yield (see table 7) was one among a number of complaints against abuses by the headman and the elder. The socioeconomic status of the two men accused (Y and Z) and of the fourteen plaintiffs (A-N) within the village can be judged by the size of their individual holdings (kokudaka) and their ranking among the fifty-five taka holders of the village (all except L, an unclear case, owned houses).^[25] Some of the peasants also held land in the neighboring village of Shimo-Kawarabayashi (see table 8).^[26]

The plaintiffs were predominantly middle-ranking taka holders, A and B being exceptions as they rank even higher than the elder (Z) in terms of holdings and servants (the elder had no servants, while A had four), and the plaintiffs were all titled peasants. One may wonder why this drive for expanded political participation was led by titled peasants, who already held a monopoly on matters of village governance. Were they eager to share their power? Only twenty-one of the fifty-five taka holders were registered as tided peasants (here called honyakunin ), and three more were listed as half-titled peasants (hanyakunin ), and the request by about one-third of the titled peasants was to turn all taka holders into tided peasants. We do not know whether this request was ultimately granted, but in the 1670s L was listed as a titled peasant.

[24] Ibid., 69-70.

[25] Ibid., 72.

[26] Peasants often held land in neighboring villages; thus, some of the involved parties's names also show up on Shimo-Kawarabayashi's tax roster. I recomputed and added data on the basis of the 1655 cadaster of Shimo-Kawarabayashi, in Nishinomiya-shi shi , vol. 4, Shiryo-hen^[*] , pt. 1 (Nishinomiya: Nishinomiya shiyakusho, 1962), 496-97. Kami-Kawarabayashi's cadaster can be found on 494-95, its population register of 1659 on 620-32. If we assume that some identical names on the two rosters refer to the same persons, Y of table 7 would have held an additional 9.2 koku in Shimo-Kawarabayashi; C, 4.6; H, 7.5; and K, 16.6.

To answer the question why titled peasants might agitate to have their ranks opened to others, it is important to draw a distinction that may seem odd at first. In Tokugawa Japan, being accountable for tribute was not the same as contributing to it. Prior to these requests, the burden and privilege of public accountability for yaku (mainly tribute rice but also buyaku , corvée) was limited to "corvée households" (rifled peasants). This title, as mentioned above, did not identify taka holders: although all villagers with some taka shared or contributed to the tax burden, only the tided peasants were accountable for it in the eyes of the overlords. This distinction simplified tribute extraction for the

overlords because it limited responsibility for it to the prominent villagers—a simplification of social space and also of social time, since it made no provisions for changes in village demographics.

When siblings or other dependents of titled peasants were established in separate quarters on a land parcel or when household heads retired on a separate plot, inkyo bunke (Kami-Kawarabayashi counted thirteen such cases in 1649, L being one of them), these branch houses did not automatically become titled peasants. The drive for taka-based access to the status of titled peasant was the result of the proliferation of new landholders. They shouldered tribute and corvée burdens without sharing the political privilege attached to the title. Given the large number of branch houses established by retiring titled peasants in Kami-Kawarabayashi—thirteen—the attempt to give these new households full political status as titled peasants may have been part of a strategy to increase the power of expanding lineages. It is important to remember that this is the first occurrence of such protest found to date and that it is somewhat unusual in that the initiative came from titled peasants. The number of such petitions, however, increased dramatically in the 1670s, when nontitled taka holders initiated them.

These petitions for entitlement, when granted, often signaled the end of the traditional miyaza in corporate villages, where a limited number

of "shrine families" had succeeded in hanging on to their religiopolitical monopoly. Originally, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, within the framework of corporate villages of a district or estate, the elders not only were secular leaders but also monopolized ceremonial life through the Shinto shrine associations, or miyaza. In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, other peasants came to function as liturgical celebrants (kannushi ) within the individual villages that emerged after the dissolution of the larger corporate units.^[27] It should be noted, however, that miyaza continued to function as exclusive political clubs in a great many villages in the Kinai.

The Kawarabayashi area offers an example of such a dissolution of miyaza-based power. Its Hino shrine originally venerated the dominion lord Kawarabayashi as the ujigami , or tutelary deity. In the early 1600s he remained the patron god of only three villages, including the two Kawarabayashi's, and in the second half of the seventeenth century his sacred jurisdiction shrunk even further, comprising only Kami-Kawarabayashi and its branch village of new fields, Goroemonshinden^[*] . Ceremonial control was now in the hands of three families in the village. Toward the end of the century even they lost their status because villagers took turns presiding over religious ceremonies.^[28]

Initially, as already mentioned, these struggles were led by traditional titled peasants against the headmen and the elders. They were followed in midcentury by demands from a different sector of the village population, namely, small taka holders who were not titled peasants. Although their motive may have been political, their professed aim was survival. They argued that their share of village expenses was disproportionately high since these were divided equally per household rather than calibrated according to holding size (taka).^[29] As can be seen in table 7, many of the taka holders in Kami-Kawarabayashi were dangerously close to having no taka at all.

Around 1700, plaintiffs explicitly incorporated in their petitions the "landless" peasants (mudaka , "without taka, " or mizunomibyakusho^[*] , "water-drinking peasants"). These terms, like "titled peasant," should

[27] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 32-35.

[28] Ibid., 223-24. Mizumoto presents another case where the struggle against entrenched religiopolitical power was waged at this level: Tateishi, in Yoshino district, Yamato province, in 1677-79 (Mura shakai , 74-74).

[29] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 76-80.

not always be taken literally, for many mizunomi peasants had some, if little, land of their own. In other words, they were not necessarily pure tenants. These suits were now directed explicitly not only against headmen and elders but also against great taka holders (otakamochi^[*] ).^[30] These plaintiffs perceived themselves as virtually landless and made common cause with those who actually were.

Various class fractions of the peasantry realigned themselves thus in their attempts to participate fully in decisions that touched their lives. Before the 1640s it was the traditional elite against headmen. In the second half of the century old titled peasants challenged headmen and elders. Then, in the 1670s all taka holders pressured the village leadership for widening decision-making participation. And finally, around 1700 the marginal peasants made common cause with the "landless" ones. At this last juncture, however, the argument changed because landless peasants could not be incorporated on the basis of their taka. They pleaded for corvée to again be computed per household rather than per taka.

This last point is hard to explain, as Mizumoto admits, because the request seems to work to the economic disadvantage of the poorer peasants.^[31] Landless homeowners would be tax-exempt in a system where corvée and tribute were based on land holding but not in a system based on home ownership. This leaves one hypothesis, namely, that the poor peasants stood to gain politically from being recategorized closer to the status of full-fledged village members. It is important to note that the system they wanted, based on household, or ie , was different from that of the early Tokugawa period, because now it would include all households, not just a privileged few.

This drive did not succeed. As we shall see in chapter 3, political membership did not open up. On the other hand, many compromise solutions were reached in which burdens were computed in part on the basis of holding size, in part on the number of households. At the level of consciousness, however, things did change, as Mizumoto argues in his perceptive analysis of the term kobyakusho^[*] , "small peasants."^[32] We are now in a position to clarify the uses and meanings of this term, for there are several.

[30] Ibid., 80-85.

[31] Ibid., 82.

[32] Ibid., 85-102.

In the first four decades of the Tokugawa period petitioners signed collectively as "all the peasants," a phrase that in reality referred only to the village elite, who had always spoken for "all the peasants." "Small peasants" was the identity taken by all successive categories of later plaintiffs discussed above: first the heads of "corvée households," or titled peasants, then taka holders, followed by marginal peasants, and finally marginal and landless peasants together. As time went by, the term came to include, for the people , more and more sectors of the village population, all of them politically disenfranchised, and it gradually came to include the economically less well off.

For the bakufu , however, it was a different matter. There was stability of meaning over the same period. In its documents and legislation, the bakufu (and some domains) differentiated a specific large category of "small peasants" from other villagers. The term excluded village officials, bond servants (nago and genin), handicraft workers, and outcastes and referred only to taka holders, even very small ones. Small peasants were thus tribute producers , even if they themselves did not directly pay the tribute, for example, branch houses for whose tribute patron families or lineage heads were responsible.

These discrepancies between rulers and ruled in the referents for the term "small peasants" reveal that initially the bakufu defined it more broadly (all taka holders) than the commoners (titled peasants). Subsequently, the scope of both usages converged when the plaintiffs included all taka holders beyond the titled peasants. And finally, the peasants expanded the term's meaning beyond the bakufu's to include nonholders.

In the area of village practice other than suits, Mizumoto further documents the growing importance of taka holders in village affairs. His analysis of the identity of those who affixed their seals to tax rosters and village budgets in a couple of villages in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reveals a sudden expansion of those who endorsed these documents and participated in their composition. In one case, 45 percent of all taka holders signed the budget in 1676 but eleven years later 100 percent signed. In another, all taka holders signed the tax roster in 1706, while only 85 percent had signed four years earlier and only 54 percent had done so in 1680.^[33]

[33] Ibid., 95-101.

These various developments in consciousness and practice invite comments on interpretations of class in early Tokugawa rural society. Herbert Bix has attempted to document a rising peasant class consciousness and an expanding oppositional political practice against the ruling samurai starting in the eighteenth century, when according to his analysis class became important.^[34] One weakness of his argument is that for the seventeenth century Bix worked basically with the official, legal, Tokugawa status definition of peasants and samurai and thus did not pay sufficient attention to economic and class divisions within the villages. The present analysis, however, reveals political action based on the recognition of the unbalanced relation between political and economic power, not between samurai and peasants, but within the peasantry. This configuration of practice, perception, and the reality of inequality was framed by the social and political structure established by the ruling samurai. Its setting was limited to the village, and the lines along which the confrontations took place were those that the rulers initially drew within the field of power—the village itself—lines subsequently redrawn when the population expanded.

The bakufu, as stressed earlier, was interested in villages only insofar as they were units of submissive tribute producers. Through legislation, it engaged in shaping the world of the village for that purpose. This "world-making" (to use Bourdieu's term) through legislation produced the headman, responsible for the village tribute, and titled peasants, the tribute payers.^[35] Yet as the cadasters show, the rulers were also aware that various relations to the land existed at a level below that of the titled peasants, who often leased, granted, or gave parcels of their land to dependents. It appears that the rulers decided not to deal with these messy and shifting proprietary relations and instead chose the most cost-effective way to extract tribute: they assigned responsibility for paying it to the headman and the titled peasants. At the same time, however, they wanted to make sure that all agricultural (and hence, ultimately, tribute) producers, that is, all those who held some taka in one form or another (all small peasants) were notified of their share of

[34] Herbert Bix, Peasant Protest in Japan, 1590-1884 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), xvii, 104.

[35] Pierre Bourdieu, "The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field," Hastings Law Journal 38 (1987): 837-40, 846.

the tribute burden. Thus, the bakufu also created a new class of "small peasants," because it named them as such in official documents.

The bakufu thus reinscribed existing power relationships, a move welcomed by those whose interests were thus reinforced. Responsibility for the delivery of tribute was used for internal political purposes, first by the headman, then by the headman and the official elders, and finally by the titled peasants. The others, however, whose numbers increased dramatically through the division of property (widely practiced during the seventeenth century), leveraged their status as taka holders to increase their voice in village affairs. Mizumoto even surmises that only when some internal political unity was achieved, around the turn of the eighteenth century, did villages start to agitate in unison in the larger peasant disturbances directed against supravillage domination in the eighteenth century.^[36] Be that as it may, this suggestion certainly reverses the standard picture of harmonious village communities in the early Tokugawa period, which would have begun to dissolve much later, when the peasantry fractured according to diverging class interests.^[37]

Macro Power I: The Colonial Variety

The dynamic relationship between Tokugawa villages and lordly power can be properly grasped only if one understands the specific nature of the political order established by the shogun and the daimyo. This new order was a regime of conquest like a colonial regime. Once the shogun and daimyo had taken over the country and eliminated or neutralized challengers from without (the court, religious establishments, commoner armies) as well as from within (rival daimyo or powerful vassals), they regrouped their troops in the towns and cities like a colonial army and faced the task of extracting tribute from the villages without direct use of coercive force. For this job they picked prominent natives (insiders) from among the local elite, backing them with their lordly military authority, and granted them privileges, mainly in the form of tribute exemptions. This policy created a new site of power in the villages and ample space for arbitrary local rule. The traditional elite

[36] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 101.

[37] This is discussed in chapter 3, where the views of American scholars are presented.

rebelled, wrangling a share in the power from those thus selected from among its ranks. The lords accommodated this new power distribution because it eliminated a trouble spot at the site of tribute production.

Colonial powers profoundly affect the life of villages from a distance, if only through new ways of recording them or by their contacts with inside authorities. Similarly, the massive shifts in the field of macro power beyond the village during the decades around the turn of the seventeenth century affected village practice in the corporate villages of the Kinai—and other types elsewhere as well, as we shall see. The authority of powerful, albeit absent, rulers now loomed behind the local (partly new) leadership, thereby transforming its character, limiting its authority in some respects and enlarging it in others. Moreover, absentee rulership meant the exercise of coercive force through decrees, regulations, directives—rule by law and documents—which in itself transformed the nature of village governance.

In this context, let us return for a moment to the question of the purpose and social effect of the national land surveys, which constituted the first drastic intervention in village life in the period under study. Japanese scholars are divided on this question, although perhaps less than twenty years ago.^[38] Mizubayashi Takeshi, in his brilliant synthesis

[38] American scholars have taken the following positions on this question: John Whitney Hall, in the context of a discussion of the social effect of the land surveys, shifting the focus to village government, states that the "'landlord peasant' status was in fact protected and recognized by the structure of village self-government which relied on the wealthy peasant for positions of responsibility within the village" (Government and Local Power in Japan, 500 to 1700: A Study Based on Bizen Province [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966], 321). Thomas C. Smith shares this opinion in "The Japanese Village of the Seventeenth Century," in Hall and Jansen, Studies , 265-68, 280. Mary Elizabeth Berry mentions the two sides of the controversy, allowing some room for the equalizing theory, but ultimately seems to decide that Hideyoshi's surveys were not revolutionary with respect to landholding patterns (see her Hideyoshi [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982], 118-21). Stephen Vlastos, on the other hand, speaks of "a new order in rural Japan characterized by a profound leveling of social and economic status" (Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986], 27). See also Philip C. Brown, "The Mismeasure of Land: Land Surveying in the Tokugawa Period," Monumenta Nipponica 42, no. 2 (1987): 115-55. Recently Brown has given the question the most extensive discussion available in English in his Central Authority and Local Autonomy in the Formation of Early Modem Japan: The Case of Kaga Domain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 16-19, 54-88, a book that came to my attention as this manuscript was going to the publisher.

of Tokugawa history, offers cogent reasons why the cadasters did not establish a peasantry of small landholders and were never intended for that purpose. According to Mizubayashi, the three kinds of village-based data compiled under Hideyoshi had the combined effect of sanctioning existing land holding and land management patterns of small and large households (ie ).^[39]

The most well known of the registers is the land cadaster, or kenchicho^[*] , listing plots of land, of insiders and outsiders alike, in the order that the plots lined up geographically in each village. The nayosecho^[*] , or name register, listed these plots within each village per holder household (ie). Although compiled in the village, this name register was an official document since it was used to indicate the amount of tribute owed by the village.^[40] A third register was the iekazucho^[*] (literally, "register of the number of households"). It listed by and large the same households that were recorded on the other two registers. Here, however, the purpose was to identify those households that were responsible for corvée to the overlords. These documents not only established a tribute relationship between overlord daimyo and their subjects but also linked the village population of peasants as national subjects to the "state" at large under the shogun.

This relationship of national corvée for commoners was similar to that between the warriors and the state. For the warriors the unit for performance of service was each ie, as registered in the name rosters of the vassal bands; for the peasants it was the village as a collectivity of ie, recorded in the household register, another instance of a transfer of military organization techniques to the nonmilitary sector of society. The amount of tribute, corvée, or service was determined according to the size of the land listed in the cadaster, and thus, although it was channeled through the "titled" peasants (owners of homesteads), it was also produced by the nontitled (muyashiki) peasants. Some of the latter,

[39] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 129-36. Brown (Central Authority , 75-76, 91) shares this opinion.

[40] Shimadani Yuriko makes the same argument, but her research indicates that some of these name registers were compiled by intendance (see her "Kinseki 'honbyakusho^[*] ' saikosatsu^[*] no kokoromi," Jinmin no rekishigaku , no. 86 [1985]: 14). She also argues that lordly corvée in the early Tokugawa period, specifically for the battle of Osaka, was not levied only on elite yakuya , or service households, but was levied on all holders according to the size of their holding, taka, and that the land cadasters did not have lists of yakunin , service people, attached to them (ibid., 13, 21). This, she suggests, was not exceptional.

as outside owners of plots within the village, may have been titled peasants in their home villages.^[41]

A comparison of entries in a name register with those in its corresponding cadaster reveals that the latter contains far more names, because it includes, besides the names of household heads, those of a number of dependents who worked the land.^[42] This association of names with plots of land provides the basis for the argument that the cadasters reflect a policy by Hideyoshi to break down large holdings managed by extended families into smaller units and that the name registers compiled in the village were perhaps a means for the large holders, who listed only themselves there, to resist Hideyoshi's policy.

Mizubayashi questions the validity of this hypothesis because the cadasters did not focus on land ownership ; if they had, their entries would have been identical to those on the list of household names. Instead, since one of the purposes of the cadasters was to make it possible to enlist manpower for service even at the national level, official cadasters recorded dependents working field parcels of extended families. If the overlords' intention had been to promote these dependents to economic independence, it is hard to imagine how this could have been achieved for people not even listed as owners in the household list simply by entering them on the cadasters as independent. The cadasters listed the manpower that worked the fields but could be put to other uses as well.

Dependents working identifiable plots were not necessarily fully independent owners. The two lists converge only much later, toward the end of the seventeenth century, when the number of owners increased and that of dependents on the cadasters decreased. The late-sixteenth-century cadasters simply reflect the composition of the various types of ie: the large, extended peasant households (what modern historians call dogo^[*] ), single peasant families, and even nonpeasant families and mixed-economy units. The modern historiographical term dogo^[*] refers to wealthy landed villagers with local political clout, which in the sixteenth century could be, and often was, temporarily converted into military power. This class of landowners included "samurai of the soil" (jizamurai ) and "men of the provinces" (kokujin ), who enjoyed a more

[41] This important point is made by Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 294.

[42] For a comparison of the two registers of one village, see Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 133.

official status of authority, at least nominally.^[43] Villages ruled by dogo^[*] families were typified by pronounced internal economic (and concomitant political) discrepancies compared with so villages, where such stratification was less severe.

Certain households were thus registered on the household registers, compiled nationwide in 1591 by order of Hideyoshi, as responsible for a wide range of corvée.^[44] Takagi Shosaku^[*] has drawn attention to the national character of some of this corvée that was earmarked as separate from that owed to the local overlord.^[45] It included auxiliary noncombat corvée, needed by campaigning armies for transporting materiel and provisions (also provided by the villages) and building roads and dikes and was official corvée away from home ordered by the highest authority, the shogun (kuniyaku , or national corvée).^[46] With the development of a system of way stations on the network of highways,

[43] Ibid., 134. For definitions of these and similar medieval terms, see John Whitney Hall, "Terms and Concepts in Japanese Medieval History: An Inquiry into the Problems of Translation," Journal of Japanese Studies 9, no. 1 (1983): 1-32, esp. 23-32. For a case study of one such family, see Suzanne Gay, "The Kawashima: Warrior-Peasants of Medieval Japan," Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 46, no. 1 (1986): 81-119.

[44] In the registers these households were variously referred to as honbyakusho^[*] , basic or titled peasant; honke , main house; buyakunin , corvée person; kogiyakunin^[*] , official servant; or kujiya , official house. Modern Japanese scholars refer to them as yakuya, or "service households" (Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 141-42).

[45] The major findings of Takagi's research on the mobilization methods of late-sixteenth-century and early Tokugawa armies can be found in the following articles: "'Kogi^[*] ' kenryoku no kakuritsu," in Bakuhansei kokka no seiritsu , ed. Fukaya Katsumi and Kato^[*] Eiichi, Koza^[*] Nihon kinseishi, 1 (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1981), 151-210; "'Hideyoshi no heiwa' to bushi no henshitsu: chuseiteki^[*] jiritsusei no kaitai katei," Shiso^[*] , no. 721 (1984): 1-19, translated as "'Hideyoshi's Peace' and the Transformation of the Bushi Class: The Dissolution of the Autonomy of the Medieval Bushi ," Acta Asiatica , no. 49 (1985): 46-77; "Bakuhan taisei to yaku," Ken'i to shihai , Nihon no shakaishi, 3 (Iwanami, 1987), 309-41 (hereafter NNS 3). See also his lengthy contribution to NRT 3:160-223. For an answer to his critics, see his "Kinsei Nihon ni okeru mibun to yaku: Minegishi Kintaro-shi^[*] no hihan ni kotaeru," Rekishi hyoron^[*] , no. 446 (1987): 90-108. Minegishi argues that Takagi overstresses the effect of Hideyoshi's status laws at the expense of the economic underpinnings upon which they were based (see Minegishi Kintaro^[*] , Kinsei mibunron [Azekura shobo^[*] , 1989], 183-218).

[46] KDJ distinguishes between kokuyaku (5:697- 98) and kuniyaku (4:845-46). The former seems to be limited to extraordinary national or provincial levies of pre-Tokugawa times (1054-1546), ordered by the imperial or shogunal courts. The discussion of the latter is limited to the Tokugawa period and to corvée by artisans. These volumes, published in 1984 and 1985, did not take into account Takagi's work, perhaps because it was too late to incorporate it or, less likely, because the authors of these entries disagree with it.

portage duties, or sukego , were also assigned to surrounding villages by shogunal authority.

This mobilization of peasants by the highest national authority for noncombat military service affected local authority relationships in a number of ways. The villages, as identified on the rosters and registers, became production and support brigades for the "national," or shogunal, government in times of war. Thus, the whole country was, at least latently, a "garrison state," as Takagi put it.^[47] When the daimyo received orders from the shogun to mobilize, many "natives" were assigned to serve in the "colonial" (samurai) army of daimyo, who were often transferred from elsewhere to rule them. This arrangement incorporated not only villages as a whole but also individual peasant households directly into a national organization, giving those selected for this service an enhanced local identity. Since there were virtually no national mobilizations during the Tokugawa period, however, the greatest effect of this system was not its practical use but the creation of an additional prestige value within the village, a form of symbolic capital, to borrow Pierre Bourdieu's famous simile, that was put to use to yield local political profit.^[48]

This institution affected dogo^[*] magnates in two ways. On the one hand, it strengthened their hold over their dependents, since national authority added a surplus dimension to some aspects of their local power. On the other hand, this local power was now in certain respects shared with a higher authority, clearly stipulated, and hence limited. This limitation of dogo^[*] power was the result of a mobilization formula that was imposed on them via the kokudaka system of the cadasters,

[47] Takagi, "Hideyoshi's Peace," 46.

[48] Pierre Bourdieu writes about the relationship between economic and symbolic capital as follows in his In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990): "A capital (or power) becomes symbolic capital, that is, capital endowed with a specifically symbolic efficacy, only when it is misrecognized in its arbitrary truth as capital and recognized as legitimate and, on the other hand,... this act of (false) knowledge and recognition is an act of practical knowledge which in no way implies that the object known and recognized be posited as object" (112, italics in the original; see also his Logic of Practice , 118).

and it differed from the one used by the warlord daimyo of the sixteenth century. When these daimyo mobilized, their orders pertained only to warrior retainers, and not to noncombatants. Specifications for these daimyo's retainers stipulated only the "kind and number of weapons and those wielding them";^[49] support personnel were not listed. Each warrior provided his own followers through his personal authority as a local magnate, and he shouldered their expenses as well. The novelty of the Hideyoshi/Tokugawa system consisted in that now (1) the over-lord's mobilization order reached commoners directly, over the heads of dogo^[*] /retainers, the local bosses; (2) the number of porters and other followers was specified; and (3) expenses were shouldered by the overlord. In other words, local magnates saw the autonomous nature of their authority undercut by a strengthened center.

Battle array charts (jindatesho ) thus included a great number of noncombatants, mostly peasants. The original purpose of the kokudaka system was precisely to determine the number and duties of these noncombatants, who constituted the bulk of the armies. Takagi gives as an example the composition of the army of Sakai, daimyo of Maebashi (130,000 koku), toward the beginning of the eighteenth century. Only about one-third of the total number of men and horses of the main force were assigned combat duties: 2,000 men out of an army of 5,344. The vanguard consisted of a corps of "engineers" who built field camps for the troops; it included 10 carpenters, 50 porters (ninsoku ), and 2 horses (see table 9).^[50]

Since under the Tokugawa peace there were no national mobilizations after the Shimabara rebellion of 1637 (except in the two campaigns against Choshu^[*] domain in the 1860s), one might wonder about the significance of the inclusion on paper of so many commoners in the armies of the daimyo and shogun. This mobilization formula, although not put into practice for over two centuries, contributed to the peasants' identity.

First of all, some of the national duties for which peasants were responsible were converted into permanent tribute categories in the second half of the seventeenth century. A portion of their tribute, cash (busen ) as well as rice (bumai ), was earmarked as military tax.

[49] Takagi, "Hideyoshi's Peace," 54.

[50] These figures are Takagi's, taken from NRT 5:191-92; they are more precise than those he gives in "Hideyoshi's Peace," 47.

Furthermore, the grandiose shogunal progresses to Ieyasu's shrine in Nikko^[*] , a total of fifteen, including those before its full-scale construction in 1636, also functioned as mobilization exercises, as did, on a smaller scale but more frequently, the daimyo's yearly marches between Edo and their domains, as required by the system of alternate attendance (sankinkotai^[*] ). In the progress of 1776, for instance, the shogun, escorted by his three collateral houses (gosanke ) and twenty daimyo, was accompanied by no less than 620,000 low-ranking soldiers (zohyo^[*] ), 250,000 porters, and 305,000 horses. These processions took one week and were so large that, according to an eyewitness, they stretched the whole length of the road, which had twenty-one way stations, from Edo to Nikko^[*] (145 km).^[51] In the Choshu^[*] wars of the 1860s, the peasants from the bakufu and some daimyo domains were effectively mobilized according to the formulae fixed over two hundred years earlier, readily accepting noncombat assignments as a "natural" part of their duties as subjects. By the same token, they resisted as "unconstitutional" the

[51] Watanabe Hiroshi, "'Goiko^[*] ' to shocho^[*] : Tokugawa seiji taisei no ichisokumen," Shiso^[*] , no. 740 (1986): 138.

attempts to arm them for combat, insisting that if they were to bear arms they should be treated as samurai.^[52]

Undoubtedly, the great division in Tokugawa Japan was between warriors and commoners. However, the peasants were essential even for the military organization of the country, and their public selfidentity included noncombatant military service at a trans-domain, if not "national," level. To that extent, in addition to being subjects of their daimyo, they were also subjects, not of the emperor, but of the shogun, since he decided when mobilization was required.

Micro Struggles 2: Peasants Versus Magnate Headmen (Dogo^[*] )

Mizumoto's regional study of predominantly the corporate type of village left unexplained the relevance of its findings for the rest of Japan, especially the "less advanced" regions, where dogo^[*] households dominated village life. A typical example would be Toyota village in Izumi province (Osaka), where two dogo^[*] households (5 percent of the total number of households), each with an average of ten dependents, together controlled 30 percent of the arable.^[53]

Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki has looked into this question with regard to a number of villages of eastern Japan, in Niigata, Nagano, Akita, and other prefectures, and presents the following argument linking protests regarding the fair distribution of tribute throughout the village with the establishment of the village-based system of tribute levy (murauke).^[54] In other words, he indirectly traces the genesis of yet another basic Tokugawa institution. Saito^[*] starts by pointing out that this murauke system was not entirely a bakufu innovation. As mentioned earlier, a similar practice (jigeuke) was not uncommon on the old estates and in corporate villages.^[55] Nevertheless, even there its implementation by the newly established headman caused problems. Saito discerns two issues related to headman governance: abuse of authority and excessive privileges , the latter an extension of their informal power as local magnates; and different responses to these problems by the bakufu before and after the

[52] Kurushima Hiroshi, "Kinsei gun'yaku to hyakusho^[*] ," Futan to zoyo^[*] , Nihon no shakaishi, 4 (Iwanami, 1986), 273-317 (hereafter NNS 4).

[53] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 42.

[54] Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki, "Kinsei shoki no nomin^[*] toso^[*] ," 42-60.

[55] Ibid., 43.

early 1640s, first unambiguous support for the headmen , then an acknowledgment of the peasants's complaints .

The issue of abuse of authority is illustrated by a case from Echigo, Otorisu^[*] village, where forty peasant households were ruled by two headmen (kimoiri , as they were called there). The headman of the East Kumi (possibly consisting of several neighborhood kumi), backed by all his peasants and some from the West Kumi as well, complained in 1662 to the intendant of Nagaoka domain that his colleague from the West Kumi had secretly overtaxed the new fields (shinden) of the East Kumi for the last eight years. The suit stressed that the accused headman had acted "without consulting the East Kumi's head and all the peasants." The case was settled out of court, the official yearly tax rosters (nengumenjo^[*] ) were made public, and the head of the West Kumi was deposed. An apology from those West Kumi peasants who had not endorsed the suit from the beginning closed the affair. Like corporate (so^[*] ) villages, this was a village without great economic discrepancies between landholders. The issue was abuse of authority by a beadman .

Other protests addressed the issue of the informal power of local magnates. The village of Shimo-Okamoto in Utsunomiya was ruled by a peasant magnate (dogo^[*] ) with 166 koku, while the other fifty-three peasants together held 840 koku. Over a span of forty years (1637-78) at least six protests were lodged against the headman. The first was a complaint by all the peasants about the headman's exemption from his portion of corvée (proportionate to his 166 koku), which they had to shoulder. Headmen from neighboring villages mediated a settlement whereby the headman in question had to pay a fee in corvée rice (bumai) on half of his holdings. Seven years later, in 1644, fourteen peasants successfully petitioned the domain to form a separate village perhaps in order to escape shouldering the headman's exempt corvée burden, which now fell on only thirty-nine peasants. Ten years later they demanded the removal of the headman. Finally, in 1678, after a few other protests, they asked the intendant's approval for apportioning corvée not per household but according to each holding's assessed yield ("per taka"). These suits did not concern flagrant abuse of power by a headman; rather, they aimed at changing the traditional patriarchal authority the headman, as a local magnate, wielded over small landholders , who were very dependent on him.

The bakufu's response to these two types of protest shifted significantly after the Kan'ei period, which ended in 1643. Before that turn-

ing point the bakufu unambiguously protected its village-based tax agents by siding with the headmen, leaving their public authority unaffected, and by withstanding attempts to limit their privileges.

Two examples from Shinano province in 1621 illustrate how the bakufu backed its appointed headmen. In one, the intendant's representative, together with powerful figures from neighboring villages, saw to it that embezzled money, whose absence was discovered after the village account books were opened, was returned, but no further action was taken against the headman. In the other, the intendant refused two successive requests by the peasants to check the tax lists. Obviously, access to the records of intramural tribute allocation was not backed by bakufu authority.

The bakufu's protection of magnate power, not against accusations of abuse, but against attempts at limiting it can be seen in the bakufu's response to peasants who complained in Akita in 1617 that they were unable to shoulder the burden of more than 10 koku of the headman's total of 16 exempted koku. They wanted to cap the exemption at 10 koku. The intendant, however, ruled that headmen had a right to as much as 20 corvée-exempt koku even in villages of only 100 to 150 koku. With only 16 koku of the headman to take care of, he added, the petitioners should count themselves lucky. The same standard was upheld in 1620 in another bakufu case.

In the early 1640s the bakufu abandoned its unquestioning support of headman authority and privilege. By then embezzlement was clearly illegal and punished. Some headmen even wound up in prison.^[56] To prevent abuses, the headman's monopolistic power was curtailed de jure. The first directives concerning intramural calculation and apportioning of tribute were issued in 1642 and 1644 as part of the bakufu's legislative response to the famines of the Kan'ei period. No doubt pressure had also been exerted by numerous petitions and suits—altogether a clear indication of the bakufu's initial reluctance or inability to regulate village affairs. The frequent settlement of these disputes without recourse to bakufu authority or through mediation of other headmen, as well as the protracted nature of some of them, further point to the same conclusion. The regulations of 1642 and 1644 stipulated that tribute allocations must be made public, and that all (taka

[56] For examples dating from 1643 and 1648-50, see ibid., 50.

holding) peasants must participate in decision making.^[57] This, Saito^[*] concludes, amounted to the institutionalization of the famous murauke system, whereby the whole village, and not simply the headman, was in a way subcontracted as the legal agency for allocating tribute.

Two points should be made here. This is first of all a good illustration of Tokugawa legal expansion as a response to ad hoc problems. What James White argues with regard to peasant uprisings also applies to their petitions and protests. Peasants never succeeded or even wanted to overthrow the system, yet their petitions and protests were not without effect. Peasant agitation propelled legislative production, and insofar as the bakufu's legislative practice as such was never put into question its authority to rule was thereby legitimized in an indirect but significant and real way.^[58] Moreover, as this shift in bakufu policy was the result of local struggles, it consolidated a new power distribution and political consciousness in the village and perhaps produced a new "civic" identity among certain sectors of the peasantry. This, at least, was the potential of this policy, even though it did not affect all community members; nor was it implemented in all communities at the same time. Much later, other peasants would agitate to participate in decisions regarding tax allocation.^[59]

Some of the special powers and privileges of the dogo^[*] were being limited by other bakufu legal judgments. Thus, in the early 1650s in a village of a bannerman the question of corvée allocation to noncorvée households was raised; it was ruled that "privileges associated with past status are acknowledged, but times have changed (jidai onaji de arazu ) and henceforward corvée [and other burdens] will be allocated equally according to assessed value (taka: byodo^[*]no takawari ni )."^[60]

The drive to apportion corvée and duties per assessed value rather than per household cut into the traditional power of dogo^[*] peasants. That these magnates resisted this as best as they could is illustrated by

[57] The decisions are quoted in ibid., 51. For the text of these laws, see Tokugawa kinreiko^[*] zenshu^[*] , ed. Ishii Ryosuke^[*] , 5 vols. (Sobunsha^[*] , 1959-61), 5:155 (no. 2784, art. 11) (hereafter TKKz); and Kinsei hoseishiryo^[*]sosho^[*] , also edited by Ishii Ryosuke^[*] , 3 vols. (Sobunsha^[*] , 1959), 2;156 (no. 280, arts. 9, 15).

[58] James White, "State Growth and Popular Protest," Journal of Japanese Studies 14, no. 1 (1988): 7 n. 27, 17, 20-21.

[59] Smith presents a dramatic example: in the town of Kurashiki some two thousand families broke the monopoly of thirteen titled peasants in 1790 (Agrarian Origins , 183-87, esp. 186).

[60] Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki, "Kinsei shoki no nomin^[*] toso^[*] ," 53.

two cases analyzed earlier. In the 1650 suit in Kami-Kawarabayashi village (see table 7) the headman capitulated, but only temporarily: shortly thereafter he reverted to the old system, a move that resulted in a new suit by the peasants. The series of suits and petitions spread over forty years in the village of Shimo-Okamoto in Utsunomiya, the second case cited in this section, started with the attempts to limit the headman's privilege in the form of exemption from corvée and wound up with a petition to switch to the taka-based system in 1678.

Macro Power 2: Dogo^[*] Power and the Dominant Class

The mid seventeenth century was not the first time dogo^[*] struggled against extramural interference. Two generations earlier, around the turn of the century, they had even organized armed resistance against land surveys in a number of places. In Higo province (Kumamoto) they mobilized twenty thousand peasants in opposition to Sassa Narimasa, who was in charge of the land survey. Similar rebellions took place in the north, where dogo^[*] power was strongest. As Mizubayashi points out (and as I shall discuss shortly), this contrasts with the economically more developed Kinai region, where since the time of Oda Nobunaga (1534-82) this dogo^[*] class had spontaneously begun to split into those who sought fortune primarily in military campaigns and those who sought it on the land. In the "backward" areas, however, the rural magnates clearly felt threatened by the warriors and their land surveys.^[61]

This struggle they lost. The rural magnates could stop neither the warriors nor the surveys, but they survived quite well the restructuring of political power that was taking place over their heads. It is important to clarify the changing structural position of this dogo^[*] class in order to understand how the dogo^[*] made the transition into the Tokugawa period, when they functioned as the overlords' local agents for over a century, until the bakufu dissolved their power in the first decades of the eighteenth century in part as a response to abuses.

Under warlords of the sixteenth century like the Rokkaku, the traditional control the dogo^[*] , as often semimilitary rural magnates and

[61] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 145. On dogo^[*] uprisings, see Donald Burton, "Peasant Struggle in Japan, 1590-1760," Journal of Peasant History 5, no. 2 (1978): 144-47.

fief holders, had over their retainer/servants (hikan ) and dependents remained firm. When they and their followers were called upon for military or other tasks by these warlords, they were recruited in toto as small coherent units. Oda Nobunaga, however, started to sever the dogo's^[*] ties to their subordinates when he used his formidable authority to bypass these local bosses by recruiting some of their dependents directly. Nobunaga presented projects such as the building of Azuchi castle in 1576, employing this labor force as kuniyaku, or "national service," and he indemnified the masters of these recruits with some tax exemption.

A second way in which the ties between dogo^[*] and their followers were dissolved was through transfers of warlords. When Nobunaga assigned a new territory to a daimyo, he ordered him to take his dogo^[*] along, as he did when he sent the Maeda to Noto.^[62] These local magnates thus lost their power base of land and followers/servants and, as full-time retainers, became completely dependent upon their lords.

Many dogo^[*] were jizamurai, or landed men of arms; in the Kinai region, however, many of them had considerably reduced the portion of their holdings that they worked themselves. Thus loosening their ties to the land on their own initiative, many had joined Nobunaga's armies without giving up their landed property, expecting greater gains from military campaigns, in the form of increased holdings, than from working or managing the land they owned. Hideyoshi, as is well known, institutionalized this initial voluntary and incomplete removal of armed men from the land through his Sword Hunt Edict (1588) and his "Status Regulations" (1591).^[63] Henceforward armed men would be clearly distinct from peasants. This had a profound effect on the social position of these landed samurai or armed rural magnates, splitting this class into two since it forced them to choose either to take the warrior road or to remain in their mini-dominions working the land. Under Nobunaga such a choice had been neither total nor final; under Hideyoshi it was both.

It is important to stress that either way, as new, full-fledged retainers

[62] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 109. For a detailed discussion of Maeda's case, see Brown, Central Authority , chap. 5.

[63] For the text of these decrees, see Tsunoda Ryusaku, William Theodore de Bary, and Donald Keene, comps., Sources of Japanese Tradition , 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 1: 319-22. The reason for quotation marks around Status Regulations will be explained later.

without land in the castle towns or as rural magnates without arms in the country, they did not become men without power in the new order. This class was reconstituted at the lower echelons of the ruling hierarchy, where it performed a number of essential functions with or without arms. The fact that some were now legally samurai and others were not should not obfuscate the fact that the new rulers encompassed nonsamurai and the ruled included peasants with a samurai background. Without a significant component of nonwarriors in the ruling cadres the system would have been unable to function, since almost all warriors were now separated from their subjects. Peasants were thus not only tribute producers, separated socially and geographically from the samurai; they were also essential to the operation of the system, in times of war, as we have seen, and in times of peace.

One can distinguish three ways in which the dogo^[*] were incorporated into the new power structure. Some became district intendants (daikan ) or their assistants (tedai ), others became village group headmen (ojoya^[*] ) in charge of a number of villages, and still others turned into a kind of contractor for "public works," especially land reclamation projects. We shall first take a look at the third group. Our example is from Kita-Saku district, a few kilometers east of Makibuse (see map 2).

As is well known, the seventeenth century witnessed the greatest boom in land reclamation in premodern Japan. Between 930 and 1450 Japan's arable increased by 10 percent. Another 70 percent was added by 1600. Equating the arable of 1450 with the value 100, it was 90 in 930, 100 in 1450, and 173 in 1600; then it almost doubled, to 314, by 1720 (and it was only 322 in 1874), as table 10 shows. Unlike the land reclamation of the eighteenth century, most of which was financed by merchant capital, the much larger projects of the seventeenth century were initiated and funded by the daimyo and the shogun. Often dogo^[*] and their bands of dependents were employed in these projects. This was the case with four such shinden (new paddies) projects in Kita-Saku.^[64]

The most famous of the four shinden is Gorobe-shinden, the others being Mikage-, Shiosawa-, and Yaehara-shinden. They were developed between 1630 and 1662. The irrigation networks for the four projects, totaling some 175 km, took twenty years to build. The ducts that brought

[64] Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku no kozo^[*] , chap. 3.

the water to Gorobe-shinden alone were about 20 km long (including some 2 km hewn in rock, nine tunnels totaling 1 km, and a duct crossing a river) and passed through nine villages.^[65] All four projects were undertaken by descendants of local vassal and subvassal houses of Takeda Shingen (1521-72). The warrior ancestors of these developers had continually sided with losing parties in the wars of the late sixteenth century. For instance, the Ichikawa house, to which Gorobe belonged, was first a subvassal of the Uesugi, then of Takeda Shingen, and subsequently of Oda Nobunaga and the Hojo^[*] when its holdings were greatly reduced. The remaining Ichikawa property, mountain forest and some undeveloped grassland in the Kita-Saku plain, was finally divided among followers of the house (between fifty and one hundred). Gorobe, reluctant to leave the area, refused twice to enter Tokugawa Ieyasu's service; instead, he took the opportunity given by Ieyasu's decision to develop new arable. In return, Ieyasu acknowledged Gorobe's jurisdiction over his numerous hereditary vassal-servants (fudai and genin). In 1642, Gorobe received from the lord of Komoro domain 150 koku of the new fields as his "fief." Then the fifty or so fudai literally came out of the woodwork, writing to Gorobe, "We are sons of fudai

[65] The calculations are based on data given by Saito^[*] Yoichi^[*] in his Gorobe-shinden to hisabetsu buraku (San'ichi shobo^[*] , 1987), 1, 2, 56-57. The most detailed history of a shinden mura in English is the work of an anthropologist, Jennifer Robertson's Native and Newcomer: Making and Remaking a Japanese City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 76-103, 136-143. The remaining information on Gorobe-shinden and the developers of the other shin-den that follows is again taken from Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku no kozo^[*] , chap. 3.

who for generations have been in your family and fought together until your father's generation, but then we moved to the mountains not so long ago because there was no land left in the family. Now, however, that you have received 150 koku, we shall remain loyal in any battle that may lay ahead." They worked for Gorobe again, first as vassals, then for wages, and they were finally set free in 1713. Meanwhile, the Ichikawa had left the area in 1670 and become absentee landlords.

The founding families of the other new villages have similar histories. Kashiwagi Koemon, founder of Mikage-shinden, having also sided with losing lords, went to Suruga for a while to take an office under Tokugawa Ieyasu, but soon he was back in Kita-Saku in charge of bringing new land under cultivation. He eventually received eighty-three koku in tax-exempt new fields, enjoyed labor services from the new settlers, and wielded considerable power in the new village. He passed on to his descendants the right (exercised as late as 1819!) to veto any election of village officials by the titled peasants and the right to keep all the records, which he lent to the officials at his own discretion. For the first fifteen years there was not even a village headman; when one was finally appointed, in 1665, he came from a branch house, and the office remained in that family for half a century.

A second road taken by dogo^[*] in the seventeenth century, more frequently by dogo^[*] remaining on the land, led to the new rural office of ojoya^[*] (village group headman). They thus became charged mainly with collecting tribute from a number of villages, their area of jurisdiction often coinciding with the pre-Tokugawa districts (go^[*] ).^[66] In this way, they supplemented their economically based and informal patriarchal power as local magnates with a new official, administrative dimension. Just as the sixteenth-century warlords used "the state" (which they built) to continue furthering their interests, the landed dogo^[*] added the same surplus political value to their traditional authority.

It should be remembered that the purpose of Hideyoshi's land surveys, conducted and registered at the village level, was not tribute exaction but the mobilization of a national army. For taxation purposes, Hideyoshi relied on the old local administrative units (often the go^[*] , encompassing a number of villages), which often became the juris-

[66] For this paragraph and the following one, see Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 136-37. Brown also stresses the indispensability of nonsamurai at the district and intendant level in Kaga domain (Central Authority , 114-41, 193, 205).

diction of a village group headman. Thus, one of the two dogo^[*] from Toyota village, mentioned earlier, filled the post of village group headman for thirteen villages.^[67]

The village group headmen, as stipended agents for the city-bound warriors, were an integral part of the dominant class in not only structural but also economic terms, for in both status and privilege they were considerably removed from the ruled in the villages. Located administratively beyond the village and performing their corvée or service to the overlords as officeholders, in their village of residence they were exempt from the obligations shouldered by regular villagers.

As developers of new paddies, the dogo^[*] expanded the overlords' tribute base, and as village group headmen they channeled this tribute upward. In addition, they functioned at the next higher administrative level also, as district intendants or, more often, as their representatives or assistants. One usually thinks of intendants as samurai, but especially in the early decades of the Tokugawa period a good number of them were dogo^[*] . Why?

The indispensability of the disarmed fraction of the dogo^[*] class to the new military rulers was not only a consequence of the concentration of the samurai in urban centers. It was also the result, in some important cases, of massive daimyo transfers to new territories. After the Hojo's^[*] defeat in 1590, Tokugawa Ieyasu was ordered by Hideyoshi to leave the five provinces he controlled and take charge of the eight provinces in the Kanto^[*] plain, most of which constituted the former Hojo^[*] domain. This transfer affected the dogo^[*] of Ieyasu's old and new domains in different ways.

In his old domain, the transfer put into practice, in one stroke, the separation of warriors from peasants, splitting the dogo^[*] class into those who took their arms and followed Ieyasu to the Kanto^[*] and those who stayed behind. It was a move that also strengthened the integration of his vassal band, which, cut off from its economic base, now became totally dependent on its lord. In his new domain, however, the local dogo^[*] class became indispensable for ruling the countryside, since Ieyasu concentrated most of his army in and around Edo, granting many (but not all) rural administrative posts—hatamoto, or bannerman, fiefs in the "Tokugawa houseland" and daikan or gundai intendant offices for

[67] For the system of village group headmen in the Ueda domain, see Bix, Peasant Protest , 62-64.

the remaining portion of the Tokugawa domain—to only a small fraction of the thirty-five thousand warriors under his direct command.^[68]

The figures are quite striking. Forty percent of the Tokugawa domain was entrusted to some twenty-two hundred fief-holding bannermen, each with his own retainers, but the overwhelming majority of the latter were stationed in Edo, not in the fiefs themselves. For instance, the Sengoku bannerman, who in the 1790s held a fief of two thousand koku (in eight villages) in Shinano and an additional seven hundred koku in two other provinces, had thirty-two retainers in Edo but only four in Shinano. His Shinano office was headed by someone with a dogo^[*] background who also relied on locals: two wariban (the equivalent of village group headman) and the eight village headmen.^[69] The remaining 60 percent of the Tokugawa domain was ruled by a mere forty intendants. They were assisted by helpers, whose total number in 1839 was less than a thousand, slightly over half of them based in Edo. Under Hideyoshi the intendants had been recruited from the ranks of vassals and dogo^[*] . In the early Tokugawa period they were former retainers from defeated daimyo (the Imagawa, the Takeda, the Hojo^[*] ) or local dogo^[*] who had served under them. This local entrenchment, perpetuated through heredity, led to numerous abuses that were further facilitated by the way these intendants were paid, namely, by allowances they themselves took from the tribute they collected. In the 1680s the majority of the intendants (thirty-five) were purged, and after 1725 intendants had to forward the total amount of tribute to the center, which substituted fixed stipends for their allowances. In addition, their posts were now increasingly being filled by staffers from

[68] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 143. The figure 35,000 comes from Conrad Totman, Politics in the Tokugawa Bakufu , 1600-1843 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 135. By the end of the eighteenth century only 44 percent, or 2,264, of the bannermen held fiefs, with a total kokudaka of 2.6 million koku (see KDJ 9:381, s.v. "chigyoseido^[*] "; for similar figures, see also Totman, Politics , 135), spread over forty provinces, and governed from 3,677 local offices because many fiefs consisted of separate territories, 43 percent of these fiefs having parcels in from two to six different provinces. The portion of the Tokugawa domain that was not parceled out in fiefs (each less than 10,000 koku) to bannermen (3.2 million to 4.2 million koku—the amount fluctuates over time) was Tokugawa "houseland" (tenryo^[*] ), administered by intendants, called daikan (50,000 to 100,000 koku) or gundai (over 100,000 koku), whose number stabilized at around forty (KDJ 4:1040-44; see also Totman, Politics , 66-85).

[69] Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 268-69.

the bakufu's central Finance Commission. These purges and reforms signaled the end of those dogo^[*] who had survived as intendants.

Many of the intendants who were not dogo^[*] but samurai took up residence in Edo and, like the bannermen, maintained only skeletal staffs in their country and Edo offices. The two intendant offices in Shinano—Nakanojo^[*] (69,000 koku) and Nakano (54,000 koku)—had staffs of only three and four men, respectively, while their Edo offices had nine and eight. (Shinano also counted two branch offices, one in Mikage with a staff of three and one in the highway station of Oiwake with only one post.) Their small staffs consisted of helpers called tedai and tetsuki . The latter, shogunal retainers, were introduced only in the 1790s; the former were local peasants.^[70] The situation was slightly different in the domains, for there the offices were often overstaffed. The small domain of Tanoguchi (12,000 koku) in Saku district, for instance, counted only twenty-five villages, yet there were three intendants.^[71]

Given the sparse use of samurai for rural administrative purposes, these intendants and fief-holding bannermen had to be assisted by locals both in their small territorial offices and in the villages, where they were assisted by village group headmen and village headmen. Moreover, although one might expect responsibility for the expenses, if not for the personnel then at least for the upkeep of these offices, to have been assumed by the mighty bakufu, that was not the case. Routine maintenance expenses were shouldered by villagers, who were also charged with the corvée duties of cleaning, changing the paper of sliding doors, operating the hot bath, and so on. They also had to provide messengers to communicate between the rural and Edo offices of these administrators.^[72]

[70] This information on the daikan and gundai was taken from KDJ 4:1040-44; see also Mizubayashi, Hokensei^[*] , 270-71, and Totman, Politics , 66-85. In 1853 the bakufu employed 640 tedai (291 of these in Edo) and only 225 tetsuki (146 in Edo). Thus, when in the 1790s the bakufu created the new post of tetsuki, to be filled by retainers, next to the identical post of tedai, filled by commoners, not only were its numbers significantly lower than that of the tedai but fewer than 100 retainers were deployed in the countryside (KDJ 9:885, s.v. "tedai").

[71] NAK-KS2 (1): 486. One of these intendants, appointed in 1851, kept a detailed list of all incoming and outgoing presents for his first year in office: he himself gave gifts on 188 occasions, 4 times to headmen from five villages, and received gifts on 596 occasions! (Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 220-47).

[72] KDJ 8:711, s.v. "daikansho"; 7:940, s.v. "jinya."

The system was extremely cost-effective and user-friendly for the samurai because the peasants, both elites and others, not only paid for it but ran it as well. The analogy of firing squad victims who first have to pay for the bullets and dig their own grave comes to mind. This analogy might seem far-fetched, bur in Tokugawa times villages that for one reason or another had a member in prison had to pay the "boarding" costs.^[73] Notwithstanding Confucian rhetoric about peasants' being "the basis of the country," the samurai were unwilling to dirty their hands through contact with peasants, not even for the purpose of levying tribute.

Samurai rural administrators, a rather rare breed in the first place, ranked low in the prestige and stipend hierarchy. Ogyu^[*] Sorai (1666-1728) wrote that "the intendants' sole preoccupation being to levy tribute, they appointed people just because they could write and count and they themselves were of low status ... which was the reason why no samurai with a pedigree became intendants, and this in turn was why no samurai, including the upper ranks of counselors, had any real sense of the people."^[74] The fundamental division between manual and mental labor stressed by Karl Marx and Max Weber^[75] is basic to the separation between warriors and peasants, although in Tokugawa Japan, as Ando^[*] Shoeki^[*] noted in the eighteenth century, it was more a question of manual versus no labor.^[76]

The nonsamuraized fraction of the pre-Tokugawa dogo^[*] class was thus reconstituted as an essential lower fraction of the dominant class and maintained local power well into the eighteenth century. Its demise, however, is not to be attributed only to bakufu initiative against abuses that diminished the flow of tribute to the upper fractions of the domi-

[73] Those confined to an intendant's jail whose provenance was known (i.e., those who were not vagrants, mushuku ) had to arrange for their own food, make payments for their expenses to the prison guard, and provide even their own lamp oil. The situation was slightly different in Edo (see Hiramatsu, Kinsei keiji soshoho^[*] , 936 ).

[74] Ogyu^[*] Sorai, Sorai sensei tomonsho^[*] (1727), in Ogyu^[*]Sorai , ed. Bito^[*] Masahide, Nihon no meicho, 16 (Chuokoronsha^[*] , 1983), 319, 320-21.

[75] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 51; Max Weber, Economy and Society , ed. Guenter Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 2:936.

[76] Maruyama Masao, Studies in the Intellectual History of Tokugawa Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 252-53.

nant class, a story of rationalization and bureaucratization; there was also a political side to this story.

Protests and petitions had led to limitations on headman authority in the first decades of the Tokugawa period. Then these dogo-headmen^[*] were forced to share power with a class of new landholders, often former dependents. Moreover, since the late seventeenth century their authority had been further checked by a representative from the other peasants, a hyakushodai^[*] (a new village office to be discussed below). The position of village group headman was abolished in the bakufu domain in 1713 as a response to a violent peasant rebellion in the Murakami fief in Echigo. Similar rebellions against abuses by village group headmen followed in daimyo domains (Kanazawa, 1712; Hiroshima, 1718; Aizu, 1720; Kurume, 1754; Fukuyama, 1789), leading there also to the abolishment of the office. The bakufu and domains, however, could not long do without some conduit between their regional offices and the villages, hence the on-again, off-again status of the office of the village group headman (on again in the bakufu in 1734, on again in Fukuyama in 1791 and off again in 1823). In the bakufu the office was now staffed on a rotation basis by headmen from the villages under its jurisdiction.^[77]

Knowledge and Power: The Struggle for Information

Data on land, population, and tribute were essential for the exercise of domination, which for Tokugawa Japan is a more accurate term than administration . Once established, power needed knowledge more than the sword to carry on. This information was organized around the kokudaka system, a thorough quantification of the country's economic potential established by Hideyoshi for military purposes of a national order. The daimyo who gathered these data for Hideyoshi benefited too, because the data gave them a more precise knowledge of their own power base, which was also expanded, since for the first time dry fields, commons, and even homesteads were rated and taxed. These data, while official because collected by and for those in power, was not public, precisely because of its link to power. Access to this information was

[77] KDJ 2:613, s.v. "ojoya^[*] ."

obtained through struggle, that is to say, through the application of a kind of power that forced the authorities to yield it.

Village suits against headmen's abuses in tribute allocation were struggles for access to kokudaka data. The plaintiffs had in mind a specific use for these data, different from the one the overlords had in mind when they created them: they wanted the data as a leverage for justice, for a fair intravillage distribution of corvée and tribute. The logic behind the strategy to obtain it, however, was similar. Through their land surveys, Hideyoshi and the Tokugawa shogun after him made official and created for themselves knowledge that thus far had been the private (and less accurate) knowledge of the daimyo and thereby increased their power over them. They were able to force the daimyo to create and render this knowledge in part because they had converted their warlord superpower into public authority (kogi^[*] ) through a number of officializing strategies.^[78] Hideyoshi and the shogun wielded a higher authority, which it was in the best interest of the daimyo not to resist. The peasants achieved the same result in a somewhat similar way by wresting privately held knowledge from their village superiors. For this the peasants needed a higher authority, which they gained when, after the 1640s, the bakufu supported the peasants in their demand for open village ledgers.

The story of the struggle for making official knowledge public does not end there, however, but the principle was established in the 1640s. I trace this struggle until the end of the eighteenth century in the following section. Here I shall first return briefly to the drive started in the mid seventeenth century to base village corvée allocation on a taka rather than a household basis. This was possible only because knowledge of each field's kokudaka was forced into the open, and resistance to it was strongest in dogo-ruled^[*] villages because there the plot discrepancies were the greatest. In such villages, if corvée were allocated according to holding size rather than divided evenly among all households, the elite would lose proportionately more than they would in places where economic discrepancies were less pronounced. Second, we shall examine the bakufu's endorsement of publicizing tax rates in the 1640s. Although implementation of the decrees to that effect was uneven, that

[78] See my Tokugawa Ideology , chap. 2.

decade constitutes an important turning point with regard to the issue of accountability.

Knowledge of the kokudaka provided peasants with a standard of value they could use in various ways, depending on local circumstances, for quantifying things other than tribute. Sometimes complicated formulae that obviously were the outcome of protracted wranglings and negotiations, to which small landholders must have been partners, were worked out. Thus, in Kitasawa village (Kita-Saku) the following agreement using different measuring units for various items was reached in 1687, through the mediation of the local temple, it should be pointed out.^[79] The preamble clearly states that the process involved "large and small peasants." The agreement covered both kinds of corvée, that owed to the bakufu and that due to the village, and stipulated the following:

Tribute from the mountains: manpower to be assigned on the basis

of horse ownership—one man per horse;
Bakufu-ordered [extramural] corvée: labor and number of days to be assigned per taka; [bakufu-ordered] intramural corvée: labor and number of days to be assigned per household for both large and small peasants;
Village fees: to be determined one-half per taka, one-half per household;
Sake portion of village fees: two-thirds per taka, one-third per household.

Such a formula of corvée allocation necessitated knowledge of each holding's kokudaka. What did the peasants know about the share of the yearly village tribute they owed the overlord?

The amount of yearly tribute, determined by the overlords, was communicated to each village head by the intendant in a document most commonly called the nenguwaritsukejo^[*] (literally, "yearly tribute [nengu ] rate letter"). From 1591 until around 1635, when they were standardized, in most bakufu territories most of these documents were very short, notes really.^[80] They clearly reflect the sole concern of the

[79] Saito^[*] Yoshiyuki, "Kinsei shoki no nomin^[*] toso^[*] ," 56.

[80] For the discussion that follows, see Arai Eiji, "Nengu waritsukejo^[*] no seiritsu," in Kinsei no jikata-machikata monjo , ed. Nihon komonjo gakkai, Nihon komonjogaku ronshu^[*] , 12 (Kinsei 2) (Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1987), 228-55 (hereafter NKR 12).

overlords—tribute—in that they simply list the village taka, the assessment rate (not always), the amount of rice tribute in bushels (koku, sometimes in bales, hyo^[*] , one koku being the equivalent of 2.857 hyo^[*] ), and the date the tribute was due. Adjustments for bad years were usually made by modifying these total figures.

This skeletal system worked because the headmen and the overlords had information that showed the further breakdown of the total village figure into amounts per holding, but this information was not to be found in most of these documents. The few exceptions list in detail and separately paddy fields, dry fields, and homesteads according to the grade of the arable; these were usually issued the year after a survey was taken. Why is it, then, that around 1635 in most areas of the bakufu territory and in the 1660s and 1670s in a few remaining pockets these forms became standardized, now always giving the detailed information that was only very rarely available earlier?

A tighter central control over intendants was not the only reason. Political pressure was also applied from below, not, obviously, from village headmen, who could thwart the system to their own advantage, but from the peasants. There were too many complaints about abuses that occurred because peasants were kept in the dark concerning the fairness of their share of village tribute.

As a first response to these political problems, starting around 1635 the intendants provided all the necessary detail in their yearly tribute letters, thereby binding headmen to extract such and such an amount from such and such a plot. This, of course, still did not make the headman accountable to the tribute payers, which led to numerous disputes. Indeed, the shogunal directives of the 1640s ordering intendants to make sure that headmen made the yearly tax list available to all the "small peasants" for their approval invariably mention that this was being required "in order to avoid quarrels in the villages."^[81]

For the bakufu, as we have seen, "small peasants" included all taka holders below the titled peasants. These small landholders were thus granted new public political importance within the village: they yearly ratified the tax list. It is possible that the few regions that succeeded in postponing the implementation of these measures until the 1660s and 1670s (Sagami's Osumi^[*] and Musashi's Okutama) were areas where

[81] TKKz, 4:122 (no. 2105, art. 14).

dogo^[*] power was stronger. In other words, this development indicates that the "small peasants" were not fully incorporated into the murauke system as far as trans-village tribute was concerned until the 1680s, that is, when villages as a whole, and not simply headmen, became responsible for the delivery of tribute.

The kokudaka system was thus manipulated as a standard of fairness by the people below in a class struggle, not against samurai, but against village leaders. This worked to the bakufu's benefit in two ways. Inasmuch as its village tribute system was widely used by the tribute producers as an ultimate scale for communal fairness , the system itself was safe from being subjected to other standards of justice; thus, intra-peasant practice legitimized overlord domination. Hints that appeals in petitions to a broader concept of Justice (which were common in premodern Europe) transcended the standard itself can only be found in vague references to notions of benevolent government or the need for peasants to reproduce themselves, to survive. These notions were marshaled in peasant protests, but they did not question the system as such.^[82] Moreover, the bakufu, through its decision (under pressure) to widen access to the system for more and more peasants beyond the headman, first the kumi heads as village officials and then all the peasants as certifiers of the tribute allocation, created a new village practice that strengthened overlord legitimacy among a widening constituency of subjects.

The expanding political empowerment of villagers discussed thus far was limited to taka holders. Toward the end of the seventeenth century, however, the number of non-taka holders increased. They also had a stake in access to information first monopolized by headmen and then shared by the "small peasants," and this for two reasons. First of all, tenants were interested in knowing the breakdown of tribute allocation because the rent they paid to landlords included the amount of tribute due on the parcel they rented, tribute for which the landlord was responsible. Correct information about this tribute allowed tenant peasants to judge the fairness of their rent. Moreover, as we have seen, these peasants shared intramural corvée and fees, and they could use the taka system to argue for a fairer allocation of these duties.

In principle this information was made available by law, starting in

[82] Stephen Vlastos discusses the arguments of these appeals in his Peasant Protests , 15-17.

the 1640s. A directive of 1642/8/10 stipulated that "for the calculation of the yearly tribute, etc. the intendant has to make village headmen meet with the small peasants and have them affix their seal to the tax roster of that year in order to avoid headmen's doing injustice to the small peasants."^[83] In another directive, dated 1644/1/11, sent to the intendants of the Kinai and the Kanto^[*] , the bakufu reiterated that "every year the tax rates (osamekatawaritsuke ) have to be shown to all the peasants without exception (sobyakusho^[*]nokorazu ) who have to affix their seal to it so that the quarrels of the past can be avoided."^[84]

Now, empirically minded scholars invariably raise the question of practice: was not the fact that these laws were reissued again and again proof that they were a dead letter? Indeed, they were reissued, for example, in 1713/4 in a long directive overhauling intendant governance that admits to faltering practice in recent years, quoted in part here:

The tribute roster that the intendant forwards every year to the village officials (murakata ) has to be made known in detail to the peasants, small and large alike. This is a law from the past. In recent years, however, we have heard that nobody has seen them except the headman, and so on, and, moreover, that the headman, and so on, do not make the village budget available to the smallest peasants because there are unnecessary expenditures or illegal matters. Henceforward, as stipulated in past laws, not only the tribute roster, which goes without saying, but also the specific items of the village budget have to be made clearly known to the peasants large and small, who will affix their seal to the budget. And every year, the intendant will examine the budget document of each village and make inquiries of all the peasants of the village concerning details, this to avoid illegalities on the part of the headman, and so on, and unnecessary expenditures on the part of the large and small peasants.^[85]

Documentary confirmation of actual compliance is, obviously, only sporadic, but as we saw earlier, seals of more and more peasants do appear on these documents, while they were absent at the beginning of the period. A more interesting question than that of the impact of legislation on practice is the reverse one, namely, what kind of practice prompted this legislation. It is clear that those who through these

[83] TKKz 5:155 (no. 2784). For the discussion that follows, see Otsuka^[*] Eiji, "Nenguwaritsuke to mura nyuyo^[*] no kokai^[*] ni tsuite," Shinano 43, no. 9 (1991): 1-24.

[84] TKKz 4:122 (no. 2105).

[85] Ibid., 134.

directives became, so to speak, politically more enfranchised were the ones who had exerted the pressure.

This continuing tug of war between those who wanted information made public, in principle officially backed by the bakufu, and those who resisted such requests resulted in more concrete legislation in 1745, 1750, and 1767. These directives required that a short version of the tax rosters, written by the intendant and listing the total amount of tribute and the precise amount due in each category of taxes, be posted on the public notice board or at the headman's gate. It was to remain there for the whole year and then be exchanged for the next year's one at the intendant's office.^[86]

Budget Control

Tokugawa villages were not only tribute units; they were also communities of people who did things together other than pay tribute, and communities have common expenses. Control over decisions concerning the size of the community budget, what it is to be used for, and how the burden is to be shared within the community translates into political power. And the degree to which such control lies within or outside the community largely determines the degree of community autonomy.

There are two opposing stereotypes concerning the autonomy of Tokugawa villages. One stresses their autonomy, because they were self-governing communities (kyodotai^[*] ). The other stereotype maintains that villages were subject to overlord authority in so many important ways that self-governance was a sham. To maintain the distinction between these two interpretations in the discussion that follows, I use communities in reference to these social units insofar as they were autonomous and villages insofar as they were constituted by the overlords. Much of this controversy has been a matter of definitions and the political views that inform them or lessons one wishes to draw from them.^[87] A discussion of local budgets may throw some light on this

[86] Otsuka^[*] , "Nenguwaritsuke," 6-7. Otsuka's^[*] research suggests that these digests were posted, but most probably only for a few weeks.

[87] For a good survey of the historiographical polemics surrounding this issue since the early twentieth century, see Uesugi Mitsuhiko, "Kinsei sonrakuron: kinsei sonraku to 'jiji,'" Nihonshi kenkyu^[*]no shinshiten , ed. Nihon rekishi gakkai (Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1986), 175-93.

question of autonomy, which is usually argued from a legal and juridical angle, as we shall see in chapter 4.

The degree to which Tokugawa villages, sanctioned by the land surveys, were already also communities with communal economic interests and expenditures varied widely. Whatever the case may have been, they were certainly tribute units. And since tribute production and payment loomed so large in the life of these villages, this undoubtedly furthered their development into some sort of communities if they were not already communities to begin with.

In Tokugawa Japan, decisions on sharing community expenses were similar to those concerning tribute, because tribute was also a communal affair. To get a sense of the relative importance of community and tribute expenses, let us consider briefly the main categories. Tribute consisted of (1) tribute in kind, mostly rice (nengu), but also various other contributions (komononari ) and (2) corvée (yaku). Corvée for overlords did not always take the form of labor: it could include cash (busen) or rice payments (kuchimai , bumai); kuniyaku, "national" corvée or service the daimyo required for duties owed to the shogun; buyaku, which daimyo or intendants requested on their own authority; and a special category, sukego, or portage labor performed by groups of villages attached to way stations on the highways. In addition, there was corvée connected with the collection and transportation of the rice tax. Many of these services included materiel needed to perform the labor. A number of other village expenses were indirectly the result of overlord demands, including remuneration for village officials; their travel expenses on official trips; expenses for village meetings held in relation to the payment of taxes; and the cost of brushes, ink, paper, and so on, to draw up official documents. All of these levies ultimately had to do with the reproduction of the samurai ruling class.

Community expenses proper, on the other hand, had to do with corvée and contributions of cash or materiel needed for the reproduction of the peasants (the ruling class's reproducers), in all spheres of their communal life (economic, political, spiritual): roads, bridges, and irrigation systems had to be maintained, festivals held, donations to temples financed, and, occasionally, the expenses of suits (not lawyer costs but travel expenses) shouldered, interest on loans paid, and so on. Aside from the important political question—how this burden was spread

throughout the village—attention needs to be drawn to a number of other points.

First, the combined village and community expenses were high, and they increased considerably in the nineteenth century, when many financially strapped overlords, through sheer neglect, shifted infrastructural maintenance costs to the villages. For instance, for the village of Kichijoji^[*] , outside of Edo, which had no particularly heavy way station portage duties or irrigation systems to maintain, in 1845 these expenses amounted to 28 percent of its tribute (nengu). For Hara village (Saku district, Shinano), which had way-station and dike maintenance duties, between 1734 and 1841 the average expenses amounted to 44 percent; in some years it was go percent or even a full 100 percent.^[88] Second, often only a tiny fraction of these total expenses were community expenses proper; in Hara village in 1734, expenses were virtually limited to festivals and religious occasions. Third, since the bulk of their expenses were direct or indirect overlord levies, the villagers had little control over the size and allocation of the expenses they had to share. Furthermore, overlords could and did increase these levies at will, while they were more reluctant to alter the yearly rice tribute. These structural constraints put severe limits on village autonomy.

Thus far I have avoided talking of budgets because Tokugawa villages did not have what we today understand by that term. Our notion of budget is forward-looking in that a budget is an itemized allocation of a known or projected amount of funds. Tokugawa village budgets were different, more like retrospective expense accounts drawn up at the end of the year, as itemized lists of expenses incurred during the year. An official copy of the budget was forwarded to the intendant at the beginning of the next year; the original draft, often at variance with the official version, remained in the village. The expenses were, of course, paid as they occurred; often, however, they were paid not by the villagers but by the headman or another better-off member of the com-

[88] For Kichijoji^[*] , see NRT 3:441; the figure for Hara was calculated on the data provided by Kodama Kota^[*] , "Kinsei ni okeru mura no zaisei," NKR 12:353. In 1840, Hara village (79 households, 72 of which belonged to titled peasants; total population 325; 470 koku) paid 155 koku tribute rice, and its village expenses, computed in koku at the then going price for rice, came to 131 koku, or the equivalent of 81 percent of the rice tribute; in 1845 the two amounts were equal (155.8 and 154.6, respectively, which Kodama wrongly reported as 44 percent instead of 99 percent) (ibid., 346, 353).

munity, who advanced the cash. Then at the end of the year, sometimes to the surprise of the villagers, the debt was divided up among them according to one formula or another, and each household paid its share to the moneylender, usually with interest and often at outrageous rates of 30-40 percent.^[89] One of the reasons for this arrangement was the lack of independent village income from common property, which was the case in corporate villages especially in pre-Tokugawa times.

Villages and other communities have always had expenses, but written budgets like the ones described above, like so many other practices of rural administration, seem to have appeared only in the mid 1640s. This was the time when limits were being set to the headman's arbitrary powers. It was also the time when some of the corvée, such as the "national" corvée, was being convened into cash or rice contributions.^[90] In other words, in earlier decades village expenses probably were predominantly in the form of labor. The headman, who was entitled to some of that corvée and as dogo^[*] also received corvée from a number of peasants as his dependents, did not always keep these two kinds of labor, official and private, apart.^[91] Remunerations for village officials in the form of labor or tax allowances easily led to abuses and disputes. This explains the drive by villagers to substitute them with payments in rice and with salaries pegged to the total kokudaka of the village. In addition, the line between corvée ordered by the overlord and that generated locally could easily be blurred to the benefit of the decision makers in the village—and it was. Numerous complaints forced the bakufu to take action. The bakufu directive of 1713, quoted at length above, ordered that not only taxes but also village expenses be made public. This was not the first nor the last legislation on this subject.

In 1642/5, three months before the bakufu issued the directive with regard to "calculation of the yearly tax, etc.," it had identified this "etc." as "expenses related to the various corvées" in a similar way: the corvée was to be specified for the small peasants in writing; the headman and kumi heads were to affix their seal to it; and official approval

[89] See KDJ 13:676, s.v. "murazaisei"; for village budgets in general, see also ibid., 683, s.v. "muranyuyocho^[*] ." In the Kinai region the interest rates were fixed at 15 percent in the late seventeenth century (see Fujiki Hisashi, "Ikoki^[*] sonrakuron," 214).

[90] Kanzaki Akitoshi, "Muranyuyocho^[*] ni tsuite," NKR 12:415.

[91] In some places this practice persisted until the end of the seventeenth century. For three cases, of 1684, 1693, and 1694, see ibid., 419-20.

by seal of the intendant's helper (tedai) was to be secured.^[92] A year later all peasants ' seals were required.^[93]

With such vague specifications, and with no sanctions provided for noncompliance, abuses at the intendant and village level continued, partly because tribute and corvée were not differentiated in these village budgets. In 1666/4 it was ordered that two lists be drawn up, one specifying each household's tribute, the other its corvée.^[94] In 1694/1 the intendants themselves had to provide two copies of the list of items to be used for drawing up the budgets, one for the headman and one for the peasants.^[95] During the Kyoho^[*] Reforms of the 1730s the intendant's responsibility in this matter was stressed, but ultimately the burden of enforcement was put back on the village officials in 1744, when for the first time punishments were specified for not informing peasants of the amounts of tribute, corvée, and the village expenditures. Headmen would lose their office, and kumi heads would be fined. If there was blatant greed, the former was to be expelled and his property confiscated; the latter was to relinquish his office and be fined.^[96] Village headmen had, of course, been punished in the past, but this was the first time that these punishments were determined as a specific category.

Also in 1744 the bakufu clarified the formulae for calculating tribute and village expenses:

corvée for the shogun and the intendants plus village expenses and expenses related to suits and disputes, and so on, have to be computed per taka; this holds also for outsiders [with fields in the village];
dwellers in the mountains, the wilds, bays or salt producing shores, and so on, or places with many households without taka or with

[92] Sugawara Kenji, "Muranyuyocho^[*] no seiritsu: Kinsei muranyuyo^[*] no kenkyu^[*] josetsu," NKR 12:386. The discussion of this legislation that follows relies on this article.

[93] TKKz 5:158 (no. 2788, art. 14). The same article appears again in a directive of 1644/1 (ibid., 4:122 [no. 2105, art. 15]). In 1652 noncompliance was seen as a major source of administrative problems (ibid., 125 [no. 2108, art. 7]).

[94] Ibid., 4:127 (no. 2110, art. 3).

[95] Ibid., 5:140 (no. 2772, art. 4).

[96] This stipulation is article 98 of Yoshimune's famous Kujikata osadamegaki (TKKk 4:210). For the additions to this text that specify the punishments, see John C. Hall, "Japanese Feudal Laws III," 788. The German translation also lists the punishments: Rudorff, "Tokugawa-Gesetz-Sammlung," 98-99.

small taka, have to compute by the number of persons and include dependent servants (excluding wives and children);
shares in the common use of mountain forests and moors have to be computed per taka; this applies also to outsiders;
expenditures for festivals, donations for religious purposes, and so on, can be decided in common agreement as one sees fit;
for all the above computations, however, prior custom can be followed in places that have been free from quarrels in the past.^[97]

The bakufu's hesitant approach toward intravillage political matters stands out clearly. Forced by circumstances to sanction a method with its authority, the bakufu suggests the taka system as a safe guidepost but then lists a number of exceptions and finally admits implicitly that the taka system should be used (only) if everything else fails.

Thus, in the mid seventeenth century the bakufu insisted that official "budgets" be drawn up to prevent village disputes about corvée distribution. A century later it gave minimal guidelines on how to achieve fairness and prescribed serious penalties for negligent village officials. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries legislation concerning village budgets was limited to efforts to shrink expenses through sumptuary measures. Although the bakufu had repeatedly stipulated since the early 1640s that "small peasants" should be involved in decisions concerning tribute and village expenses, it was only in 1744 that it issued guidelines to deal with disputes and stipulated penalties. During the century in between, peasants agitated around these issues on their own and broadened their political base within the village. In this sense, the stronger stance taken by the bakufu in 1744 sanctioned peasant gains.

"Representing" the Peasants

One of the most significant institutionalized intramural checks on village leadership, at least in principle, was the "peasant representative," or hyakushodai^[*] . He was to keep an eye on village governance for all the peasants, which in concrete terms meant foremost on decisions made by the titled peasants with regard to tribute allocation and village expenses. This institution should have been of obvious interest

[97] TKKk 2:67.

for scholars exploring the question of village self-governance. Yet they have not paid much attention to it, focusing instead on the question of village autonomy as reflected in village laws.

In an extended study of land ownership published some thirty-five years ago, Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] discussed this position briefly as one of the three official village offices, murakata sanyaku (next to the headman and the kumi heads), the way it is described in the famous late-eighteenth-century handbook for local administration, the Jikata hanreiroku .^[98] The earliest instance reported by Oishi^[*] dates from 1714 (in Oiwake, Kita-Saku district). It is generally accepted that the office was institutionalized around that time, although not universally: not all villages had peasant representatives in the second half of the Tokugawa period.^[99] "Institutionalization," therefore, depended on local conditions, that is, on whether or not overlords acknowledged such an office or whether villages established one on their own. Villages here stands, however, for titled peasants, who, for obvious reasons, were not eager to be monitored. Here again, therefore, the establishment of peasant representatives was often a response to a local crisis.

In 1724 in Gorobe-shinden (Kita-Saku district), for example, when the headman's retirement, officially for health reasons, caused strife, a peasant representative was installed.^[100] Demands for creating peasant representative posts were quite numerous in the first decades of the eighteenth century. Once they were recognized by overlords, the peasant representative's seal was required on all official documents (including suits), next to that of the headman and the kumi heads.

Sakai Uji recently examined the history of this office in the Kanto provinces and concluded that its widespread "officialization" was nothing but the sanctioning by the bakufu and daimyo of a much older peasant practice.^[101] According to Sakai, one has to distinguish between sobyakushodai^[*] ("all-peasant representative") and hyakushodai^[*] ("peasant representative"). In general, the former is found in the records only

[98] Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , Hokenteki^[*]tochi shoyu^[*]no kaitai katei: I Kinsei jinushiteki tochi shoyu^[*]no keisei katei (Ochanomizu shobo^[*] , 1958), 177-85, esp. 184-85; Oishi^[*] Hisakata, Jikata hanreiroku 2:93.

[99] KDJ 11:996, s.v. "hyakushodai^[*] ."

[100] Oishi^[*] , Hokenteki^[*]tochi shoyu^[*] , 180-81.

[101] Sakai Uji, "'Sobyakushodai^[*] ' kara 'hyakushodai'^[*] e: zenki hyakushodai^[*] no seiritsu o megutte," in Ronshu^[*]chu-kinsei^[*]no shiryo^[*]to hoho^[*] , ed. Takizawa Takeo (Tokyodo^[*] shuppan, 1991), 373-406.

between the 1660s and 1770s; the latter from the 1680s until the end of the Tokugawa period. Thus, "all-peasant representative" was the only title until the 1680s, when the second title started to appear, but it remained the predominant one until the 1720s, when it began gradually to lose ground, and it finally disappeared after the 1770s.^[102] "All-peasant representative" was first used for a position that had sprung up within the villages, whereas "peasant representative" ultimately became the title used officially by the overlords and came to supersede the former. Sakai puts the official institutionalization of this office in the Kanto provinces in the 169.0s.^[103] This office thus developed within the context of the small landholders' struggle for access to information and power discussed earlier. Although the first written trace of "all-peasant representative" dates from the 1660s, the possibility or necessity of this village position is already contained in bakufu directives of the years 1641-43.^[104] The second of two copies of the village budget the bakufu ordered made in those years was for the small peasants. This copy must have had a recipient. (The same goes for the tribute roster; see appendix 3, addendum to art. 35.) So it is very likely that, insofar as this directive was implemented, there must have been at least an informal peasant representative.

This "representative," however, was not necessarily a small peasant. It was more likely that he was a titled peasant and that if genuine peasant representation by a non-elite peasant was to occur, this had to be achieved by internal pressure, as the following case of Iribuse village (next to Ken's Makibuse) in Kita-Saku district indicates. There, the offices of kumi head and peasant representative had always been filled "since the ancient past" by some of the twenty-four titled peasants. The nontitled peasants, however, had agitated to have some say in who was elected, and they wanted to be candidates for office themselves. In 1760 an agreement was worked out, on bakufu orders, by two officials from villages in the area (see appendix 1 for the text). First, the rule that the kumi head always had to be a nontitled peasant was abolished. However, nontitled peasants could be elected, which must have been a con-

[102] Ibid., 377, 380.<

[103] Ibid., 396.

[104] Sakai refers to three directives in ibid., 397-98. One can be found in TKKz 5:153-54 (no. 2782, art. 10). The others are directives by the Kanto intendant (gundai) Ina Hanjuro^[*] that Sakai found in the Saitama-ken shi: Shiryohen^[*] , vol. 7 (Saitama-ken, 1985), 46, 47.

cession, although the eventual transfer of power from a titled peasant to a nontitled one was still conditioned, it seems, by the willingness of the titled peasant to relinquish his post. Henceforward, however, the nontitled peasants would elect their own representative from among their own ranks.

Thus the genesis of the office of peasant representative was prompted partly by the movement from below whereby peasants insisted on access to crucial information on matters that profoundly affected their material well-being. In order to avoid trouble, the bakufu incorporated their demands by ordering the diffusion of information. Often, we surmise, this information came to be monopolized by the titled peasants. In a further move, then, the nontitled "small" peasants wanted a representative of their class to be the one who checked the village elite's governance.

That power remained with the powerful in the villages should perhaps come as no surprise. For a considerable time, however, the thesis that a small peasantry was established at the beginning of the Tokugawa period has prevented this view from gaining full acceptance. Even though the original stratum of village power holders split into two, some of them becoming salaried vassals, others remaining landed, the two new strata were able to make the transition into the seventeenth century quite successfully. Economic expansion, especially the development of new arable, and political agitation from within the villages, together with the overlords' responses to these developments, modified the traditional power of this old rural elite, which, however, succeeded in reproducing itself well into the eighteenth century and in some cases even until the end of the Tokugawa period.

Analytically speaking, one can refer to those who found themselves in this stratum as an objective class, because they monopolized either economic cure political power (in the beginning) or political power only (later on, when economically they became indistinguishable from "small peasants" in certain regions). When they lost their economic prominence, however, many were able to hold on to their social position by manipulating a special kind of power, namely, that of status. Within the villages, they closed ranks, forming a subjective class, to defend their privilege, a development taken up in the next chapter.

3
Status Power

Samurai fight with weapons, peasants with lawsuits.
Tanaka Kyugu^[*] , 1721

American students of the sociopolitical or socioeconomic (as opposed to the purely demographic or purely economic) side of Tokugawa peasant society have, with the exception of Thomas C. Smith, framed their interpretations within a particular trajectory of peasant protest spanning the whole period. In the first century, overlord domination met resistance by solidary villages. By the nineteenth century, however, interclass confrontation had turned into intraclass struggle within the peasantry, its solidarity now fractured along lines of divergent economic interests.^[1]

This picture of late Tokugawa peasant society is not to be questioned even if these scholars take different positions vis-à-vis class theory. Herbert Bix perceives a growing class struggle, while Stephen Vlastos works with a widened Marxian concept of oppression. William Kelley, on the other hand, does not discuss the early period and firmly rejects any notion of group solidarity to focus on shifting coalitions around temporary interests that cut across economic strata. That these scholars do not seriously engage the notion of social class as such is irrelevant

Epigraph: Tanaka Kyugu^[*] , Minkan seiyo^[*] , 335.

[1] Bix, Peasant Protest ; Burton, "Peasant Struggle"; Irwin Scheiner, "Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants: Rebellion and Peasant Consciousness in Tokugawa Japan," in Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period , 1600- 1868, ed. Tetsuo Najita and Irwin Scheiner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 39-62; Vlastos, Peasant Protests ; James White, "Economic Development and Sociopolitical Unrest in Nineteenth-Century Japan," Economic Development and Cultural Change 37 (1989): 231-59. William Kelley limits his analysis to the nineteenth century in his Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).

for the point I want to make, namely, that they all posit in some way a solidary village at the beginning of the Tokugawa period. Admittedly, the seventeenth century is not the focus of any of these studies, yet one still may raise the question whence and why this image of early village solidarity.

This question is also relevant with regard to the research by Thomas C. Smith, who stands alone in having highlighted, very early, the seventeenth century's great economic discrepancies.^[2] For Smith, looking for the agrarian origins of modern Japan, the seventeenth century as origin of these origins was ultimately far removed from his interests. Moreover, the modernization paradigm within which he was working, although anti-Marxist in one way, shared with economistic Marxism a slighting of political factors. Smith's research agenda led him away from the questions taken up here.

These other scholars took as their subject the most salient features of peasant protest, the ikki, or confrontations of supravillage authority by whole villages or groups of villages. These confrontations occurred only in mid and late Tokugawa. When Anne Walthall and Herbert Bix touch upon intravillage protests, these are predominantly eighteenth-century protests.^[3]

Status and Class—Mutually Exclusive?

Perhaps a more fundamental question underlies the assumption that economic discrepancies as source of class tensions developed only fully in the eighteenth century, turning seventeenth-century villages into communities that either were harmonious or harbored status conflicts, which were considered to be less significant than class conflicts. This question concerns the relationship between class and status and, ultimately, how economic and symbolic matters weigh in on one's scale of reality.

We know that status in Tokugawa Japan was fixed by laws, starting with Hideyoshi's famous Edict Restricting Change of Status and Residence of 1591, which thus created a "society of orders." Actually, that edict did not aim at status as such: its immediate purpose was to secure

[2] Smith, "Japanese Village."

[3] See Anne Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture m Eighteenth-Century Japan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986).

a stable, productive agricultural labor force at home while Japan was engaged in a war abroad. Nevertheless, in combination with the Sword Hunt Edict three years earlier, its sociopolitical effect was the great divide between rulers and ruled, samurai and (mainly) peasants. While this nationwide divide certainly was not without obvious economic underpinnings, namely, a division between producers and extractors of economic surplus, scholars have too readily assumed that it over-determined people's preoccupations and, hence, that all serious conflict centered around the opposition between dominators and dominated, or orders of rulers and commoners.^[4] Status thus subsumed class before the two started to separate, that is, before class divisions as such appeared, which would have occurred only sometime in the eighteenth century.

According to Herbert Bix, "Generally throughout Japan from the 1760s onward, the division of peasants along economic lines was slowly beginning to override their unity along status lines.... One may reasonably hypothesize, therefore, that class and income stratification was starting to introduce distinctions between households, which, in turn, reduced the likelihood that mere status could continue to serve as a firm basis of solidarity."^[5] And Nakane Chie writes that as a result of "the Tokugawa policy," " in theory there was no social differentiation among the households of a village community," but by "the eighteenth century ... differentiation in peasant statuses became common in most villages, resulting in titled farmers (owners) and dependants (tenants)."^[6] Stephen Vlastos, who writes that "the juridically determined social order in which peasants were subsistence agriculturalists, as indeed they were in the early Tokugawa period, bore little relation to functional relationships within the market economy of late Tokugawa—circumstances which profoundly affected conflict and collective action at the end of Tokugawa rule,"^[7] evokes an image of an early peasant class unified by status that developed intraclass conflict only under the impact of a commercial economy.

[4] Bix, Peasant Protest , xvi-xvii, xxvii; Vlastos, Peasant Protests , 11-14, 159, 166-67; Burton, "Peasant Struggle," 138, 151, 166; James White, "Rational Rioters: Leaders, Followers, and Popular Protest in Early Modem Japan," Politics and Society 16, no. 1 (1988): 46-47.

[5] Bix, Peasant Protest , 103, 104; on p. xvii he writes that "the degree of peasant 'classness' tended to increase while their 'statusness' decreased."

[6] Nakane, Kinship , 47, 49.

[7] Vlastos, Peasant Protests , 7-8.

These interpretations contradict the argument presented in chapter z and have two points in common. One, they work within the framework of a legally defined status order, implying that legislation was the only source of status division (which effected class solidarity) and that no further status divisions existed in the village, because of the absence of legislation at that level, assuming, in addition, that villages did not generate status differentials on their own. Two, since the legally defined status of the peasantry gave way to internal class divisions, there were no internal class or social divisions worthy to be referred to as such prior to the development of a market in the eighteenth century.

Class and status are dichotomized historically here, to the point of occupying mutually exclusive sequential positions: status societies are succeeded by class societies.^[8] A quick reading of Max Weber may give that impression, for he is quite explicit in saying that class situations are market situations, while status orders (Stände ) are not, on this point approximating Karl Marx's historical view.^[9]

Class societies are dominated by "functional" interests, the rational dictates of the market, which does not know personal distinction, and stratified through pure relations of property and production, generating classes that are unaware of their shared objective conditions unless they resort to social and political action. Status societies, in contrast, are organized in groups consciously distinguished from one another in terms of social honor, ascriptive privileges, lifestyles, and hence prescriptive modes of consumption that abhor and suppress the purely economic, which is typical of class societies.^[10] In class societies, one may add, the ruling class owns the means of production (and its own means of consumption); in status societies, an elite also directly controls the means of consumption of others through extraeconomic means.

Status, which Weber defines as "an effective claim to social esteem in terms of positive or negative privileges," entails a clear social recognition of belonging, while property and social classes are constituted foremost by objectively shared interests, which may or may not lead to forms of associations. For the sake of completeness, I should further

[8] For a similar dichotomy that has governed scholarship on seventeenth-century France (was it a "society of orders" or a "society of classes"?), see the discussion in Beik, Absolutism , 6-9.

[9] Weber, Economy and Society , 2:927-28.

[10] Ibid., 1:306-7; 2:929-30, 932, 936-38.

note that for Weber, property classes are "determined by property differences," while social classes are constituted by "the totality of those class situations within which individual and generational mobility is easy and typical," class situations being the "typical probability, within a given economic order, of procuring goods, gaining a position in life and finding inner satisfactions."^[11]

Dichotomies, such as that of class and status, are put forth by Weber to construct ideal types that, although mutually exclusive, can serve as flexible, descriptive tools for analyzing social realities, which are always hybrids somewhere between the pure extremes. A closer reading of Weber, therefore, reveals that the ideal types are not essences functioning as monocausal explanations. His thought is more fluid; he thinks in more relational terms.^[12] Weber suggests the following possible relationships between status and class: "Status may rest on class position of a distinct or an ambiguous kind. However, it is not solely determined by it .... Conversely, status may influence, if not completely determine, a class position without being identical with it." And "class distinctions are linked in the most variegated ways with status distinctions. Property as such is not always recognized as a status qualification, but in the long run it is, and with extraordinary regularity." On the relation between power and status, he writes: "Quite generally, 'mere economic' power, and especially 'naked' money power, is by no means a recognized basis of social honor. Nor is power the only basis of social honor. Indeed, social honor, or prestige, may even be the basis of economic power, and very frequently has been."^[13]

Pierre Bourdieu, in his ongoing reflections on the theoretical implications of his own vast research, has spelled out more systematically the various ways in which class and status (in the modern sense rather than the historical sense of orders or estates) are linked and how power and honor can be the basis for each other. Bourdieu has thus developed notions of various types of capital (material, social, cultural, and symbolic) that can be converted into one another, which entails a critique of substantialist thinking and realist views of class. Hence the importance,

[11] Ibid., 1:305, 302.

[12] Pierre Bourdieu stresses the fundamental importance of thinking in terms of relationships rather than essences (see his Logic of Practice , 4; and In Other Words , 40, 126).

[13] Weber, Economy and Society , 1:306; 2:932, 926.

as an analytic starting point for this relational approach, of the notions of field and social space, where people occupy certain positions, through which one "can understand the logic of their practices and determine, inter alia , how they will classify themselves and others and, should the case arise, think of themselves as members of a 'class.'"^[14] Social spaces consist of differential power positions, determined intrinsically by material conditions and relationally by their distinctive distance from other positions. Agents thus identified as sharing common positions constitute only "theoretical classes" and not "groups which would exist as such in reality," unless they are actually organized politically^[15]

This objective truth of social classes has to be supplemented by considering what provides domination the surface of legitimacy that allows relations of exploitation to function as such. This "supplement" (from an objectivist standpoint) is provided by signs of distinction that effect a social misrecognition or, more precisely, at least a socially accepted misrepresentation of those relations. Such signs of distinction function as a rare symbolic capital whereby one distinguishes oneself foremost

[14] Bourdieu, In Other Words , 50; see also 49 and 126. Japanese scholars' discussion concerning status, which centered around Minegishi Kentaro's^[*] articles, some of which he collected in his book Kinsei mibunron , has been hopelessly stock in the kind of realist, reifying perspective Bourdieu criticizes. Bourdieu advises against "questions ... about limits and frontiers" when studying classes (In Other Words , 50), which is precisely what Japanese historians were preoccupied with in the 1980s, according to Minegishi (Kinsei mibunron , 56). In addition, Minegishi argues (13-21) against the Marxist views of two prominent medievalists: Kuroda Toshio's instrumentalist class interpretation of status as a means of "extra-economic coercion" and Ishimoda Sho's^[*] emphasis on the mediation of the state. Takagi Shosaku^[*] (see chap. 2, n. 44) agrees with Minegishi's anticlass stance but emphasizes the role of the state (dissociated from class) in contrast to Minegishi, who argues that the origins of status were social. Recently, Asao Naohiro has pointed out that during the last decade a number of historians have avoided the substantialist dilemmas that framed the earlier debate and started to analyze the flexible and instrumental relationships between status and the evolving world of occupational diversification and competition, in other words, how public sanction of status served interest groups not readily identifiable as classes ("Kinsei no mibun," in MK, 35-38). Class has thus all but disappeared from the discussion of status among Japanese historians.

[15] Bourdieu, In Other Words, 117, 118. The simple distinction between objective and subjective classes proposed by Bourdieu is none other than Marx's classes "in themselves" and "for themselves" or Berreman's "etic" categories and "emic" groups (see Gerald Berreman, "Social Inequality: A Cross-Cultural Analysis," in Social Inequality: Comparative and Developmental Approaches , ed. Berreman [New York: Academic Press, 1981], 18).

from those holding immediately lower positions, whose aspirations constitute a direct threat to one's social identity. "The logic of the symbolic," therefore, "makes absolute 'all or nothing' differences out of infinitesimal differences."^[16] Thus, struggles within social fields will always also be at least (and exclusively, unless the objective conditions are clearly foregrounded) struggles for specific differences to thereby modify one's position within the established and accepted order of classification, an order of legally or customarily institutionalized "indices of consecrations."^[17]

Bourdieu's reflections on class and status are the result of extensive sociological research in modern society, where, as he has noted himself, sumptuary laws do not set legal limits on the deployment of symbolic strategies, as they did in Tokugawa Japan. Nevertheless, what he has to say further about the relation between the two is very helpful for the present study. Status groups, Bourdieu argues, structure their strategies of distinction through a social logic of union and separation, seeking thereby "to make de facto differences permanent and quasi-natural, and therefore legitimate, by symbolically enhancing the effect of distinction associated with occupying a rare position in the social structure"; these strategies are therefore "the self-consciousness of the dominant class."^[18] Hence Bourdieu's critique of Weber, to whom he acknowledges a great debt: "'Status groups' based on a 'life-style' and a 'stylization of life' are not, as Weber thought, a different kind of group from classes, but dominant classes that have denied or, so to speak, sublimated themselves and so legitimated themselves."^[19]

The Great Status Divide

Bourdieu's insights are relevant for the study of the macrosocial space of Tokugawa society and most pointedly for the micro fields of power that

[16] Bourdieu, In Other Words , 136-37; the quotation is from 137.

[17] Ibid., 138. Bourdieu further elaborates on these "indices of consecration" as "objective marks of respect calling for marks of respect, a spectrum of honours which have the effect of manifesting not only social position but also the collective recognition that it is granted by the mere fact of authorizing such a display of its importance."

[18] Ibid.

[19] Ibid., 139. Bourdieu has mentioned and discussed his indebtedness to Weber on numerous occasions; see, for example, ibid., 21, 27-28, 46, 49, 106-7.

were the villages. From this perspective, Tokugawa feudalism's ever-multiplying status stratifications and hierarchies, literally embodied through codes of dress and address attached to hereditary households especially in the dominant class (thereby endlessly split into dominant and dominated fractions), can be seen as defense strategies of particular groups against the aspirations of neighboring groups. Although conceivable and indeed real because realistically possible in the turmoil of the sixteenth century, skipping several rungs on the hierarchy became gradually unthinkable, which strengthened domination in that the range of people's aspirations became more and more circumscribed. Those occupying the intermediary positions would certainly resist such ambitions by people below them.

Status legislation with regard to the peasant class developed over time and aimed mainly at reinforcing the distance between peasants and warriors. Peasants were not allowed to use surnames in public documents or to carry long swords, and they had to wear cotton, dismount when encountering samurai, use respectful forms of address, and so on.^[20] Overlord authority, which through its land surveys had identified certain peasants as "titled peasants," did not differentiate further among this peasant elite except by lifting some of the prohibitions, allowing the use of surnames and the wearing of one sword by peasant officials such as village headmen and village group headmen.

It should be understood that the prohibition was not against having surnames but against using them in public, such as on official documents, and it was not a Tokugawa innovation, since it had existed already in the mid Muromachi period, as a prohibition of 1485 reveals.^[21] And exceptions during the Tokugawa period were perhaps less frequent than one might think.

In the 1820s in Tsuyama domain (Mimasaka province), only 44 commoners from 266 villages were granted the privilege of using their surname; in Katsuyama domain (also in Mimasaka province) only 59 from 106 villages; and in Matsushiro domain (Shinano) only 2 out of 871 village officials were granted the privilege. Moreover, the prohibition on surnames was directed most specifically at peasants. Doctors

[20] Minegishi reports such legislation for clothing in 1628 and for behavior in the 1640s in bakufu territories and in Choshu^[*] domain (Kinsei m ibunron , 114).

[21] Kobayashi Kei'ichiro^[*] , "Shomin no myoji^[*] wa itsu goro kara tsukerareta ka," Nagano , no. 99 (1981): 1-2; see also Sekigawa Chiyomaru, "Shomin no myoji^[*] ni tsuite," ibid., no. 3 (1965): 14-15, 16.

and Shinto priests were exempt, and exceptions made for other commoners seem to have been far more numerous among townspeople than among peasants.^[22]

Overlords identified peasants with the land, rather than the other way around. The peasants' generic (and public) identity was not related to their family, their household, or their lineage, but to the land, an identity that was sometimes inscribed in documents, next to their first name, where, in "sidescript," the size of their field was added, such as "Yohachi^{2.785 koku} ." That this prohibition spilled over, to various degrees at different points, into the "private" sphere is clear from the way documents of religious organizations for the management of festivals or membership lists of confraternities were signed. Only in the mid or late Tokugawa period did all the signatures on some membership lists analyzed by Kobayashi Kei'ichiro^[*] include surnames.^[23] This is an indication that the status markers created by the overlords were being accepted by and large within peasant communities.

As we have seen, the political concerns of seventeenth-century peasants were intravillage divisions rather than the macro divide between samurai and peasants. In the villages the confrontations were between economically and socially neighboring groups, which is where such struggles always take place, as both Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu have pointed out.^[24] In premarket economies, according to Bourdieu, economic power must be partly converted into symbolic capital, "a

[22] Sekigawa, "Shomin no myoji^[*] ," 15.

[23] One complete list, covering the years 1592-1902, of the organizers of a yearly festival at a Hachiman shrine reveals that until 1612 only first names were entered; a few surnames were included in some years between 1613 and 1669, when the list reverts back to first names for the next eighty years; and after 1748 all signatures include surnames. A Koshin^[*] confraternity list (1693 to the present) includes the surnames of all its members starting in 1858 (Kobayashi, "Shomin no myoji^[*] ," 3).

[24] As Weber put it, "It is not the rentier, the share-holder, and the banker who suffer ill will of the worker, but almost exclusively the manufacturer and the business executives who are the direct opponents of workers in wage conflicts. This is so in spite of the fact that it is precisely the cash boxes of the rentier, the share-holder, and the banker into which the more or less unearned gains flow, rather than into the pockets of the manufacturers or of the business executives" (Economy and Society , 2:931). And Bourdieu writes that "minimum objective distance in social space can coincide with maximum subjective distance. This is partly because what is 'closest' presents the greatest threat to social identity, that is, differences (and also because the adjustment of expectations to real chances tend to limit subjective pretensions to the immediate neighborhood)" (Logic of Practice , 137)

legitimate possession grounded in the nature of its possessor," or symbolic power, "the power to secure recognition of power," before it is accepted as legitimate by those subjected to it.^[25] In Tokugawa villages this symbolic capital, grounded in but not identical to material conditions, consisted of status and was largely generated and manipulated from within.^[26]

"Shared" Communities

Several times in chapter 2 we came across various ways of dividing power, tribute, corvée, and so on, within the village. Households were corvée households (yakuya) or not, and some were only half so (hanyakunin). Official obligations could be distributed per household (iewari , tsurawari ), per assessed yield (takawari , tanwari ), or as combinations thereof. Every household (ie) had some share of privileges and burdens. A good part of village life was literally a matter of "shares," kabu . Tokugawa villages were "shared" communities to a very high degree, making them probably quite unique.

This term conveys well, through a concrete image, the concept behind this structure. Kabu literally means "stump" or "roots" of a tree or plant, and kabuwake means "dividing roots (shares)," as when one separates the roots of a plant into parts so that it can multiply and be divided further into share portions or recombined into bundles. Kabu is a quantitative and combining form that could also be, and was, applied to nonmaterial things such as status and power. (Modern stockholding companies, kabushiki kaisha , deal in shares or stocks, kabushiki .)

The concept of shares, while seemingly modern, is intimately related to the "refeudalized" setup of the early Tokugawa period, when over-

[25] 25. Bourdieu presents this argument in "Modes of Domination," chap. 8 of his Logic of Practice (122-34); the quotations are from 129 and 131.

[26] Smith mentions both class and status when writing about the great contrasts in seventeenth-century villages, and he says that the documents leave "little doubt concerning the general picture of inequality among holdings .... Not infrequently we encounter peasant holdings that can only be described as estates." He goes on to say that it is "not surprising that such extremes of wealth and poverty among hyakusho^[*] of the village were accompanied by marked social distinctions." There were, he says, "two distinct economic classes among the peasantry," and "not infrequently the existence of distinct economic classes in the village was explicitly acknowledged" ("Japanese Village," 266, 268 and n. 28).

lords established villages as tribute units for a certain quota of produce, goods, and services based on the village kokudaka, or assessed yield. Although land cadasters and population registers recorded individual plots and the people on them, the yearly tribute expected by the overlords was the village quota. This relieved the rulers from keeping track of the ever-shifting land, population, and relations between the two within villages. They did not want to deal with the complex effects of time and change. Consequently, villages were left to deal with this reality on their own.

For the peasants, in other words, cadasters and registers were outdated almost as soon as they were compiled: households multiplied or died out, acquired or lost land; new fields were developed, others abandoned; changing weather conditions resulted in average or bumper crops, or total or partial crop failures. All these variations had to be juggled locally in a coordinated effort to produce the fixed quota (which only rarely was adjusted downward in bad years), in much the same way that factory workers have to adjust their schedules, breaks, sleeping, gestures, postures, and breathing to the set production quota at the fixed speed of the conveyer belt. A coordinated group effort is essential in such systems.

In the beginning, villages had to struggle with the discrepancy between real conditions and productivity expectations without any directives from above. Then, most of the nengumenjo^[*] , the yearly village tax bills, simply included the total amount due and the order that (1) all of it be forwarded after a meeting of "the headman, the elders, the small peasants, and outsiders who owned land in the village," and (2) "since the rate (men ) is a global one for the whole village (souke^[*] ) and it is natural that some peasants go bankrupt or abscond, the community make up the forfeited amount."^[27] The question thus faced every year was how to effect an equalization (domen, jinarashi , literally, "land

[27] Mizumoto discusses these intravillage adjustments in pt. 2, chap. 2, and pt. 3, chap. 2, of his Mura shakai. The following discussion, however, is based on Nishiwaki Yasushi's study of Niremata village, Anbachi district, Mino province (in what today is Gifu prefecture) (see "Kinsei zenki no nengu sanyo^[*] to 'mura' chitsujo: 'Narashi' sanyo^[*] o meguru murakata sodo^[*] no bunseki o toshite^[*] ," Shikan , no. 106 [1982]: 19-39 [hereafter "Nengu sanyo^[*] "]; and "Kinsei zenki Mino Waju^[*] chiiki no 'kono^[*] ' to sonraku: Bakuryo^[*] Anbachi-gun Nirematamura ni okeru kisoteki bunseki," Gifu shigaku , no. 76 [1982]: 41-82 [hereafter "Mino Waju^[*] "]. The quotation, from a directive of 1621 by an intendant's assistant (tedai), is taken from idem, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," 20.

exemption," "land equalization") of this burden among all members of the village, which, if for no other reasons, thereby became a community with vital interests at stake, in other words, a matter of sharing.

There were two alternatives: either to apply a new rate to each plot according to its officially assessed grade to produce the supplementary tribute necessary for meeting the village quota or to check the actual harvest of each field and allocate tribute accordingly within or without the framework of graded fields. The latter practice, devised by the peasants, was ultimately sanctioned by law in the mid 1620s (in the district studied by Nishiwaki Yasushi, on whose research I rely). The tax bills ordered equalization based on the actual harvest and according to the grades of the arable.^[28] The bakufu thus incorporated into its policy peasant practice that in fact was dealing with the shortcomings of the kokudaka system. This was one way in which the original system was supplemented by new directives to make adjustments for changes that inevitably occurred over time.

The amounts involved were sometimes considerable. In a village studied by Mizumoto, the village as a whole was 34 percent under par in 1623, but the individual fields' shortfalls varied greatly from a low of 9 percent to a high of 77 Percent.^[29] It is not hard to imagine the tensions this produced within the village, tensions between villagers and the headman (especially in the early period, when the headman monopolized both precise knowledge and decision-making powers) as well as between tenants and landowners (because landowners and not the tenants paid the tribute for rental parcels).^[30] And yet, each year there was a deadline to be met.

[28] Nishiwaki, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," 21-24. Besides the two alternatives mentioned in the Niremata documents, there actually existed a third one, which was practiced widely elsewhere: jiwari , or redistribution of the land (without changing the proportion of the total acreage held by each household). Often (but not only) applied when land was lost as a result of floods or other natural disasters, the land in the village was redistributed—sometimes by village initiative, sometimes by overlord order—only once or regularly at intervals of several decades. Unlike earlier scholars, Aono Shunsui considers this system an integral part of the Tokugawa murauke system (see his Nihon kinsei warichiseishi no kenkyu^[*] [Yuzankaku^[*] , 1982], 14-18). In some locales, this system operated until the 1950s (KDJ 7:769, s.v. "jiwariseido"). For the only discussion of the system in English, for Kaga domain, see Brown, Central Authority , 94-112.

[29] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 41-43.

[30] Ibid., 52-63. In Saku district, Shinano province, tenants usually paid two-thirds of the harvest to their landlords, retaining one-third for themselves (Ichikawa Takeji, "Saku chiho^[*] ni okeru reizoku nomin^[*] 'kakaebyakusho^[*] ' no jittai," Nagano , no. 128 [1986]: 15).

Initially, the bakufu had a simple way of dealing with those peasants who fell in arrears: it took their land, gave it to someone who could pay the tribute share, and banished the culprits. We find such measures both in intendants' directives of 1640 ("transfer the land") and in bakufu rules for villages issued in 1642 ("banishment").^[31] With the famines and crop failures of the 1640s threatening the very existence of many small landholders, however, the bakufu reversed course and instituted its famous policies to protect the "small peasants" from bankruptcy: it required, among other things, that all peasants approve the tax distribution by affixing their seal, instituted a system of receipts for payment of tribute, and forbade the sale of land.^[32]

Mizumoto has heralded these equalizing village practices as victories by peasants for the causes of justice and equity, especially against the arbitrary rule of headmen, and they generally were.^[33] In order to indicate, however, how local conditions made such struggles very complicated, and their immediate outcome at times less than an emancipation of small landholders, we shall follow in some detail Nishiwaki's case study of one such struggle in Niremata village, Mino province (Gifu prefecture).

Factious Peasants: Niremata, 1654

There are various overlapping dimensions to this case in Niremata village: struggles of elders to participate in village government, tensions resulting from the uneven impact of a drought on the harvest, a consolidation of lineage power, and an attempt to split the village into two. A partial apportioning of well water during the drought of 1654 had mixed results in Niremata. Upland fields could not be irrigated and thus

[31] Nishiwaki, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," 22. For the bakufu directive, see TKKz 5:155 (no. 2784, art. 8).

[32] The famous prohibition on the sale of land was issued in 1643/3 (TKKz 4:121 [no. 2104, art. 3], 5:157 [no. 2786, art. 13]). For an English translation of this important law, see David John Lu, Sources of Japanese History , 2 vols. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), 1:206-7. For a discussion of the law, see Oishi^[*] , Kyoho^[*]kaikaku , 9-43. The requirements of seals and receipts were legislated in 1644 (TKKz 4:122 [no. 2105, arts. 14, 15]).

[33] Mizumoto, Mura shakai , 45, 56-60.

registered a serious crop loss. A denied request for a tax cut was followed by a request for an on-the-spot survey, addressed to the intendant's assistant (tedai) in charge of crop inspections. In this request the peasants promised either to accept and pay in full whatever lower amounts the inspector would set or, if the inspector did not act, to lower the tribute on the affected fields themselves and make up the deficit by additional levies from fields that had escaped damage from the drought. The inspector saw no reason to lower tribute rates, and so the trouble began.

A faction formed around Genzo^[*] (with 28 koku, only 5 less than the headman), the second largest landholder and one of the four kumi heads (there was also an elder). Niremata had a kokudaka of 526 koku and counted thirty-five resident landholders, eighteen of whom were independent tribute payers.^[34] Genzo's^[*] faction held a total of some 120 koku. His followers tore up the agreement, insisting that tribute and corvée for the overlord be allocated across the board according to the regular rate regardless of losses. The other faction, led by the elder, the other three kumi heads, and the headman (the author of the agreement), was forced to borrow cash in various places to meet the village quota.

Around harvest time, in the tenth month, Genzo's^[*] faction wanted to split off from the village altogether and have its own headman, storehouse for tribute rice, runners, and so on. The intendant's assistant agreed only to partition the existing storehouse, providing two separate entrances, but Genzo^[*] rebelled: he destroyed the storehouse, scattered its instruments, stored the rice of his followers in his own granary, and again applied to secede. The headman argued that there was opposition from all the peasants because of the increase in administrative costs. Ultimately, the village split into two Kumi (not to be confused with the kumi of five-household groups) (see table 11).

Obviously, those who suffered losses beyond the village's average would benefit most from an adjustment of tribute amounts per field based on the actual condition of each field. These lowered amounts would be supplemented by others, who would pay above their normal share. We cannot know whether the secession drive was fueled by the uneven distribution of crop losses among the two factions, for we only have data on the headman's group (see fig. 3).

[34] Nishiwaki, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," 24-38.

It is worth noting, however, that all thirteen landholdings on Genzo's^[*] side were 15 koku (one) or less (the other twelve), while the headman's group included, besides some twenty-one peasants in that category, all four large holders of the village excluding Genzo^[*] (with 19, 20, 24, and 33 koku, the last one the headman's). Losses in the headman's faction

Fig. 3.
Crop Loss per Holding Size in Niremata's Headman's Kumi, 1654

Source: Nishwaka, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," table 3 (P. 29).

averaged 13.3 percent of the quota.^[35] As it turns out, sixteen households (among whom there were nine dependents) had losses above the average, and nineteen households (including eight dependents, among whom were the only three that had no losses) had losses below the average. The bulk of the "small" peasants (seventeen out of twenty-two

[35] Aono (Warichiseishi , 18, 51) estimates that if any adjustment of over 10 percent was needed to bring the actual yield in line with the putative yield, then a proportional distribution of the burden based on the land cadasters became irrational. Then villages had to resort to an equalization (based on an internal land survey they conducted themselves), or levy a fee per bale (todai , "a fee per to [one tenth of a koku or 18 liters]"), or, ultimately, perform a redistribution of land (jiwari).

households, with 5 to 15 koku) had less than average losses, but all six "very small" holders, of less than 5 koku (five of whom were dependents), lost more than the average (excluding one who had no losses).

What can we learn from this hard-to-follow detail? Its relevance has to do with the way tribute was paid: only independent landholders paid it, including the portion of their dependent holders' parcels if they had dependents. In the present case this applied mostly to landholders of over 15 koku, especially the larger landholders, among whom are the village officials. Six out of the seven such landholders in the headman's faction, it is worth noting, were also among those who suffered above average losses. While very small and small peasants undoubtedly could be ruined by a crop failure averaging only 13 percent (one holder of 1.9 koku registered a 52 percent loss; another of 4.4 koku, one of 42 percent), it was the large holders who lost most in absolute terms, since they also shouldered their dependents' tribute payments. Hence it was the large landholders who stood to gain most from a tax formula that supplemented their shortfalls with extra contributions from those with lesser losses, that is to say, from the "small peasants," who were mostly autonomous and without any dependents themselves. The loss of this stratum of small peasants alone constituted 38 percent of the headman's faction's total loss.

From a rational economic point of view, one may thus hypothesize that the wealthier peasants, led by the headman, sought to defend their interests through a tax formula that was most beneficial to themselves because it made the small independent peasants shoulder the burden. From this view also, Genzo^[*] would then represent the plight of the small peasants, which makes one wonder why more small peasants did not side with Genzo^[*] .

Before we turn to this question, a few observations are in order. This is a good illustration of how extramural authority affected village politics through the sheer mechanism of the village tribute quota. Weather conditions affected individual peasants unevenly, but the adjustment was communal, which in turn brought about a new unevenness, this one, however, the result of human decisions. While ultimately the overlords were the enemy, the immediate target of these struggles was within the village, where greater or lesser fairness could be achieved. And finally, the factions that formed were not mere collections of autonomous individuals differentiated only by holding size. The partic-

ular relation between dependents and their bosses in matters of tribute payments gave a special character to these factions.

Villages were structured by what one can call "lineages," although these were not exclusively blood lineages, since non-kin were among its members. Cognates were often set up as branch houses with various degrees of autonomy with regard to title to land. Even when they became independent, however, tribute-paying landholders remained tied to the main house through various obligations. Bond servants (nago, genin, and fudai, about which more will be said later) were even more dependent, even if they worked specific parcels of the main house land almost as if they owned them. This dependency related very concretely to the use of tools, equipment, and so on, but also to access to fertilizer, which in the early Tokugawa period was secured almost exclusively by cutting grass on the mountainsides. This access was not free. Not that extraordinary fees had to be paid—they were very modest—but this also was a matter of shares. And these shares were controlled by the lineages. Indeed, if one was not a member of a lineage, one could not have access to the mountains for fertilizer, wood, and so on. Outside the lineage there was no way to survive.

Genzo's^[*] village, Niremata, counted three lineages: the headman's, one headed by one of the kumi heads, and one headed by Genzo^[*] . Genzo's^[*] holding was second to the headman's and far larger than that of any of his lineage members. When Genzo^[*] decided to secede, he certainly had ambitions of becoming a headman in his own right, but his following was limited to his own lineage. The dispute over tribute allocation was thus used by Genzo^[*] as an occasion to play out lineage rivalries and increase his own power by adding to it the official dimension of a headmanship.^[36]

Lineage cohesion was often reinforced ritually through ancestor worship, by members' belonging to the same ancestral Buddhist temple for annual or memorial rites for the dead. Niremata is an exemplary case of such practice. There were three temples in the village, one for each

[36] One should recall that lineages were not sanctioned, either negatively or positively, by higher authority. For the overlords, the only official subdivision of the village was into kumi of five households, each with its own head. The authorities, however, may well have aimed at breaking lineage power indirectly, since intendants often required that kumi be organized strictly on a contiguous geographic basis; that is, they should not include just "kith and kin" (Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 25, 33. See also article 1 of the goningumi rules for Shimo-Sakurai village in Kita-Saku district [Shinano] of I640 in appendix 2).

lineage: temple and lineage membership overlapped almost perfectly (only few households belonged to outside temples), even to the point that at the time of the split into two Kumi the two blood-related households of Genzo's^[*] group who shared the same temple as the headman defected to the headman's Kumi.^[37] This triggered a stern warning from Genzo^[*] that any further defections would result in the confiscation of the property by his Kumi! Effective or not, this threat illustrates the kind of power lineages presumed to wield even in matters of landownership.

Why did Genzo^[*] choose this moment to secede? The number and composition of Niremata's neighborhood kumi was not stable in the 1630s and 1640s: there were five in 1630, ten in 1634, and five again in 1641. It appears that while certain of these kumi were made up of lineage members only between 1638 and 1669, the smallest of the three lineages, Genzo's^[*] (who had been an elder and then kumi head all along), was dispersed over several kumi until 1649.^[38] In that year, however, he was registered as head of a kumi in which all but one of the members of his lineage were gathered. The secession group that formed a separate Kumi five years later was thus nothing else but a singlelineage kumi. As in the case of Makibuse village in chapter 1, as well as in the case of Kodaira below, the bakufu rule concerning kumi formation seems to have been widely ignored, seriously affecting intravillage authority relationships.

The secession petition was signed not only by the five full members of Genzo's^[*] kumi: it bore sixteen signatures. Thus, within the secession move the voices of those without full political membership in the village suddenly became important, and to that extent the power of their leader and lineage head can be said to have been conditioned by their assent. It is clear, however, that such "emancipation" of dependents was circumscribed by lineage control of the lives of its members. This is also evident if one compares the kumi membership list with the population register (shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] ). Dependents do not figure at all on the first list, but they are marked as such on the second. On the latter their status as kerai , or vassals of their patron households, is clearly indicated. Thus the population registers, a neutral recording device in the eyes of the overlords, came to be used not only to record people but also to make their status official.

[37] Nishiwaki, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," 34, 35.

[38] Ibid., tables 7 and 8 (pp. 36, 37); idem, "Mino Waju^[*] ," 44.

Fractioned Peasants: Niremata, 1615-1680

A document of 1651 lists 33-7 titled peasants in Niremata. What could be the meaning of a fraction of a peasant? Here we face again the operation of shares, this time shares in the status of "titled peasant." Such a fractioned status, however, was not instituted by the higher authorities.

Niremata's household register (iekazu aratamecho^[*] ) of 1635 reflects the overlords' perspective.^[39] It lists 30 ie: 18 titled peasants and 12 "others," which include the headman, three temples, and a tobacco cutter, among others. This document, addressed by the headman to the intendant, is an official report of Niremata's corvée capacity. Another document, of 1651, lists a total of 42 ie (an increase of 40 percent over sixteen years), 33.7 of which owed corvée: 26 titled peasants and 16 others who held fractions (of 30, 50, 60, and 70 percent) of titled peasant shares with a total value of 7.7 shares, making a grand total of 33.7 titled peasants.^[40] This document is an internal village document addressed by the five elders to the headman concerning the distribution of corvée due to the overlord. Some of these corvée-owing families were among those listed separately sixteen years earlier as "others." Many of the new full or fractional titled peasants were recently established branch families (with or without blood ties to their main families). The distribution of the required corvée among these ie reflects the village's adjustment to the establishment of new autonomous landholders.

The population registers (shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] ) record this trend: between 1638 and 1646 all small landholders, even those of nonblood dependents (genin), are listed as independent units. From 1649 on, however, the genin are dropped, and we find only extended families listed. How does one make sense of these shifting ways of recording households, first as dependent (1635), then as independent (I638-46), and then again as dependent (1649)? This does not fit the pattern of gradual and progressive emancipation of dependents as a result of economic circumstances that Smith's description in his Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan leads one to expect.

[39] Nishiwaki, "Mino Waju^[*] ," 43-44.

[40] These figures are not computed from Nishiwaki's "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," tables 2, 4, and 5 (PP. 28, 31, 32), which would lead to slightly different numbers; instead, they are taken from his "Mino Waju^[*] ," 43.

We get a first clue from two population registers from 1646 that differ in two major respects: none of the figures in the two documents are the same, and only one of the two hears a seal. This is an example of double bookkeeping. One register was destined for extramural eyes , namely, the intendant's, and was thus an official document; the other was for intramural use , reflecting genuine practice. The former lists 26 ie grouped in five kumi with a population of 224, the latter 41 real ie divided among eight kumi with a population of 267.

Nishiwaki explains the discrepancy as follows: the village under-represented by fifteen the number of landholders in order to avoid an increase in tribute, especially corvée, which was assigned per ie, distributing this corvée among all the households, even those not registered as official tribute units. This created an ambivalent situation for newly established small holders. If they became full-blown titled peasants, their tax burden would increase, but with it would come full political membership. On the other hand, the titled peasants of old could only lessen their corvée burden by setting up small landholders to share this burden. The compromise was to limit the number of titled peasants but grant branch houses fractions of a "title," perhaps increasing the fraction as time went by and they became economically more secure, until they were "fully vested."

The bakufu was caught between two contradictory policies. On the one hand, especially after the famines and crop failures of the early 1640s, it had to help small landholders survive, which implied establishing them as autonomous tribute producers, as they were recorded on the land cadasters (the survey of 1623 showed fifty-two peasants, 30 percent of whom had holdings of less than five koku).^[41] On the other hand, the real tribute payers were the wealthier peasants, those in the 10-30 koku bracket, to whom many of the smaller peasants were attached in some form of dependency. Nishiwaki's analysis of which bracket of holders held the highest percentage of taka (and hence produced the most tribute) in Niremata between 1637 and 1684 reveals an interesting pattern (see table 12). Before the 1630s the percentage of those with less than ten koku gradually increased to 13 percent. This trend was then interrupted during the crisis decade of the 1640s, when it dropped to between 3 and 7 percent. It picked up again in 1648, when it jumped to 35 percent, and it did not drop below 30 percent for

[41] Nishiwaki, "Mino Waju^[*] ," table 7 (52).

the next forty years, except in 1653, when it was 12 percent, and 1684, when it was 16 percent.

This curve seems to reflect the slow growth of small landholders, interrupted by the natural disasters of the 1640s, and their subsequent resurgence, perhaps as a result of bakufu policies. The question is, what happened to them during the half-decade or so when they disappeared from the statistics, and what was behind the sudden jump in 1648? The answer to the first question is simple: many of the small landholders were reabsorbed into their parent households. The larger members of the lineage tided them over during the bad years. This is one instance where one can observe, not an irreversible "emancipation" of dependents, but a circular movement whereby "independent" holders, in various ways still in need of the support of their parent households, returned to a position of full dependency.^[42] It is important to note,

[42] For instances of movement back and forth between the status of fully dependent bond servant (genin) and house-owning lifelong servant (fudai), and between the status of fudai and yakunin and back to fudai over two generadons, see Minegishi, Kinsei mibunron , 142-46.

however, that during this period far more non-kin than kin dependents were set up as independent branch houses. In other words, although non-kin dependents were "treated as kin," they seem to have been left to their own devices in times of crisis.^[43]

This practice of absorbing small units into larger ones went directly counter to the intendant's policy of establishing small independent landholders. This is clear from the difference between two tax rosters (menwaricho^[*] ) submitted to the intendant ten days apart, which explains the sudden jump in the numbers of small holders. The first roster, dated 1648/11/11, listing the names of twenty-nine tribute owners with their individual assessed values, was obviously returned by the intendant to be replaced by a second roster, dated 1648/11/21, which was almost twice as long, listing fifty-two names.^[44] Although the total villageassessed value and the number of its tribute payers is the same on both lists, the second list certainly reflects the intendant's effort to identify, and thereby perhaps empower, the individual tribute producers and increase the number of households available for corvée.

The additional producers on the new list were overwhelmingly family members, especially direct descendants: thirteen sons and grandsons, two brothers, and two servants (genin). This does not mean that they were independent, because the original parent families continued to use their own seals for them on official documents. Neither were they all small owners: the headman's 72 koku of the first list was broken down on the second into 33 koku for himself, 23 for his son, 13 for his grandson, and z for a bond servant. It is among these new additions, however, that the "fractional peasants" appear. For example, the servant (incidentally, the younger brother of a 13-koku holder) is a 0.3 titled peasant; two others, with 8 and 10 koku, are both 0.7 titled peasants.^[45]

[43] In 1644 there were thirteen branch households in Niremata, eleven of which were not related by kinship to their main households (nine had no holdings). Smith (Agrarian Origins 15 ff.), among others, stresses the fictional kin relationship that servants had with their masters' families and that they "were often maintained by virtue of an obligation w keep them rather than for strictly economic reasons" (29).

[44] For the two lists, see Nishiwaki, "Mino Waju^[*] ," table 13 (64).

[45] Data computed from ibid., table 15 (64); and idem, "Nengu sanyo^[*] ," table 5 (32).

These gradations reflect to some degree holding size, although as many as nine fully titled peasants had smaller holdings than that of a 0.7 peasant, and also degrees of dependency to the main house as well as shares in political power. This status was not reflected on the tax rosters, but on the population rosters, where most of these peasants were also recorded as heya-sumi , or "living in a room" (of the main family).

Although the authorities recognized any taka holder as a peasant, they ultimately came to recognize, via the population registers, the lineage-based hierarchy among holders within the village. Here the trend was to cap the number of full-status peasants (eighteen in 1651; fifteen two years later; then fourteen; and finally thirteen in 1669), limit the number of official branch houses and restrict these to kin, and ultimately, in 1684, to absorb newcomers into the village (mainly craftsmen and nonpeasants) within the lineage framework explicitly as retainers. Only in the 1680s was the status of branch families as autonomous units acknowledged within the village.^[46] By 1684 the heya-sumi category had disappeared, as had all extended families (see table 13).

The Niremata case illustrates the impact of population growth on village life in seventeenth-century Japan: how the village adjusted its internal social and political structure and how this adjustment had to take into account the overlord's own reactions to this growth and, in a feedback movement, to the village adjustments to his reactions. The political, social, and economic status of new households shifted several times over a sixty- to seventy-year period. Let us now closely follow an effort by some dependents to change their status.

From Tribute Producers to Tribute Payers: Shimo-Kaize, 1687

Peasants were hierarchized according to degrees of autonomy, as Thomas C. Smith reported in the first chapters of his book. Titled peasants with extended households had a number of dependents aside from kin: lifelong servants (fudai), without separate living quarters and mostly single; and bond servants (genin), with or without separate living

[46] Data are from Nishiwaki, "Mino Waju^[*] ," tables 10, 13, and 17 (56, 59, 78).

quarters, single or married, with or without a plot more or less their own. One step above them were semiautonomous branch houses (kadoya), which were servants set up in a separate "dwelling," or shack. These structures, often located at the entrance to the compound, quite commonly were no more than hole dwellings with a pointed, thatched umbrella roof reaching to the ground, identical to prehistoric Yayoi dwellings. Also considered as dependents were indentured servants, who were almost always unmarried. Extended families set up

branch households (bunke or kakae) as titled peasants or not. They all remained incorporated into a lineage structure.

The ladder of emancipation and prestige extended through the various ranks of bond servants to semi- and fully established branch houses, titled peasants, and eventually patron household if one established one's own branch family within the old lineage, or beyond if one broke off from it to establish a separate one. Much of this classification was based on ownership of house and land, but ownership was a very fuzzy notion, as we shall see. Additional factors intervened. One was status, which was not unambiguously connected with economic wealth. A second factor was political power in the village as lodged in the village council and the lineages. A third was whether or not one paid one's tribute portion of the village quota directly or not.

All these factors interacted, and there were no strict rules that applied automatically. Moreover, if tradition or custom were invoked, the question often became whether or not the particular norm applied, as Wittgenstein has acutely observed. Hence, disputes led frequently to suits settled either through conciliation, often by Buddhist priests and elders from neighboring villages, or by an intendant. The supporting data in these suits were official documents. Composed for the lordly purposes of controlling population and extracting economic surpluses, these documents were used politically within the villages in status disputes.

Disputes concerning status, position, and hence power in the village as expressed in these documents often had a certain degree of urgency added to them when one party refused to sign the population register that was just about to be turned over to the intendant (as we saw in Ken's case, in chapter 1). The refusal to sign under one's entry because of the status attached to it drew the higher authorities into these disputes. The examples of this strategy that follow are from the eastern part of Shinano province, mostly from the Kita-Saku district.

The first case is a lawsuit from Shimo-Kaize (1687-88) submitted to the intendant by three plaintiffs, Tokubei, Kichibei, and Hikozaemon, against their patron, Hanbei, concerning their disputed status as fully established branch houses (kakaeya) or semiautonomous branch houses (kadoya). There are six documents: the original suit; an official written response, which the defendant was invited to submit to the intendant according to custom; and four additional recorded testimonies (kuchi-

gaki ) by the headman, the tided peasants, and other witnesses, the last three dated eight months after the suit was initiated.^[47] The texts that follow are edited translations, modified for clarity.

1. Tokubei, Kichibei, and Hikozaemon's suit (1687/7/11)

1. In past years, we were recorded every year in the population and kumi register as Hanbei's fully established branch houses (kakaeya ), but this year Hanbei registered us according to a new procedure as [only] semiestablished branch houses (kadoya ). We had a conference with Hanbei and told him that we would not affix our seal to the registers unless we were entered as kakaeya as in the past. Then the headman and the village council urged us to affix our seal; otherwise if the entries were changed, the rosters could not be presented to the shogunal authorities [in time]. Since we did not wish to go as far as to cause trouble to the authorities, we affixed our seals.

Twice we went to the higher officials about our registration in the population roster as kadoya, and we explained our ancestry to them. They suggested that Hanbei change the entries back to kakaeya. Now, because of the selfish (wagamama ) behavior of Hanbei, we request to change kumi away from Hanbei. Please summon him and communicate our request.

2. The three plaintiffs and the defendant share a common "ancestor" three generations back through their "great-grandfather," Umanosuke [the three plaintiffs were related through Umanosuke's adopted son, originally the son of an uncle (see fig. 4)]. When Umanosuke retired, he gave half of his 44 koku to his son Goemon, keeping the other half for himself. At his death in 1645, this latter portion was divided into three between Tokuzaemon (Goemon's son), Shige'emon (Umanosuke's adopted son), and Shin'emon (Umanosuke's son by a woman other than his wife). This was witnessed by two villagers (Daitokuin and Chuemon^[*] ) and a peasant from the new branch village (Jiroemon^[*] ).

3. Shiroemon^[*] and Bun'emon were at Umanosuke's funeral, but all memorial services down to the thirty-third year were conducted by the three inheritors (Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and Shin'emon), to which people in the village can testify. Now, Hanbei, in his selfish manner, maintains that because we are within the (undivided) 44 kokudaka, we are only kadoya. But Bun'emon, Shiroemon^[*] , Shige'emon, Shin'emon, and Tokuzaemon, all five of them (individually), have a part of this 44 koku and have contributed the yearly tribute and corvée separately according to their taka.

[47] The six documents of this case can be found m NAK-KS2 (1): 946-52 (no. 476). The first three are also reprinted in Aoki Koji^[*] , Hennen hyakusho^[*]ikki shiryo^[*]shusei^[*] , 17 vols. (San'ichi shobo^[*] , 1979-93), 1:568-71.

Fig. 4.
Umanosuke's Lineage, Shimo-Kaize, 1630s-1680s

^a present at Umanosuke's funeral m 1645

^b inheritors of Umanosuke's 22 koku and sponsors of all memorial services

Note: Based on the plaintiffs' argument in paragraphs z and 3 of their suit.
Some data in this chart, especially the relationship of the plaintiffs to the lineage,
were challenged later in the sum Moreover, Shin'emon had a son by
the same name. Bracketed numbers represent koku.

We testify to the truth of the above and request that Shin'emon and Tokuzaemon be summoned and that you inquire with them about this matter, and that you summon Hanbei and reach a decision.

1687/11
Shige'emon's children from Kami-Kaize,
Tokubei
Kichibei
Hikozaemon

The plaintiffs build their argument about their status as full-fledged branch houses on genealogy, or more properly linealogy (as we shall see via Shige'emon), and on the performance of memorial services. They maintain (against Hanbei) that the original estate was divided into separate tribute units. Thus, as "children" of one of the owners (Shi-ge'emon), they cannot be considered Hanbei's dependents (kadoya). As full branch houses, they would not be on an equal footing with Hanbei, their patron, but as such they certainly would be full lineage members in their own right.

Hanbei's counterargument in the reply requested by the intendant follows. He opens with an attack on the alleged linealogy and responds to the allegations one by one in great detail. Without the necessary local knowledge of the kin and power relations, which constituted an invisible subtext, the detail must have been as confusing for the intendant as it is for us. Reading Hanbei's reply, one can thus put oneself without much effort into the sandals of the intendant; reader positions are always distant ones, though not always equidistant.

2. Hanbei's Response to the Intendant (1687/12/4)

1. Re : The reasons why the three plaintiffs are [only] kadoya. Their grandfather was Bunzo^[*] [and not Umanosuke], who had an older brother, Bunshiro^[*] . My great-grandfather Umanosuke bought them as lifelong bond servants (fudai ), and hence they were supposed to serve him forever. However, because they had served since their youth, they sued for their freedom, which was granted them, and so they were established under Umanosuke as his kadoya. In addition Umanosuke gave them the land they had brought under cultivation during their service years. Bunshiro's^[*] corvée obligation as kadoya was twenty days of labor every month; Bunzo's^[*] was fifteen. Bunshiro^[*] married Tsuru, one of Umanosuke's bond servants [gejo , the term for a female genin], having two daughters by her: Miya, who left Umanosuke's household to work in a temple when Umanosuke's wife died, and Musu, who bought her freedom with cash and married someone from another place. When Bunshiro^[*] died, he gave his land m Bunzo^[*] , who became a kadoya.

2. This year, at the transplanting of the rice seedlings (taue ), only Kisaburo's^[*] [another recalcitrant kadoya, who was not one of the three plaintiffs] and Tokubei's wives showed up, while they themselves did not come and help [as they should have as kadoya]. So I went to Chuemon^[*] , the headman, to officially request that he inform the higher authorities and seek a decision, to which Chuemon^[*] replied m wait until he got more information about the matter. After some postponement, Chuemon^[*] , Zenzaemon, and Heizaemon [the headman and two village officials, presumably] communicated that the men in question offered their apologies for not showing up at the transplanting of the rice. The same three officials also offered some sake with their own apologies, which I accepted, and I was asked to forget the whole thing, which I did.

3. To record them as kadoya is not a new practice. In 1644, under intendant X [named], the population registers and household rosters recorded Yaemon [?] as Umanosuke's kadoya and Shige'emon as Shiroemon's^[*] . [Here Shige'emon, of crucial importance to the plaintiffs, is argued by Hanbei to have been a kadoya, certainly not on an equal footing with the other four inheritors of the estate.] These documents, written by Daitokuin with all seals of the village attached after a full

meeting, list the division of fields. The following year, Umanosuke passed away, but because Shiroemon^[*] was a grandson-in-law, he could not inherit the kadoya [Shige'emon, who had been his kadoya thus far].

Subsequently, under three different intendants [named], the entries are still kadoya, but as headman [Hanbei had been headman, as Umanosuke had been] I had difficulties with that. In the current population register submitted to the intendant, there are also kakaeya entries. However, given the fact that these persons are in that situation [of dependency toward me] and cannot but obey me, ultimately it does not matter how they are registered.

Now, you may ask, why [after just saying that the label does not matter] I registered them, nevertheless, on this year's registers as kadoya. The reason is as follows. A decision was made in the village council to [upgrade and] register as kakaeya relatives (uncles, brothers, etc.) of full kumi members [only titled peasants were full kumi members]. So we registered them all equally as kakaeya. The above persons, however, have been kadoya for generations, and they are therefore not like the others and should not be registered as if they were their equals; hence their registration as kadoya.

4. Re : The signing of the goningumi register by these three as kadoya. This whole thing was triggered by Kisaburo's^[*] refusal to sign as kadoya, and the dispute was brought before the headman, who came to me. I stressed to him again and again that I could in no way remove the kadoya entry from Kisaburo's^[*] name, and I also gave him reasons why the others, Kichibei, Hikozaemon, Tokubei, and so on, should remain registered as kadoya and told him that each of them should affix their seals in the presence of the others. So the headman called them all and explained to them in detail why they should be registered as kadoya, to which they all agreed, and thus they affixed their seals to the goningumi roster. This is the truth, which you can verify with the headman and the titled peasants of the village.

5. Re : The adoption. The 22 koku of the retired Umanosuke were inherited by Tokuzaemon, Shin'emon, and Shige'emon. The land division was witnessed by Jiroemon^[*] , Chuemon^[*] , and Daitokuin. You can ask the latter two and have them testify.

6. Re : The funeral and memorial services. Because there was no unhulled rice for the funeral, my father, Shiroemon^[*] , who was employed by the intendant's assistant (tedai ), Ichikawa Gohei [from Gorobe-shinden?], borrowed six bales from the storehouse. All other expenses were divided into two by Tokuzaemon and Shin'emon, and they were also responsible for the memorial services from the first through the seventh year and did not collect any contributions from Shige'emon. [However,] after that, Shin'emon (Umanosuke's son by a woman other than his wife) and my uncle Bun'emon did not set them [Bunzo^[*] and Bunshiro^[*] ] free. Their only proof that they were set free is that they, as life-

long bond servants, made a request to be set free, but what they said [about this] to the authorities is a lie, which has been the cause for a longstanding grudge and quarrels between us.
As for the remaining memorial services, I do not know about Shin'emon, but as far as my uncle Tokuzaemon is concerned, because he was only four when Umanosuke died [he did not contribute], my father, Shiroemon^[*] , took care of all the services.

7. Re : The holdings of Kichibei, Hikozaemon, and Tokubei. On the cadasters of the 1629 land survey, Bunshiro^[*] and Bunzo^[*] were recorded as Umanosuke's dependents [co-residents?] (uchi ). Next, on the cadasters of the 1676 land survey, Shigehei, Hikozaemon, and Kisaburo^[*] were recorded as Shiroemon's^[*] dependents (uchi ).

8. Re : The rewriting as kakae on the new population register. There was a dispute concerning signing the new register under the heading of kadoya. The matter was brought before the two intendants [named], and their opinion was that if I by all means insisted on their being kadoya, this would lead to an endless dispute and prevent the registry from being submitted in due time. Therefore, the headman and the titled peasants consulted with each other, and they said that it did not matter what was entered as long as the registers were submitted in time, and so I changed the entry and submitted it with my seal.

1687/12
Hanbei

Hanbei's argument is very complex, but I shall limit myself to the main points. The hierarchical relationship between fudai, genin, and kadoya is clearly stated. Fudai are bought, usually at a very young age from outside the village. Prices for fudai are rarely mentioned in documents, but in Hirabara, a few kilometers to the north, a ten-year-old boy was bought for three bu (worth about 1.5 koku of rice on the market), and a four-year-old girl for six bales (about 3-6 koku of unhulled rice) in the 1650s.^[48] They were virtually house slaves for life unless their

[48] The prices are from Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 119; the equivalent in rice for the gold price is calculated from Ono Takeo, Edo bukka jiten , Edo fuzoku^[*] zushi, 6 (Tenbosha^[*] , 1989), 451; the bales of unhulled rice are calculated at the rate of one bale per 0.6 koku (NAK-T 5, "Furoku," 4). Brutal as this practice may seem, these children were seen, perhaps all too euphemistically, as rescued (quite a few of them had the name Kaisuke, "bought and rescued" [Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , 119]). They were certainly given a better livelihood than children who are recruited into prostitution for foreigners in Southeast Asia; nowadays recruiters exchange television sets for children, or they buy them still in the womb (Murray Kempton, "A New Colonialism," New York Review of Books 30, no. 19 [1992]: 39).

freedom was purchased, as in the case of the two female genin. "Freedom," the transition from fudai to kadoya, meant that they were "given" the land they themselves had brought under cultivation, but most of their labor was still for their former owner, who also paid the necessary tribute on their land. The refusal by some of the kadoya to help out with transplanting the rice seedlings at Hanbei's signaled that they did not consider themselves kadoya owing labor to a boss. In addition, Hanbei's case rests on documents that testify to their kadoya status. As in the Niremata case, a clear line was drawn between dependents who were relatives of titled peasants and those who were not (most kadoya).

Another source provides social background data on the stratified minisociety of Shimo-Kaize village. In 1643 Shimo-Kaize's population of 218 lived in thirty-one main homesteads, three kado dwellings, and eleven long houses. Three households each had 1 "dependent," and thirteen houses had a total of 30 servants (male and female).^[49] Eleven of these servants were recorded as hikan (a rather pejorative term for "serf," common in pre-Tokugawa times). The village kokudaka was 336 koku, averaging 10.8 per household; the largest holding was 22 koku, the smallest 2.3. Thus we know that Umanosuke was the largest holder of the village, since he had 22 koku after he retired. He also had a rather large house, because his must have been one of the three houses of 27 tsubo (930 square feet, or 90 square meters). The kadoya, on the other hand, were housed in buildings that varied from 425 square feet, to half that size. Most of the long houses measured only some 210 square feet.^[50] By the time this suit was filed, however, many of the kadoya must have already been promoted to kakae as a result of the gradual breakup of the larger holdings.

Next, the defendant Hanbei submits a recorded testimony that is certified as true by the headman.

3. Hanbei's Recorded Testimony, Certified by the Headman (1687/12)

1. Re : The question that the three were kadoya for generations but now claim that they are kakae. They filed a suit concerning this dispute. In my response, I claim that my great-grandfather Umanosuke bought Bunshiro^[*] and Bunzo^[*] , that they should have worked for him forever, but that they were set free[, etc.]. Now, when I investigated who received this land that they had developed and what Bunjiro^[*] and Bunzo^[*] were in rela-

[49] These data are from Ichikawa Yuichiro^[*] , Saku chiho^[*] , tables 2, 8, and 9 (77, 100, 101).

[50] Ibid., 78, 79, 119, 124.

tion to the three plaintiffs, I found that the two cadasters had entries as I claimed and that Bunzo^[*] was Tokubei's oyabun [real or relational parent or patron], Hikozaemon's father-in-law, and Kichibei's grandfather; and that this Bunzo^[*] was the one whom the three suitors claim m be Shige'emon. Bunshiro^[*] is Bunzo's^[*] elder brother. Now, who bought Bunzo^[*] and Bunshiro^[*] as fudai, and is there proof that the two performed service for the indicated days per month? They were bought by Umanosuke from X [named]; there is no proof that they performed the alleged service, but everybody in the village knows that they did.

2. Re : The yashiki [homestead and compound] of the three plaintiffs. Is it in my yashiki or is it separate [an important question to determine their degree of autonomy]? Until forty-three years ago, Bunzo^[*] and Bunjiro^[*] were put up on Goemon's yashiki, which was part of the inheritance of 22 koku he received from Umanosuke. But there were difficulties with building a [new] residence for them. Luckily, there was an empty building in a separate yashiki, which is where they were put up, and that is where the three plaintiffs live now. As far as the yearly tribute is concerned, until twelve years ago, the 44 koku were recorded as one registered holding, but they had informally (naisho ni ) divided it among themselves, and each individually paid tribute as allocated by me. Because this was difficult, the headman divided the yearly tribute as well as the corvée into separate parts.

1687/12
Hanbei
I certify that the above is true
Yahei, Headman

Yahei, the new headman who replaced Chuemon^[*] , vouches for Hanbei's version of the three plaintiffs' ancestry: they are mutually related and tied to a kadoya. Equally important are the location of their living quarters (whether they are within or outside someone's compound—he confirms that they now live in Hanbei's grandfather's compound) and their independent tax status. The latter seems to indicate that the village headman had treated them as independent tribute payers.

These three documents were apparently insufficient for the intendant to make up his mind on this question of status, because seven months later three additional recorded testimonies were produced, the first one by the headman and the thirteen titled peasants.

4. Recorded Testimony by the Headman and the Thirteen Titled Peasants (1688/7/11)

1. We have been asked whether the three plaintiffs in question are Hanbei's kakaeya or his kadoya. Since we are unaware of circumstances long past, we do not know whether they are one or the other. They were listed separately and they paid tribute and corvée separately.

2. The three allege that their grandfather Shige'emon had been adopted by Hanbei's great-grandfather Umanosuke and that they were attached to the portion of the land on which Umanosuke retired and which he passed on to Shige'emon. Now, is there certainty that Shige'emon was Umanosuke's adopted son? It is hard to tell whether he was his adopted son or his kadoya because it is too long ago and the situation is not dear. Of course, as far as the division of Umanosuke's 44 koku is concerned, the three plaintiffs have today a portion thereof, but on what basis this was divided, that we do not know.

3. Now the question: Did the three plaintiffs pay their tribute and corvée separately and have they been listed separately on the name registers since Shige'emon's generation or not; and if not, then since when and for how many years have they been paying taxes separately? Afterwards [after Shige'emon's time] they made all their contributions, tax and corvée included, together with Hanbei, but they delivered separately the taxes and corvée of 1676, twelve years ago. Now, if further asked on what grounds this separate payment of twelve years ago took place or how the division of land occurred, we do not know, but Hanbei was headman then.

4. Hanbei alleges that the three plaintiffs are without a doubt kadoya because every year since his great-grandfather's generation down to his own they performed kadoya corvée and the villagers all know that. When investigating the truth of Hanbei's allegation, we found that although we do not know what will happen now, every year at the time of the transplanting of the rice seedlings, the three, including their wives, without exception helped on Hanbei's paddies. This is what Kichizaemon said. As for others who may have helped on that occasion, there were others, although we do not know their number.

5. Hanbei alleges that forty-four years ago, Shige'emon was recorded as kadoya on the population and house registers, documents certified by Daitokuin and separately by the whole village with the seals of the peasants. Because this was so long ago, we were not there when these documents were written, but [when we checked them] we found that it was Daitokuin's writing and that all the peasants certified those documents with their seals.

6. Hanbei alleges that "under the next three intendants, the three plaintiffs were always listed as kadoya; but that under the last intendant they were also sometimes registered as kakae; ultimately, it did not matter how they were registered since they were his dependents, who had to obey him." Is this true? In those days population registers were compiled only every five or ten years. Hanbei in the end could not remember for sure, and he and Zenzaemon admitted not knowing whether it was kakae or kadoya.

1688/7/11
Yahei, Headman
Thirteen titled peasants

The village leaders are unwilling to pronounce on the status of the plaintiffs. They state, however, that the trio was attached to Shige'emon's

land (and not Goemon's). Thus they corroborate the plaintiff's alleged filiation to Umanosuke via Shige'emon. The question then became whether Shige'emon was an adopted son or a kadoya. They say that they do not know because it was too long ago but that documents exist that could verify this. What is puzzling is that the plaintiffs seem to have become independent tribute payers, at least informally, when Hanbei was headman. His argument, however, clearly rests on his assumption that no matter how they were registered, they were his dependents.

Next is a recorded testimony (with the headman's certification) by Shin'emon, whose father, of the same name, was Umanosuke's son by a woman other than his wife.

5. Shin'emon's Recorded Testimony, Certified by the Headman (1688/7/11)

1. My father, Shin'emon, is Umanosuke's son by another woman. Of Umanosuke's 44 koku, 22 went to Goemon, son by his wife; the other 22 went to Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and myself. Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and I attended Umanosuke's funeral. Furthermore, Umanosuke's 44 koku are now in the hands of Bun'emon, Shiroemon^[*] , Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and myself; we pay tribute and corvée separately according to our taka. I looked into this; also into what the three plaintiffs said. My father, Shin'emon, died ten years ago, and because he was non compos mentis (fuchoho^[*] ), he did not tell me anything. As to the division of the 22 koku, I do not know of a document to that effect, but Shige'emon, the oya [parent or boss, patron] of the three plaintiffs, received 5 sho^[*] [0.05 koku] of paddies and 5 sho^[*] of buckwheat dry fields from Umanosuke when the latter died. At the funeral were Tokuzaemon and myself. The three plaintiffs did not help. Tribute and corvée were paid separately.

2. This is my pedigree. Hence I have been asked whether the three plaintiffs are Hanbei's kadoya, and since I line up in the lineage at the same [generational] level as the three plaintiffs, I was requested to talk about the times since Hanbei's great-grandfather Umanosuke, on the supposition that I was knowledgeable about them. But as mentioned earlier, since my father was non compos mentis , he did not transmit to me any details. However, in Umanosuke's generation, the three plaintiffs' oya, Shige'emon, worked for Umanosuke fifteen days a month.

1688/7/11
Shin'emon
Certified as true by Yahei, Headman

Everyone is evasive; collective memory seems blocked, this time through the state of non compos mentis of a conveniently dead man who while still alive might have casually provided his son with the right information. But he did not. A certain labor dependency of Shige'emon

vis-à-vis Umanosuke is acknowledged, but this dependency is not spelled out as one typical of a kadoya. Everybody seems to sympathize with the plaintiffs by not providing the crucial information that would otherwise nail them.

Finally, there is a recorded testimony by two of the three men who arranged Umanosuke's inheritance: Daitokuin (a Buddhist priest, judging by his name) and Chuemon^[*] .

6. Recorded Testimony by Chuemon^[*] and Daitokuin (1688/7/11)

1. This concerns the three plaintiffs' allegations that: they are not kadoya; their oya, Shige'emon, is Umanosuke's adopted son; the 22 koku of the retired Umanosuke were divided into three and given to Tokuzaemon (son of Goemon, Umanosuke's son by his wife), Shin'emon (son by another woman), and his adopted son Shige'emon; this division is well known to Daitokuin and Chuemon^[*] from this village and Jiroemon^[*] from the branch village. We were summoned and asked to investigate.

Forty-four years ago, still alive, Umanosuke told us that he wanted the 5 sho^[*] of paddies and dry fields each to go to Shige'emon. He died that year. In the spring of the following year the three of us got together and made the transfer m Shige'emon, but the talk about dividing the 22 koku into three is a lie. As to the adopted status of Shige'emon, the three plaintiffs alleged that we knew that well, but we do not know whether he had been adopted or not. We have not heard rumors that he was adopted or that he was a kadoya.

1688/7/11
Chuemon^[*]
Daitokuin

Almost a year after the suit began, in a testimony by men who knew Umanosuke, it turns out that Umanosuke's property was not divided into three as alleged all along. But at the same time, they are ignorant of Shige'emon's adoption or his kadoya status! It is striking how just about everything is a matter of dispute: the status of kadoya or kakae, the relationship of adoption, the question of inheritance, the meaning of joint versus separate tribute payments.

We do not know the outcome of this suit, but it seems likely that the result somehow favored the plaintiffs. This absence of a clear settlement, which would result in one side's admitting defeat, is rather typical, as we shall see. One also senses the lineage tensions between Hanbei's side and Shin'emon's; village politics were often lineage politics. Overall, one also has the impression of a status system in transition.

From Tribute Payers to Full Peasants: Kodaira, 1629-1849

Titled peasants are often understood to be descendants of peasants entered on the early land surveys as landowners and tribute payers. Ancestry and ownership would thus be necessary to qualify for the title of "titled peasant." Accordingly, one would expect that as the population grew (especially during the seventeenth century, when the growth rate was 50 percent) and the number of kin-related small landholders that branched off from the original households increased, the number of titled peasants also increased. On the other hand, if many new peasants came from the ranks of non-kin dependents (who were not descendants from original titled peasants) and ancestry was more important than landownership, one might expect nontitled peasants to outnumber titled peasants. Honbyakusho^[*] , "titled peasant," is specifically a title, and its rarity points to privilege and limited access. Ancestry, however, was only one way to anchor and preserve this privilege against other claimants, and it was not an absolute criterion: it was only one strategy among others to secure distinction and status.

Thus, a number of questions have to be answered with regard to the status of titled peasant. Why did the number of tided peasants tend to become limited? Whence the rarefaction? What criteria controlled entry to this status group—ancestry, ownership, wealth? And did the overlords or the village council control these criteria? How did lineage power intersect with the power or prestige individuals derived from the fide? Was this symbolic capital—which within the village was political capital—immune to devaluation (could one lose one's status as a titled peasant) or marketable (could one sell or buy the status as such)? Could one transfer the title independently from the land, or were the two inseparable? I touched upon some of these questions in chapter 1. Here I shall discuss them more fully.

In discussing the original titled peasants, identified as homestead owners in the early registers, I have described their function in rather vague terminology: they were accountable for the tribute, responsible for it, and they channeled it. This language is intentional, because non-titled peasants also produced and contributed to tribute and corvée. The original titled peasants were clearly the economically wealthier peasants, if for no other reason than that they had homesteads. The basis for the title was thus economic and rested on ownership not sim-

ply of land but of homesteads as well. By the same token, it was also political, since it was the local elite that became titled. The term "titled peasant" thus has two sides, an extramural and an intramural one, the former having to do with responsibility for tribute and corvée, the latter (both reinforced by and the basis for the former) with local status and power.

The early titled peasants managed land, not uncommonly estates of more than one hundred koku, and a number of dependents co-residing on the homestead as well. Gradually these estates were divided and parceled out to dependents, who thereby became economically independent to some degree from the original owner, who nevertheless retained his preeminent position within the expanding lineage by registering the various households (ie) and their land as being part of (buntsuke) or within (uchizuke ) the main holding. Often, but not always, the former referred to kin (affines, descendants, and relatives), the latter to non-kin.^[51] Genealogically, or perhaps more precisely, linealogically , these new units were branch houses of the main house.

In Shimo-Kaize, as we have just seen, there was a great difference between kadoya and kakae, which I referred to as semi-established and fully established branch houses, respectively; and the trend was "emancipatory" from kadoya to kakae. The evolving relationship of these kakae to the titled peasants can be described as follows. The number of titled peasants increased until the last decades of the seventeenth century, when they appear to have reached a quota in most villages that was maintained for about a hundred years. During that century the number of kakae grew, but then it decreased and by the end of the period, in the 1860s, they had virtually disappeared, having become titled peasants.^[52] These turning points in the trajectory of the relationship between kakae and titled peasants need explanation. Why a growth in the numbers first of titled peasants, then of kakae, and then once again of titled peasants?

To follow this trajectory, the struggles that determined it have to be analyzed and the question of status that constitutes their center

[51] Ichikawa Takeji, "Kakaebyakusho^[*] ," 6.

[52] For instance, in Ozawa village of Saku district in 1704, 33 percent of the peasants were kakae, but in 1864 all kakae had disappeared. The same drastic drop occurred in nineteen out of the twenty-five villages that constituted the Tanoguchi bakufu fief, of which Ozawa was a part (ibid., tables 3 and 4 [7, 8]).

addressed. With this in mind, we shall follow in some detail the history of Kodaira village (presently part of the town of Mochizuki in Kita-Saku district) as presented to us by Ozaki Yukiya.^[53] In 1647 its assessed yield was 175 koku, making it a small village.

In 1629 Kodaira counted thirteen peasant owners of residences (yashiki), making them "tided peasants" (see table 14) In 1643 there were twenty: the original thirteen plus two branch houses, all holders of between 8 and 21 koku, and five others with holdings between 4 and 8 koku as yet without homesteads. Since the latter five were entitled to a yashikibiki , an exemption of tribute owed on their residence, they must have been titled peasants as well.^[54] In addition, there were two other peasants with less than 1 koku who differed from the other twenty in that they did not enjoy the exemption; they were nontitled peasants.^[55] The number of titled peasants thus increased from thirteen to twenty in about a dozen years.^[56] Two hundred years later, in 1849, there were twenty-one Kodaira peasants marked in the registers as osabyakusho^[*] ("head peasant"), a variant of honbyakusho^[*] . Nothing seems to have changed, yet this longue durée is filled with colorful events.

The 1677 population roster shows clear status divisions. The peasant population, aside from one outcaste, then comprised twenty titled peasants (including seven patrons), thirteen clients (including three kadoya), and a number of bond servants (fudai and genin). Economically, however, the members of the two main groups are not always distinguishable. Although all holders of more than eight koku are titled peasants, some clients have equally large or even larger holdings and bond servants as well. The three clients and the one outcaste have holdings larger than that of the smallest titled peasant (under 1 koku). Nine of the clients, however, have no holdings at all (mudaka).

Over the next twenty years two great shifts occurred. In 1694 one titled peasant, a sake brewer (whose descendant is still in business

[53] Ozaki Yukiya, "Kinsei sonraku naibu no mibun kaiso^[*] ni tsuite: Shinano-kuni Saku-gun Kodaira-mura kakaebyakusho^[*] mondai o chushin^[*] ni," Nagano 29, no. 8 (1977): 752-68, no. 9 (1977): 815-30.

[54] In Matsumoto domain this amount was 1 koku (Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 85).

[55] Although the five holders of 4 to 8 koku had no yashiki they were nevertheless granted the yashikibiki , which means that they must have been (new) titled peasants (Ozaki, "Kinsei sonraku," 755).

[56] Ibid., table 1 (755).

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

today) had become very successful, for he had 80 koku, which put him far ahead of the next two holders, with 25 and 13 koku. The situations of some of the kakae had also improved: the nine taka holders, the largest with 11 koku, each had more land than sixteen of the twenty titled peasants, but there were now also twenty-seven landless clients. The total number of clients now stood at thirty-six. By 1731 the picture has changed again. The sake brewer, had nineteen servants and had acquired another 28 koku, bringing his holding to almost 100 koku. But twelve of the now twenty-one titled peasants had only x koku or less. Now, there were forty clients, of whom all but one had land. This does not mean, however, that there were no landless peasants (mizunomibyakusho^[*] ): there were eighteen of them, one of whom was a client.

Ozaki does not detail the composition of the goningumi, but it is likely that the kumi were structured along lineage lines. It is important to note as well that membership in the goningumi was limited to titled peasants, twenty-one households out of a total of seventy-eight.^[57] As we shall see, lineages played an overwhelming role in village politics, one that has not received much scholarly attention. As lineages grew, the number of temples grew from one temple of z koku to three, one with less than half a koku, the other two with 5 and 16 koku. It is likely that these temples serviced nor simply "the village" but the lineages.

We should take a closer look at who the titled peasants and clients were. A comparison of three population registers (shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] ), for the years 1694, 1695, and 1698, reveals numerous and frequent changes in the identity of titled peasants and clients. Between 1694 and 1695 the number of titled peasants increased by one (to twenty-one); however, this new titled peasant, who had been promoted from the status of client, became a client again three years later, but under a different patron. In another case, a patron changed places with his client, the latter now assuming the position of lineage patron and titled peasant. Another titled peasant went into service outside the village for

[57] This was also the case in Tenjinbayashi, a neighboring village. In 1699 there were nine goningumi in Tenjinbayashi, each counting exactly five members (rifled peasants), except for one group that had only four members. Together with the headman, this adds up to forty-five rifled peasants; nineteen of them were patrons for a total of thirty-two kakae. In addition, there were six servants and four outcastes (see Ozaki Yukiya, "Mochizuki-machi no buraku no rekishi [1]," Mochizuki no burakushi 1 [1975]: 53).

several years and gave up his title. Other cases in 1698 show a similar instability in the membership of both ranks. One titled peasant passed his title on to his client when he left the village on a service stint. One Jihei who in 1695 was a client turned up three years later as not only a titled peasant but also a patron of three clients: one was Jihei's former fellow client; one was Sajihei, a titled peasant who had two clients in 1694 but only one in 1695 and was himself Jihei's client by 1698; and the third was the successor to Sajihei's former client.

The situations of a number of titled peasants were precarious, and their clients stood ready to take their place. (By now the titled peasants constituted a numerus clausus .) These clients were often second and third sons and in some rare cases bond servants. The fiction that they were all born within the village, however, was maintained; although most bond servants came from the outside, when they were promoted to client status they were recorded as "born in the village." Also, as we saw in chapter 1 to be the case in Makibuse, none of Kodaira's approximately thirty bond and indentured servants were married. Either they could not afford a family (a very widespread phenomenon beyond Japan also)^[58] or they were not allowed to have one (they needed their patron's approval to take a spouse).^[59]

In the 1702 population rosters of the neighboring village of Kasuga, one looks in vain for clients. Instead, there are a good number of mudaka, peasants without taka, recorded as doing "internal work" (naisaku ) for their parents or brothers. They had families and lived in separate quarters and were thus kin, established as branch families who officially had not been granted land by their main family.

What qualified one to be a titled peasant, and why was their number restricted at a time when more and more branch houses were being created? Economic power obviously was not the decisive factor: quite a number of clients held larger holdings than most of the titled peasants. There was no upper kokudaka threshold that automatically made one a titled peasant or a lower one whereby one lost one's title. At the same time, all of the clients who were promoted held at least close to

[58] I referred earlier to Pierre Bourdieu's study of the Béarn region in France. I still remember the live-in stable hands on the farms of the village in Belgium where I was born, all bachelors who were never taken seriously and bore the brunt of many jokes and pranks.

[59] Minegishi, Kinsei mibunron , 140-42.

five koku. Unlike the holding, the title usually could not be divided (although in Niremata it was). Hierarchical lineage structure seems to have determined all important relationships within the village. In society at large the great divide was between samurai and nonsamurai, in the village between rifled and nontitled peasants; both the nonsamurai and the nontitled peasants were subjects of governance. The nature of status in samurai society differed from that in peasant society. Whereas samurai status adhered to all descendants of samurai, for long periods of time during the Tokugawa period the number of titled peasants was limited; only one of a titled peasant's sons could inherit the title—which was also the case with samurai offices . The title of "titled peasant" thus seems to have functioned not simply as a marker of status but also as a title of office. And initially this was the case, since titled peasants were created and set up as such to provide the overlords with the goods and services they expected from their subjects. But why its scarcity, given that many nontitled peasants obviously provided the same function? Were there also extramural influences at work in the limitation of the number of titled peasants?

Naito^[*] Jiro's^[*] answer to this question, which is perhaps too one-sided, is that the titled peasants were those who had a hyakusho^[*]kabu , or "peasant share."^[60] In the beginning only the "titled peasants" (homestead owners) had such a share. While this may sound tautological (titled peasants are those who have a share in the status of peasant as opposed to those who do not), the term share , as we shall see shortly, was used very early on to refer to title holders.

In accounting for the nearly universal phenomenon of the continued restriction of the number of title owners, Naito^[*] concentrates on extramural factors, thus ignoring the increase in the number of titled peasants in roughly the first half of the seventeenth century. He cites two cases where daimyo legislated explicitly against an increase in the number of "peasant shares," one of them using the term kabu .^[61] In bakufu legislation there is no explicit reference to limiting the number of rifled peasants, but many bakufu-initiated village laws (goningu-

[60] Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 28.

[61] The two cases revolve the Kaga domain and the village law of Iwamoto village in Echizen (ibid., 94-95). The latter mentions the term kabu and is a document that dates from between 1601 and 1607. For the full text of this document, see Miyagawa, Taiko^[*]kenchi-ron , 2:304. Another case is Ueda domain (see NAK-T 4:464).

micho^[*] zensho) mention the need to provide successors to bankrupt peasant houses.^[62] Naito's^[*] interpretation of this injunction seems plausible. He argues that if shogunal policy had simply aimed at establishing small landholders, there would have been no need for such encouragement: there were plenty of small landholders with lands and homesteads who could have succeeded to bankrupt titled peasant houses. This injunction makes sense only in a context of limited access to the status of titled peasant.

Another extraneous influence was undoubtedly the bakufu's 1673 prohibition against dividing land below a certain size: For peasants the minimum size was ten koku, and for headmen, twice that amount.^[63] This law was issued around the time that the great riparian works of the seventeenth century were coming to an end. In many regions the acreage had been increased, so that an expanding population could be absorbed. Thus the further creation of branch houses would result in smaller holdings, and often, for example, in small mountain villages, even in a reduction of acreage of arable by the amount of land taken up for new homesteads. In many areas the branch houses established during this period of expansion became titled peasants.

In the registers in Ueda domain, a few kilometers to the north of Kodaira, one finds clients until around 1624, when they begin to be entered on the name rosters as equal to the titled peasants, and by 1654 they are all registered as such on the cadasters; that was when the number of titled peasants was frozen. And this seems to have been in response to orders from the overlord. Subsequently, in the 1670s, clients reappear on the kumi rosters under various labels—"kakae," "elder brother kakae," "younger brother kakae," "nephew kakae," and so on—as dependents of titled peasants and yet as owners of homesteads and lands.^[64]

The same thing happened in Gorobe-shinden (discussed in chapter 2), a few kilometers to the east of Kodaira, with the large development of new fields by a dogo^[*] . When all the available flat land was brought under cultivation by the late 1660s, the number of titled peasants froze at forty-five households, and kakae were entered on the population registers (shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] and goningumicho^[*] ) as dependents of

[62] Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 95-98.

[63] For an English translation of this law, see Lu, Sources , 1:207.

[64] NAK-T 4:463-64.

titled peasants, hence not as full community members. Half a century later, in 1712, the number of titled peasants in Gorobe-shinden was still forty-five, but thirty-four of them had a total of eighty-three kakae.^[65]

Naito^[*] points out that if there was a limitation on the number of titled peasants set by overlord power, as was sometimes the case, and if, by bakufu order, it had become difficult to establish branch houses (and if, one may add, certain sectional intravillage interests were served by such restrictions), then new branch houses, even if they were economically independent and as well off as their parent families, had officially to be registered as still part of, or dependent on, their parent families. In other words, this limitation maintained hierarchical relations between main and branch families and the importance of lineage structures.^[66]

This arrangement looks very much like another tatemae reconciliation of the contradictions between legal principle (making branching a virtual impossibility for the majority of peasants) and actual practice (it was not admitted to on paper, but it happened nevertheless). A tatemae approach to law can perhaps best be rendered as a "nod and wink" approach—the Italians' perception of their own relationship to law. The authorities had documents showing compliance with the law (the stable number of titled peasants), and the peasants had a practice they could live with—an eminent illustration of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a misrecognition of reality that fools nobody.^[67]

Thus, the lineages used bakufu restrictions on partitioning holdings to structure themselves and were at the same time structured by it. In and of itself, however, lineage economic power was not effective if it could not be translated into political power, which meant acquiring for its members the title "titled peasant." Since the number of titled peasants was restricted, however, they had to wait for the moment that a titled peasant, for one reason or another, had to give up his share. Another bakufu institution leveraged by lineages was the kumi system. Kumi organizations were used to strengthen lineage filiations, because

[65] Ibid., 464.

[66] Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 50, 175-79.

[67] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 133, 171. The Japanese categories tatemae (face, façade) and honne (real intention), which John O. Haley skillfully uses in his discussion of "law as tatemae " (Authority without Power: Law and the Japanese Paradox [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 186-90), fit perfectly Bourdieu's analytic notion of misrecognition.

all heads of the five-household neighborhood groups were patron houses. Intravillage lineage hierarchies and administrative structures, the latter ordered by overlord authority, thus overlapped.

Let us return now to Kodaira village. By 1731 forty landholding kakae and seventeen landless peasants, all incorporated into hierarchical lineage relationships, were ruled by twenty titled peasants, half of them virtually landless (i.e., having less than one koku). The situation was unavoidably wrought with tensions. Some tatemae, or cosmetic, as opposed to substantial, changes had been made in the entries of the population registers a few years earlier, changes that reduced somewhat the difference in status between tided and nontitled peasants. The former were no longer entered as having been tided peasants daidai , "for generations and generations," and to the latter's name was no longer added onbyakusho^[*] tsukamatsuri makari ari , "deferentially in service of titled peasants."^[68] But how could these nontitled peasants go about effecting substantial changes? Some overlords (in Ueda domain at one point) had legislated against such changes; others (often in bakufu territories) were not interested in such matters.

In 1769 a number of kakae in Kodaira organized themselves as spokesmen for their class, although they did not form a majority, and raised an issue that was of some interest to the authorities, namely, the structure of the neighborhood kumi. That year eighteen (out of fifty-eight) kakae filed a suit requesting that the kakae system be abolished. They argued that patrons should not also function as kumi heads because this constituted a repressive, overlapping authority structure. On 2/29, however, before the suit was even filed, sixteen of the twenty-one tided peasants of Kodaira submitted a written rebuttal to the five village officials (the other titled peasants). They argued that there had been twenty-one tided peasants in the village "since ancient times"; that they, together with the kumi heads and the representative of the peasants (hyakushodai^[*] ), made all the important decisions; and that issues of kumi membership were always discussed by all the peasants. The next day the remaining forty kakae wrote to the village officials that they disapproved of the suit by their eighteen status mates.

This attempt at staving off the suit failed, and the officials filed a recorded testimony with the bakufu's intendant at Mikage-shinden,

[68] Ozaki, "Kinsei sonraku," 767.

stating that the overlapping system was according to longtime village law and that at a meeting of 2/8 "all" the peasants had decided not to change the entries in the new population rosters that were due within a few weeks. Moreover, they reminded the authorities that prior to this suit of the eighteen, three among them had gone directly to the office in Mikage-shinden about this matter and that that office had shown little interest, ordering a private settlement (naisai ). The plaintiffs, however, had ignored the decision that was subsequently reached in the village. Finally, a few days later, in the third month, the suit was filed together with a rebuttal signed by the village officials and the titled peasants.

The plaintiffs obviously wanted to use the institution of the neighborhood kumi as leverage to break the power of their bosses, while the defendants stated that the overlapping system was village law and did not cause problems to the plaintiffs. The latter, however, argued that while Tokugawa law required that kumi be established by neighborhood and that a head then be designated, in Kodaira only patrons were kumi heads. The plaintiffs made it clear that they believed the village officials had been maneuvering to prevent kakae from becoming kumi heads. (The case of nearby Iribuse, discussed in chapter 2, was very similar.) The defendants, conceding this point somewhat, proposed a compromise whereby the titled peasants would constitute three separate kumi and the other peasants would be grouped in genuine neighborhood associations and would choose their own heads. This compromise solution was rejected. The eighteen were intransigent and wanted to negotiate only if the entry "patron" (kakaeoya) were taken off the population register. They cited the precedent of neighboring Makibuse, where the overlapping system had been abolished. But the village officials were unimpressed, arguing that Kodaira had its own village law and that it did not matter what was practiced elsewhere.

This suit describes concretely the trouble patrons caused their clients; some complaints are about the symbolic distancing of the village officials from the peasants. In the third month the new population register had to be signed. The custom had been for peasants to drop by the headman's home to certify their entries with their seals, but now they were all summoned to assemble in the headman's yard, with the officials inside and the representative of the peasants acting as a go-between. The officials gave three reasons for this hierarchical arrangement. First, since the village had become part of the bakufu domain (in

1765) the village law had to be read to the peasants once a year, which was why they were gathered together to hear the reading and sign the register at the same time. Second, the headman's house was too small for a gathering of all the peasants. And third, since the weather was fine, it seemed like a good idea to use the outdoors. The last two reasons sound spurious: it is doubtful that the headman's house was too small, and in the mountains of Nagano in the third month the weather is still bitterly cold. Obviously, the kakae interpreted this setup as arbitrarily emphasizing the differences in status between the officials, or patrons, on the one hand, and the peasants, or kakae, in general, on the other.

The eighteen had set out for the bakufu office at Mikage-shinden (some sixteen kilometers away) with their suit once before, but the village officials had gone after them and persuaded them to return by promising a private settlement. The negotiations had faltered, however, over the abolition of the patron system, and the eighteen had reintroduced their suit. Then the issue of a conflict of interests was raised, the plaintiffs expressing their concern that the decision by the titled peasants to have the village shoulder the officials' travel expenses might have had something to do with the overlapping responsibilities of patrons and kumi heads. The titled peasants simply denied the allegations and asserted that the decision about shouldering the defendants' costs had been made not only by the twenty-one titled peasants but by all the peasants. Costs had also been a factor in postponing the suit of the eighteen for over four years. They had submitted their suit to the peasant representative several times, but the village officials had ordered prepayment of the costs of the suit. The titled peasants' view of this was that all these earlier attempts had constituted only informal talks, not formal proposals for a full-fledged suit.

The plaintiffs, conscious of their economic independence, also requested that any household that could not be self-sufficient be excluded from the kumi. The officials responded by arguing that economics had nothing to do with full kumi membership: lack of economic self-sufficiency was no reason, they said, to lose one's status as titled peasant and patron. Only if one became a servant in another village did one lose one's status. But this was not the case with Kyuzaemon^[*] , whom the plaintiffs cited as an example. Kyuzaemon^[*] , patron and kumi head with a meager holding of 0.085 koku, was working as a servant (hokonin^[*] ) in

another household. He had in his kumi one successor house and one doshin^[*] (a Buddhist priest without a temple). When one of these two disappeared the field had to be taken over by another peasant, who had himself only 0.15 koku but never lifted a finger to cultivate the minuscule plot.

The suit contains yet another reference to a previous suit, this one involving a kumi head (0.4 koku) who had expelled one of his kakae "because not only had he always been insolent but he had also ignored advice from the village and he was selfish (wagamama )." The village officials had then told the kakae that because he now had no patron he could no longer live in the village. This kakae also had brought a suit to the Mikage-shinden office. The case had been stopped, however, through mediators brought in from another village. The same expelled kakae, together with his three co-kakae, were among the eighteen plaintiffs.

By the time of the suit, the titled and nontitled peasants were economically virtually undistinguishable. Only five titled peasants had holdings of more than z koku (the sake brewer, with 120; the headman, with 14; and three others, with 5, 4, and 3 koku), four more had x koku, and the remaining twelve had holdings below 1 koku. On the other hand, nineteen kakae had more than x koku. Both plaintiffs and their ten patrons were spread evenly on both sides of the 1-koku divide. Four patrons found all their kakae united on the side of the plaintiffs, and eight had succeeded in rallying all theirs in opposition, while the kakae of the remaining eight were divided between plaintiffs and opponents to the suit.

The outcome of the suit, mediated at the wealthy temple Fukuoji^[*] , appeared to be largely a victory for the plaintiffs: reference to kakae and mizunomi in the kumi membership lists was to be dropped, kumi would now be arranged geographically, and kumi leaders were to be elected from within the kumi every other year. But it was a hollow victory, because after four years, in 1773 and 1774 three separate but identical suits were submitted (by twenty plaintiffs, thirteen of them new ones) about the problem of overlapping jurisdictions. This time, however, the plaintiffs' demands were on a smaller scale: they wanted to be freed from their status as kakae and to be "recognized in the population roster as born in this village." There was no critique of the kakae system as such, no insistence on abolishing it. This obviously was not a

"class suit," for all kakae. Moreover, all petitions were also co-signed by the officials and the patrons in question. What was the rationale behind this new drive, coopted, it seems, by all those with any power? Who among the kakae signed, and why not all of them now that the drive enjoyed official sanction? (There is secondary evidence of an additional petition, now lost, by another ten kakae, bringing the total kakae supporters to thirty, still just above half of the total kakae population of fifty-six.)

The petitioners made a distinct, on between kakae that were related by kinship and those that were not. What four years earlier had appeared to be a united front as far as claims were concerned had broken down along kinship lines. Fictional kinship was fine, the petitioners seemed to say, but it was not the real thing and should not be treated as such. Distinctions were introduced, or made stronger, in order to separate the two and to produce distinction that was acceptable to the authorities.

It annoyed the thirty kin branch houses that they would have the same status as the twenty-six non-kin branch houses, and they wanted not simply to have their kakae status removed but to be acknowledged as hyakusho^[*] , "peasants." (A similar distinction between kin and non-kin kakae had been made in Shimo-Kaize.) The result, however, was not equality with the old titled peasants, here called onbyakusho^[*] , or "honorable peasants," but a further splitting of this status whereby the kin kakae became second-class onbyakusho^[*] , while the non-kin kakae became simply hyakusho^[*] , peasants—but the term no longer simply described an occupation: it now was a title designating their status within a finely graded hierarchy.

The population register of 1780 includes the following seven ranks of peasants (the number of peasant households in each rank is given in parentheses):

1. "onbyakusho^[*] [honorable, i.e., titled peasant] living in this village since ancient times" (18)

2. "onbyakusho^[*] born in this village" (29)

3. "hyakusho^[*] born in this village" (18)

4. "hoko^[*] [in service] at X with Y (born as onbyakusho^[*] in this village)" (5)

5. "X's kakae, born in this village" (3)

6. "X's mizunomi ['landless' (tenant)]" (3)

7. "mizunomi born in this village (onbyakusho^[*] since ancient times but now mizunomi)" (1)

This new status stratification was an ingenious device to accommodate some of the demands while preserving distinction and the distinctions that constitute the symbolic capital—they had hardly any other—of the dominant fraction of the village. The demands of the kakae, both kin and non-kin, were met: in ranks z and 3 they were now recorded as "born in the village" and no longer as kakae but as peasants, hyakusho^[*] . The special demand of the kin kakae was also met, for they were now distinguished from the non-kin by the "honorable" prefix on . And former titled peasants (onbyakusho^[*] ) were recognized as such: in rank 4, for those who had to give up their title because they went into service outside the village while retaining some land, and also in the lowest rank, because they had lost all their land (below the mizunomi of rank 6, who had some land). There are, however, a few kakae left, in rank 5.

Later population rosters tell the continuing story of wranglings over status promotion and maneuvers against status pollution. All non-kin hyakusho^[*] of rank 3 became absorbed as onbyakusho^[*] into rank 2, and all dependent mizunomi of rank 6 were promoted to dependent kakae of rank 5, who later were gradually incorporated into rank 2. On the 1849 roster only the names of peasants are listed, without any prefixes. Had equality been achieved? Not quite, because there are "sidescript" entries next to the names. On this roster, twenty-one peasants are marked as osabyakusho^[*] , "head peasants" (three of them mizunomi), forty-eight as hyakusho^[*] , "peasants" (among whom are three mizunomi), and two as kakae (one mizunomi). Finally, after some two hundred and fifty years all but two in this peasant village had become "peasants." Had status been superseded by class at the end of the Tokugawa period, as the historians mentioned at the beginning of this chapter argue? Not quite. Mizunomi is a clear economic marker for landless peasants. Yet three mizunomi are among the elite twenty-one.

Similar struggles concerning the status of titled and nontitled peasants took place in the area around Kodaira at roughly the same time. We shall look briefly at two additional cases that involved "mass" decisions, one involving promotion to, the other demotion from, the status of titled peasant. A group promotion of kakae to titled peasants

should not be interpreted too readily as a final step toward equality. Often, subtle or even explicit social distinctions were maintained between the old elite and arrives.

In 1780 in Nagatoro (in today's Saku city, some fifteen kilometers east of Kodaira) thirty-five clients were set free by twenty-five patrons, and they became full members of the neighborhood kumi (resulting in the creation of seven new kumi); but all of them had to be given permission by their former patrons, who thus became their guarantors.^[69] The reasons these guarantors gave for setting their clients free included the following: "he has his own holding"; "he has a separate house but no land yet, but he will cause no trouble"; "I shall give him land, and he will cause no trouble"; "he is my relative, and I shall give him 1.44 koku."

Having a clear title to some land (even one koku or less) was a basic condition for becoming a titled peasant in Nagatoro. It is ironic, however, that these amounts of land were insufficient to maintain even a small peasant household. These peasants, now nominally "full peasants," must have supplemented their income through nonagricultural pursuits. Economically, the term "titled peasant" was an empty title; its significance was purely political and social.

The "independence" thus gained was conditional upon good behavior; the guarantorship certainly suggests as much. Sometimes the difference between old and new titled peasants was codified and expressed in public signs. In Tanoguchi village (also in Kita-Saku district) the village laws of 1681 stipulated that clients promoted to the status of titled peasant were not allowed to wear haori coats, hakama ceremonial aprons, or ashida (high rain geta, or wooden clogs) or to use umbrellas, and the pillars of their houses could not exceed eight shaku (2.40 meter); nor could they use tatami mats, and they were not allowed to enter homes of "real" titled peasants, but had always to stay in the entrance way. (As we shall see in chapter 5, prohibitions identical to these were issued against outcastes.) Such distinctions within the ranks of titled peasants could be maintained for a long time. In one case, someone whose household had been promoted to titled peasant in the 1780s was reminded in writing two generations later, in 1844, that he could not wear a kamishimo ceremonial over-

[69] Ichikawa Takeji, "Kakaebyakusho^[*] ," 12-13.

coat except when he was the main mourner at a funeral or the groom at a marriage (an allowance made because of relaxing standards, it was stated). If these things were disregarded, he was warned, his house would return to its former kakae status.^[70]

The group demotion case, a rare occurrence, is from Kasuga-shinden (a few kilometers south of Kodaira), which, with only 145 koku, was a rather small village.^[71] In 1767 the headman in one stroke demoted twenty-five titled peasants to kakae status. The result was a suit (in the third month, as was so often the case) brought by the demoted to the headman. The headman, however, single-handedly, and without any further endorsement by village officials, passed the suit on to the bakufu authorities in Mikage-shinden—in an effort to doom it.

It should be noted in passing that this circumstance throws some light on the process of lodging suits. Dan Fenno Henderson has argued that villagers' suits had to be approved by the village headman and could be initiated only after conciliation efforts had failed.^[72] Japanese scholars have disputed this point. According to Ishii Ryosuke^[*] , no conciliation efforts were needed; the headman had simply to provide an accompanying letter, which the headman failed to do in this case.

All four kumi heads (the only ones among the twenty-two patrons who had not been consulted, "because this would have led to a dispute") immediately wrote to the same authorities, explaining the case and requesting an investigation. The headman had put the twenty-five former titled peasants as kakae under their relatives (brothers or parents), who thus became their patrons. His reason for this drastic step was that there were too many tiny peasants in the village with holdings of "0.02, 0.03, 0.05, 0.08, 0.2, 0.3, 1 and z koku, and too many irregularities, making it difficult to apportion expenses to each and every peasant; it was much easier to rechannel this through patrons." The intendant investigated the case and returned the original petition to the village, noting that he would attend to the matter if the request was forwarded properly, via all the village officials. In the second month of the following year the kakae were reinstated as titled peasants.

[70] Ibid., 8-9.

[71] For a summary statement of the case and some of the documents, see ibid., 10-12. All full documents for this case can be found in NAK-KS2 (1): 964-68 (nos. 490-93); for the village kokudaka, see ibid., 724.

[72] See Henderson, Conciliation 1:136; and Ishii Ryosuke's^[*] critique in his long review of this work in Law in Japan 2 (1968): 216-17.

Lineages, Goningumi, and Village Politics: Oashi,^[*] , 1840S

Lineages were left untouched by the kumi organizations established by order of the overlords. As the suit by the Kodaira kakae makes clear, lineages are not unalterable biological networks. The plaintiffs wanted to do away with the social construct of patron and client, with the inscription of dependency onto relations between main and branch houses. As Naito^[*] suggested, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships between households along lineage lines may have been prompted by the kabu structure of the title "titled peasant."

In the following case study, we shall take a close look at how lineage politics were structured by the institutions of titled peasants and kumi membership. The location is Oashi^[*] village (presently part of the town of Akashina in central Nagano prefecture). A number of kumi rosters from that village dating between 1731 and 1872 examined by Ozaki Yukiya give one a good sense of the composition of the kumi.^[73] What is striking, but certainly not exceptional, is that in every case village offices and kumi headships were passed to members of the same families.^[74] That this was a privilege is clear from the fact that when the number of kumi had to be reduced by one, and hence one family would lose its leadership position, it was decided that the two former kumi leaders would hold the position in alternate years.^[75] This tightly knit group had turned this privilege into a monopoly by devising ways to prevent any member from losing his status and hence to prevent others from joining.

[73] Ozaki Yukiya, "Chikuma-gun bakufuryo^[*] ni okeru goningumicho^[*] m goningumi no jittai: Chikuma-gun Oashi-mura^[*] no baai," Shinano , 16, no. 2 (1964): 45-60.

[74] Ozaki has documented this in detail for the period between the 1750s and the 1820s (ibid., table 7 [559]). Dan Henderson presents an agreement from 1867 between the six titled peasants of one village as evidence for a collusion m rotate the headmanship every five years among themselves and thus keep control of the land cadasters (see his Village "Contracts ," 164-66): "If outsiders raise objections, the six as a group would come forward strongly, and try to settle the matter .... If besides our six some outsiders become the headman or group chief [kumi head], some one of the six of us will carefully keep custody of the survey records, and we will make sure to agree on all issues. Hereafter, besides agreeing within the six-house group, we would definitely work together in harmony no matter what the problem is and help each other to the greatest extent" (164).

[75] Ozaki, "Chikuma-gun," 54.

Scarcity and access had to be controlled in order to maintain the value of this political and social capital.

In 1848, however, five households wanted to split off from a nine-household kumi to form a separate kumi with their own elected head because "the kumi was too big." Yet a nine-household kumi was not unusually large: the largest kumi counted eleven households, and the smallest, three. The officials consulted the higher authorities, who gave permission for a new kumi; however, "in consultation with the village officials" it was decided that the current head of the kumi would move with the five petitioners as their new head, a strategy to maintain a monopoly on political power against the threat of a newcomer. The five did not agree to this condition and so refused to sign the population register. They also rejected another peasant whom the officials tried to impose upon them as head in a failed attempt at compromise. The result was a suit and a new compromise: the village officials would be in charge of the new kumi for three years, and then they would decide on another head.

Taroshichi^[*] , the leader of the secession quintet, had been a troublemaker in the village before this incident. Nine years earlier, in 1839, he and his son had been involved in a suit against two other peasants, also a father and a son, about collecting firewood. The Buddhist priest and officials from a neighboring village, however, had worked out a settlement. In 1844 another member of the secession group, Risaemon, had been involved in a quarrel at a wedding in his home. The quarrel arose after Risaemon announced that he was going to change the name of his younger brother to Heijiro^[*] , which he claimed was the name of one of his forbears, and one of the guests made it clear that he found this ludicrous. The quarrel had simmered down, but soon thereafter Risaemon and Taroshichi^[*] had sued the guest for slandering them and causing not only trouble at the wedding but also hardship by criticizing their family pedigree. They had proof, they said, that about two hundred years before, in the 1650s, a Heijiro^[*] had been recorded in the cadasters as a titled peasant. Thus, for at least ten years before the secession incident Risaemon and Taroshichi^[*] seemed to have been buddies prone to causing trouble.

The issue of the new kumi headship flared up again when, after the three-year interim, the five requested the promised appointment of a kumi head and the village officials postponed it for another seven years!

To the new suit the five filed, the officials answered that the five in question had not changed their behavior, so none of them could be chosen as head because "in our village, heads have to come from households with a long pedigree (senrei nagatachi ni kagiri , limited to [houses] with longstanding precedent)." The five argued that headships should have nothing to do with pedigree (iegara ) or status (mibun ), that it was unreasonable to bring these things to bear on matters of village governance. Risaemon had used the public occasion of the wedding to stake out his claim to a long pedigree. Given the political importance of pedigree, undoubtedly his declaration was a political move and was perceived as such by the guest who ridiculed it.

Eight years later, in 1859, a new compromise was reached. The officials' requirement for headships was now hitogara , or character, rather than pedigree. But, the officials added, since none of the five in question had the necessary character, they had to wait until someone with the proper character emerged in the group who could be appointed as head. Therefore, each year one of the five would function, not as hangashira (the local term for kumi head), but as hangashira-dai , a proxy head.

This is another example of an ingenious solution by "splitting." It provided face-saving compromises that allowed both parties to claim victory. The village officials defended their turf: they stuck to principle by not capitulating to the demands of the five. The latter, in turn, gained self-governance, which in practice put them on an equal footing with the other kumi heads. The real solution would come about with time, which was on the side of the secessionists. It was inevitable that they would eventually get what they wanted, perhaps in the next generation, when these fine distinctions had become, for everyone, a dead letter. And this was indeed what happened. What was the nature of this "inevitability"? Why could five peasants hold out for so long?

This protracted conflict, of which we know only the peaks, points to social fault lines in the village that are invisible in the texts of the suits. It turns out that Taroshichi^[*] and Risaemon and the other three members of their kumi were related (see fig. 5). The fault lines demarcate divisions of lineage power. Over time, the five had come to constitute an economically powerful lineage. The conflict over these several decades was one between old and new lineages, the former trying to block

Fig. 5.
Lineage of Risaemon's Secessionist Kumi, Oashi^[*] , 1725-1869

Source: Adapted from Ozaki, "Chikuma-gun," table 8 (p. 58).

Note: Names are of secessionists. The numbers are of kokudaka.

the translation of the latter's economic power into political clout by appealing to family pedigree, social standing, and personal character.^[76]

Pedigree was at issue in the quarrel over names (when Risaemon and Taroshichi^[*] claimed a two-hundred-year-old ancestry) and in the disagreement about kumi leadership. Since both disputes developed into suits, it is not surprising that the village appears to have conducted a pedigree check. On the tribute list of 1725, under the ancestor Matsuemon (the holder of 1.1 koku in fig. 5), the officials noted that the

[76] Writing these lines in October I992, I was struck by how the suppression of the economic in the name of "character" during the debates preceding the U.S. presidential election was similar to the strategy employed by the village officials discussed here.

older records had been lost in a fire. Needless to say, there is no guarantee that this was an impartial investigation. Since the name Heijiro^[*] , which Risaemon intended to give his younger brother (Hei'emon), does not appear in subsequent village records, it seems likely that his claim of titled ancestry going back to 1650 was not recognized.

In the 1700s, during the first two generations of the lineage as we know it, the household's holdings remained at the low kokudaka level of 1.1. Around 1800, however, the holdings tripled, which allowed the household to create a branch house in 1815. This trend continued during the following decades, leading in 1848 to the attempt to consolidate the economic power of the lineage (which now totaled 15.4 koku) by giving it a political dimension. The lineage continued to grow, and by 1869 it counted nine households and a total of 26 koku. Ultimately, in 1872, the lineage split into two separate goningumi, headed by Taroshichi's^[*] two sons.

In order to acquire political power commensurate with their economic strength, lineages had to do more than simply create ever more branch houses. Either they could consolidate their power within the village (and thereby strengthening intralineage authority) by setting up a separate goningumi or they could acquire for some of their branch houses titled status when such a share came on the market through the bankruptcy, abscondence, or venality of some shareholder. Whichever route they decided to take, they needed foremost the approval of the local decision makers, and various factors determined the ease or difficulty with which that was given. The careers of a few titled peasants from Gorobe-shinden illustrate the process.^[77]

Gorobe-shinden, as the name indicates, was a village of newly developed fields. In the first two generations, since there was little competition for land, social mobility was not very restricted. In 1695 three villagers from Gorobe-shinden wanted a relative of theirs to move into the village as a tenant. They promised to take responsibility for him and establish him as a kakae; eighteen years later this newcomer became a titled peasant with 1.6 koku. One couple came as servants (hokonin^[*] ) in the 1640s, bought some land, rented a house, became kakae, borrowed money to buy a house, then bought land in other villages. In 1713 the household gained titled peasant status with 12 koku, two bond servants, and one horse. Another peasant also started his career as a

[77] Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku , 125-27.

servant, in 1673. In 1687 he was able to buy land, build a house, and take the place as titled peasant of one who had died. Later, however, he sold the house and title, became a kakae again, and finally ended up landless (mizunomi).

Where land was scarce—a general problem toward the end of the seventeenth century—social mobility by means of upper-status "shares" became restricted. Shares became available when a shareholder died without offspring or successor, left the village, went bankrupt, or decided to sell his share. Symbolic capital, originally an expression of real capital, could be converted back to it: in 1760 a share in Kasuga village (a few kilometers east of Gorobe-shinden) went for the outrageous price of twenty ryo^[*] ;^[78] two years later in Gorobe-shinden itself someone paid only one ryo^[*] .^[79]

The market for the title of titled peasant was restricted in three ways. First, it was a village market, limited to the actual residents. A peasant could be titled only in his own village (even if he had additional fields in other villages) because the status entailed a position of village leadership. Second, the price for the title was set within the village, not on an intervillage "market for titles." Third, cash alone was insufficient. Since the title was essentially a social one, its acquisition had to be sanctioned socially. Beyond cash, symbolic capital consisting of social esteem and communal "harmony" was needed. There were specified procedures for obtaining a title, as an incident of 1812, also from Gorobe-shinden, illustrates.^[80]

That year someone's client bought the title of titled peasant from a third peasant. At the time of the yearly registration of the population, he asked his former patron to erase his client status. The patron, however, insisted on a formal written request, which met the objection that "things were never done that way before." "Au contraire, " the patron returned, "you have to go through the village council." Inevitably, the intendant was presented with a suit.

[78] Ichikawa Takeji, "Kakaebyakusho^[*] ," 10. Kobayashi Daiji lists prices for symbols of elevated social status in the second half of the Tokugawa period (without giving place or date or citing sources): 5 ryo^[*] for a kamishimo ceremonial outfit, 10 for village headman's rank, 15 to use a surname, 20 for the rank of village group headman, and so on, all the way up to 100 ryo^[*] (see his Sabetsu kaimyo^[*]no rekishi [Yuzankaku^[*] , 1987], 193).

[79] Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku , 132.

[80] Ibid., 134-35.

The officials, fearing trouble if the suit came to a judgment, decided on the following course. The plaintiff, they said, was a diligent peasant and deserved to be a titled peasant but should have notified his patron before buying the title—or certainly immediately after buying it—instead of waiting until the next population registration: he had to admit to wrongdoing. The patron, on the other hand, should be honored to have cultivated such a qualified peasant, with a sizable holding, who had contributed diligently to a government request for funds: such a peasant deserved to be set free.

Both were reprimanded, and both were satisfied. This is an example of a typical solution, with a balanced interplay of apologies, shared blame and praise, and thus no clearcut winner or loser. The aftermath of this solution is also instructive. Soon thereafter, three more clients of the same patron asked to become clients of the new titled peasant. The trio circulated secret memos bad-mouthing their patron, but this tactic led nowhere: their status remained unchanged.

Cooperative Villages

The villages discussed in this chapter were mainly dogo^[*] villages with tightly structured lineages. In contrast to the corporate so^[*] villages, predominant in the Kinai, they were characterized by strong hierarchical arrangements, their origins in large extended families. Political equality always lay just beyond the horizon, always one more status distinction away. Both so^[*] and dogo^[*] villages had their roots in pre-Tokugawa formations.

A third type, one that has not received much attention even in Japanese literature, goes by the convoluted name shozokudanteki kyogyotai^[*] , literally, "small, family-type occupational cooperative village.^[81] Harada Seiji compared the structures of twelve villages of Fukuyama domain (Bingo province, Hiroshima prefecture) as they appear in a document from 1647 and found what he calls patriarchal-type villages and cooperatives.^[82] Traditional patriarchal villages were to be found in

[81] An excellent bibliography of the few articles and books on this type of village can be found in Harada Seiji, "Kinsei zenki sonraku no shoruikei: Fukuyama hanryo^[*] o chushin^[*] ni shite," Shigaku kenkyu^[*] , no. 193 (1991): 26 n. 3.

[82] Harada rejects the term dogo^[*] because most of the large landholdings had disappeared in the warfare at the end of the sixteenth century, but his "patriarchal" villages look very much like villages other scholars refer to as being controlled by dogo^[*] .

the hills and mountains and typically engaged almost exclusively in wet rice cultivation. Cooperative villages dominated by small peasants were mostly in the coastal areas, with only dry fields, or on inland flat terrain, with a balanced economy of wet and dry fields. The latter two regions are characterized by open terrain, making expansion possible and reducing competition for land, which is in great contrast to conditions in the hills and mountains.

Harada's hypothesis linking in a general way ecological conditions with certain types of village organization is suggestive but certainly far from conclusive, given his small sample. Nevertheless, his structural comparisons put in sharp relief different village structures and can serve to conclude this part of our study. Harada divided the peasantry into the following categories: (1) titled peasants without bond servants (genin): small, independent cultivators with holdings usually between 5 and 15 koku; (2) tided peasants with genin, broken down further into peasants with 15 or more koku, that is, typical patriarchal families, and peasants with less than 15 koku; (3) genin; and (4) mawaki , or kin branch houses.

Table 15 contrasts two such villages. In Futamori, with a kokudaka of 165 koku, the titled peasants were clearly divided between those with genin (more than 20 koku) and those without; all genin belonged to the wealthier peasants. Harada argues, however, that this top-heavy hierarchy (approximately 72 percent of the arable was owned by the five peasants with holdings of 15 or more koku; 22 percent by those with 5 to 15 koku; the remaining 6 percent by peasants with below 5 koku) is not a leftover from medieval times: in 160 t the respective percentages were approximately 26, 55, and 19. Pre-Tokugawa villages would have been characterized by small holdings like those of Mizunomi village (466 koku). Typically, here only one holder had more than 20 koku, while most titled peasants, both those without and those with genin, had 3 to 10 koku, as did a large number of the genin. Of these twenty-three genin only eight were attached to the top three titled peasants; all the others were genin of small peasants with holdings hardly larger than theirs. The smallest tided peasant (with between 1 and 3 koku) had four genin, as did the titled peasant just above him.

Many small holders had genin who were taka holders; in some cases the combined kokudaka of the genin was almost twice that of their host family (see tables 16 and 17). These "bond servants" obviously were

situated quite differently both socially and economically from those of Futamori, and they look more like the clients (kakae) we have encountered elsewhere. Mizunomi was a typical "cooperative" village with large numbers of almost equal holdings among mawaki as well, the result of the division of property through equal inheritance. This was a village with high status mobility. In a relatively short time, these mawaki became fully titled peasants, and the genin seem to have had no difficulty following the same route. Part of the reason may have been

the availability of additional space: between 1619 and 1647 Futamori added only 6 koku to its arable, while Mizunomi added 55.

The reason these families organized themselves as a cooperative on a more or less equal basis was, according to Harada, to meet the overlord's extraordinarily high extraction quota, which set a premium on rice, a crop that was not produced here, or if it was, the yield was far less than in the hills and mountains. There is certainly room for debate and further research on an argument that so categorically relates geographic location and type of agriculture with social organization and, further, links the cooperative villages, through their type of agriculture, with extraction policies. What is clear, however, is that Japanese rural society offered a number of organizational patterns and that status rigidity seems to have been linked with the availability of space, a phenomenon we encountered in the case of Gorobe-shinden.

To conclude, then, status distinctions and status-generated distinction were part of village life throughout the Tokugawa period. As the frequent appearance of virtually landless titled peasants in the records shows, status was not replaced as a differentiating mechanism by economic class as such. The sources of status distinctions were intravillage economic factors and extravillage political realities, which reinforced the former: the stature of traditional, established peasants, undoubtedly the decision makers in the villages, was enhanced by their being assigned the communal responsibility for tribute and services owed to the overlords. This official duty somehow made them the only ones who were real peasants.

Some overlord measures contributed either directly or indirectly, but not uniformly and universally, to limiting the number of titled peasants. After the 1673 prohibition against partitioning holdings below a certain size, the villages seem to have resorted to fixing the number of titled peasants while in reality putting very few, if any, constraints on actual practice. This necessarily resulted in recording economically independent peasants as dependents, which solidified lineage formation, strengthened status divisions, and limited political power to small segments of the village population.

Within these institutional constraints, resistance to status mobility depended on lineage expansion and the availability of additional arable. In extended families, the hierarchical relations among members were unambiguously inscribed in their economic and social positions, for it was clear who controlled the means of production and reproduction.

Although this material reality was misrepresented symbolically through familial and paternalistic terms of kinship address and on ritual occasions,^[83] the symbolic had less autonomous determining power than it would have later. The head of the family had a clear title to the land, owned the buildings and agricultural tools, and had the final word concerning which members could set up their own families. With partitioning, control over these means was transferred to branch houses. The preeminence of the main family came then to rely increasingly on symbolic means, status distinctions being one of the most important. The availability of additional arable worked against the maintenance of rigid status hierarchies and promoted status mobility.

When Japan reached an ecological barrier in the early eighteenth century, status again came to play a greater role in village life (contrary to the opinions of many American scholars). It seems that status production, the generation of ever finer status distinctions, was a powerful tool for offsetting the politically negative implications of economic decline. Economic development affected eighteenth-century villages in two ways. Some peasants succeeded in accumulating more land, or economic capital, which they sought to translate into political capital, but they encountered status barriers. More often, however, a great economic leveling downward took place for most of the peasants, turning them into very small holders (and an "objective" class), which is also contrary to prevailing interpretations. Either way, economic development brought pressure to rearrange the structure of the political field in the villages.

This pressure could take a number of forms. Peasants could simply become nonplayers in the status game by removing themselves from it and migrating to the urban centers. They could become part-time players by seeking employment (hokonin^[*] ) elsewhere for a period of time, as many did starting in the late seventeenth century, although this negatively affected their position, standing, and status in the village.

[83] Smith astutely observes with regard m "ceremonial services" that "the participants themselves made no consistent distinction between ceremonial and labor services, often calling both by the same name. It would seem—one cannot speak with certainty in such cases—that the two services were thought of as being essentially the same. This is not because people failed m observe that one had economic value and the other not, but because this difference though evident was insignificant in view of the fact that the two had the same social character" (Agrarian Origins , 30). On kinship terminology, see ibid., 15 ff.

They could also try to change the rules of the game, yet with the notable exception (in the present study) of the first of the two drives in Kodaira to abolish the system of kakae altogether, this did not occur. Most of the demands were efforts, not to change the rules of the game, but to change one's position within the field where the game was played, which ensured its longevity.

4
Village Autonomy

In effect, the village had the security of the administrative state along with the freedom of the outlaw.
John Owen Haley

Village autonomy has two major components: financial and juridical. Japanese historians have given little consideration to the former, analyzed in chapter 2, in their debate about whether or not (more often than the degree to which) Tokugawa villages were autonomous. Their discussion has centered on the juridical aspect of village powers, judicial and prosecutorial, as found in village regulations.^[1] Between roughly 1900 and 1950 a number of village laws were made available in about half a dozen compilations, mainly the work of legal scholars. Then, starting in the 1960s some historians began using these documents to examine the relationship between village and state, questioning the legal scholars' assumption of village autonomy.

Hozumi Nobushige, one of the drafters of the Civil Code, and Miura Kaneyuki pioneered the study of the goningumi system around 1900, no doubt inspired by the same concern that made the late Meiji (and Taisho) government promote "local self-government." This research produced several volumes of goningumi regulations, edited by Hozumi Nobushige and Shigeto^[*] , father and son, in 1921 and 1944, and Nomura Kanetaro^[*] , also in 1944. To these works should be added Maeda Masaharu's studies, especially his 1952 analysis and compilation of village codes , which were different from the goningumi laws because,

Epigraph: Haley, Authority without Power , 61.

[1] For an overview of this historiography, see Kadomae Hiroyuki, "Kinsei no mura to kinseishi kenkyu^[*] ," Rekishi koron^[*] , no. 95 (1983): 94-101; Uesugi Mitsuhiko, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] no seikaku ni tsuite," Minshushi^[*]kenkyu^[*] , no. 7 (1969): 80-106, esp. 80-81; and idem, "Kinsei sonrakuron." See also NRT 3:401-5.

according to Maeda, they developed mostly independently from the laws ordered by the extravillage authorities.^[2]

This first phase of research has made available some six hundred village laws and two hundred village codes. In the multivolume histories published by every prefecture for the last twenty years and in the innumerable local histories promoted by the even more recent furusato bumu^[*] , or boom of hometown-ism, hundreds of additional village regulations, as well as statistical analyses of them by region, can be found.^[3]

The first generation of scholars, with the exception of Maeda, were legal scholars trained in the German formalist tradition. For them the mere existence of these village laws constituted proof of a tradition of self-government. But while such an interpretation was of service to the Japanese state's attempt to revitalize local self-government in the interwar decades, it conveniently overlooked the fact that goningumi laws had undeniably been an important instrument of central control over local life during the Tokugawa period.

Maeda, on the other hand, subscribed to the autonomy thesis in perhaps less radical terms but for opposite reasons. Village codes or rules (okite ), he argued, locating their origin and archetype in the famous codes of Nakano, Sugaura, Imabori, and other corporate vil-

[2] Scholarly attention was drawn to village laws as soon as historical interest in the Tokugawa village as such was developed with Fukuda Tokuzo's^[*]Die gesellschaftliche und wirtschaftliche Entwickelung in Japan , Munchener volks-wirtschaftliche Studien (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta, 1900), an economic history of Japan published in German before it was published in Japanese. These works on village laws are: Hozumi Nobushige, Goningumi seido (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1902); idem, Goningumi seidoron (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1921); idem, comp., Goningumi hokishu^[*] (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1921); Hozumi Shigeto^[*] , comp., Goningumi hokishu^[*]zokuhen , 2 vols. (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1944); Nomura Kentaro^[*] , Goningumicho^[*]no kenkyu^[*] (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1944). The compilation by Nobushige contains the documents he used for his first two books. Shigeto^[*] , Nobushige's son, compiled two more volumes, to which he added indexes for all 477 laws contained in both father's and son's compilations. Nomura's study contains another 121 laws. Maeda Masaharu studied 216 village codes m his Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*]no kenkyu^[*] (Yuhikaku^[*] , 1952) and "Ho^[*] to sonraku kyodotai^[*] : Edo jidai ni okeru sonpo^[*] o chushin^[*] ni," in Hoken^[*]shakai to kyodotai^[*] , ed. Shimizu Morimitsu and Aida Yuji^[*] (Sobunsha^[*] , 1959), 169-214.

[3] Kanzaki Naomi, for instance, recently analyzed 143 village laws of the old Musashi province (today's Gunma prefecture) in "Musashino-kuni no sonpo^[*] ," Tama no ayumi , no. 65 (1991). Examples of similar studies are idem, "Kozuke^[*] kuni no sonpo^[*] ," Gunma bunka , no. 225 (1991): 39-55; Yokota, "Kinsei sonraku"; and Uesugi, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ."

lages from Omi^[*] province, some of which dated back to the mid fifteenth century,^[4] constituted an independent tradition. The overlord-generated goningumi regulations (the goningumicho^[*] zensho, "preamble to the goningumi roster"), called here village laws , adopted many items from these customary codes (especially from the end of the seventeenth century), which in turn took on many formal and substantial features of these laws over time.^[5] Maeda's rather tenuously argued thesis of village autonomy and its postwar critique by scholars such as Kodama Kota^[*] ,^[6] mostly in the form of polemical counterassertions, made clear the need to examine closely how these two kinds of village regulations were related to each other and to extravillage authority. Two scholars addressed these questions in the 1960s: Uesugi Mitsuhiko, who compared laws and codes for content and form, and Oide^[*] Yukiko, who focused on the juridical status of the codes.^[7]

Village Laws and Village Codes

Using fifteen categories, Uesugi compared the content of all of Maeda's village codes with a good number of Hozumi's village laws and concluded that, given an overwhelming similarity, the village codes functioned to supplement overlord law as expressed in the village laws of the goningumi rosters.^[8] He pointed out that no village code contradicted any overlord stipulation (to which we shall return), but he also warned, following Maeda, that neither these codes nor the laws covered all aspects of village life; the more extensive laws reflected village life

[4] Ten of the twelve pre-Tokugawa village codes Maeda looked at are from Omi^[*] province (Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , "Sonposhu-hen^[*] ," 1-15); for a translation of some of the Imabori codes, see Tonomura, Community and Commerce , 198-207 passim.

[5] Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , 7-9, 18.

[6] For some critiques, see Uesugi, "Kinsei sonrakuron," 176; and idem, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 81 n. 6.

[7] Uesugi, "Kinsei sonrakuron"; Nanba Nobuo, "Hyakusho^[*] ikki no hoishiki^[*] ," in Seikatsu, bunha, shiso^[*] , ed. Aoki Michio et al., Ikki, 4 (Tokyo Daigaku, 1981), 45-88; Oide^[*] Yukiko, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] to ryoshuken^[*] ," (Nagoya Daigaku) Hosei^[*]ronshu^[*] , nos. 18 (1961): 1-31 and 19 (1962): 73-128; Mizumoto, "Kogi^[*] no saiban," 283-316; Mizubayashi Takeshi, "Kinsei no ho^[*] to saiban," in Chusei^[*]no ho^[*]to kenryoku , Chuseishi^[*] koza^[*] , 4 (Gakuseisha, 1985), 144-71.

[8] Uesugi, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 86-87. The village codes were more detailed in certain areas, for example, rules to implement attendance at village council meetings, tribute collection, sharing of commons (use of mountains and water), regulations of festivals, and penal matters.

only as it related to overlord interests.^[9] After the 1720s the codes' form and language conform closely to the overlord laws, and a good number of them stress the need to obey the laws.^[10] According to Uesugi, if there was resistance against overlord power as Maeda argues, there are no signs of it in the texts of the village codes.^[11] Over time, village codes came to look more like the lords' laws in form and content, growing lounger in response to lordly expectations, especially in sumptuary matters. Oide^[*] presents a more detailed picture of the relationship between village codes and laws, using as her basic data Maeda's and Hozumi's compilations. She first addressed the question of origins and saw an increasing trend of lordly influence in the codification of village codes, especially in the second half of the Tokugawa period.^[12]

The overlord's interference took various forms. It was most pronounced when the codes were a direct response to an order from above. A striking example of such lordly initiative is the drafting in 1827 of a lengthy village code for the Kanto villages that were grouped into leagues, kumiai . Regional village leagues, linking dozens of villages, developed in the last decades of the eighteenth century.^[13] Sometimes a third party outside the village (usually a headman from a neighboring village) was made to participate in the process. This occurred frequently in Mino province in the late Tokugawa period on the occasion of recalls of headmen.^[14] More often, villages proceeded to draft codes on their own with regard to a specific overlordly regulation. Other villages presented their codes to the lord on their own initiative. Thus, the "officialization" of village codes was not simply the result of explicit coercive power from above. It was just as often sought from below by local officials adopting a submissive posture, wanting to ingratiate themselves with the authorities by delivering voluntary proof that they were "within the law."

[9] Ibid., 88; Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , 59.

[10] Uesugi, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 88-90.

[11] According to Uesugi (ibid., 88), Maeda argues that village codes reflected villagers' resistance ("Ho^[*] to sonraku kyodotai^[*] ," 211-13), although Maeda speaks only of areas of autonomy, especially in matters of justice.

[12] Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 11-19.

[13] For the text of the 1827 code, see Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , no. 128 (159-66). On these village leagues, see Anne Walthall, "Village Networks: Sodai^[*] and the Sale of Edo Nightsoil," Monumenta Nipponica 43, no. 3 (1988): 279-303.

[14] Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 112-23.

What was the legal status of these village codes? Officially, the bakufu acknowledged Shikitari yaburi , the breaking of custom, as a legal ground for suits, but in several lists of "civil" court cases compiled during the Tokugawa period, Oide^[*] could find only a single case based on that claim and one other case that explicitly argued a breach of a village code .^[15] Obviously, infractions of village codes were almost never brought before the overlords. In other court cases, overlords acknowledged village codes if these supplemented their own laws without contradiction. The greatest claims for autonomy, however, have to do with village policing and penal powers, which received detailed attention in many codes.^[16] What was the bakufu's attitude toward village justice?

In a rare explicit statement on the matter, a response to a query of 1829 on whether a village could impose fines for gambling beyond those stipulated by bakufu law, the superintendent of finances (kanjobugyo^[*] ), who also functioned as the overseer of litigation, revealed that the bakufu did not forbid village justice but silently acknowledged it as a secondary and separate form of justice , not as the lowest echelon of its own judicial machinery. In practice, village justice was allowed in matters the bakufu did not or could not handle. Local administrators, however, could deal with village disputes kokoro jidai , "as they saw fit."^[17]

From this we can conclude a general tendency on the part of the bakufu as well as the locals to keep things within the village,^[18] often through the mechanism of conciliation and apologies. This tendency created room for potential conflict, because certain serious crimes had to be reported upward, for example, manslaughter, arson, even theft and gambling. Obviously not all thefts were reported, although bakufu, domain, and village laws all stipulated that they be reported.^[19] When

[15] Ibid., 24. This is case no. 58 (dated 1781) from the 160 cases collected in what was left after the Tokyo earthquake (1923) of the Saikyodome (Record of judgments), cases that came before the bakufu's supreme court, the Tribunal, or Hyojosho^[*] . The other two collections perused were the Mokuhi (Private articles) and the Kujiroku (Record of suits).

[16] Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , 93-149; Uesugi, "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 93-94.

[17] Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 75-76.

[18] Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , 31, 116.

[19] For the bakufu's general law, see article 56 of the Kujikata osadamegaki of 1742, in TKKk 3:189; for an English translation, see Hall, "Japanese Feudal Laws III," 755. For reference to domain laws and village laws, see Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 78-79.

gambling became a serious problem in the second half of the period, the bakufu explicitly allowed local punishment: in 1723 the bakufu proclaimed that it was no longer necessary to report gambling in bakufu and daimyo domains of the Kanto area, and the law was extended to the whole country in 1788.^[20]

That villages had certain penal powers did not mean that they were free to apply any kind of punishment. Death penalties were strictly forbidden, although Mizumoto has found village codes in Echigo that listed the death penalty among possible punishments for about fifty years in the second half of the eighteenth century, an extremely rare case according to Mizumoto.^[21] Maeda reports one village law in 1621 that prescribed the death penalty for gambling "after obtaining the opinion of the overlord."^[22] And we shall soon see that the village codes of Hozu stipulated that (village) samurai could cut down peasants who offended them.

Banishment, or tsuiho^[*] , was allowed when its application was not "private" or arbitrary: permission had to be secured in advance from intendants; sometimes, however, reporting it after the fact made it legal.^[23] There was one way of banishing people that was not labeled tsuiho^[*] : a person could be legally taken "off the [population] roster" (chogai^[*] ) in response to a request by village officials or relatives, which resulted in loss of residence and legal status for the person in question. Banishment might also consist in expelling a person to a location just beyond the village border and letting him or her live (or die) there in a makeshift shelter. Shinzo^[*] in chapter x was a victim of both removal from the roster and expulsion beyond the village. Perhaps the most well known form of village punishment is ostracism (murahachibu ), whereby a person was cut off from social interaction and most mutual help. This particular form was generated by the village itself. It is found only in village codes, not in village laws.

Throughout the period, village codes relied on overlord authority—"borrowed" its power, so to speak—by stipulating that any infringement of the codes would be reported to the lord. Oide^[*] sees a gradual

[20] Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 82.

[21] Mizumoto, "Kogi^[*] no saiban," 295.

[22] Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] : "Kenkyu^[*] ," 103; "Furoku," 16.

[23] Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ," 85-87. See also article 26 of the goningumi rules of 1662 from Shimo-Sakurai, Kita-Saku district, Shinano, in appendix 3.

merging of the two kinds of justice, lordly and village justice. Punishments became lighter; physical punishments (banishment or mutilation) tended to become rarer from the middle of the period onward and were replaced by fines; increasingly, crimes were reported beyond the village. With the rural crisis of the nineteenth century, the village leadership was no longer able to handle village affairs and came to rely on the overlords to resolve conflicts, thereby increasing considerably the time and energy intendants spent adjudicating disputes.

Class and Status Codifications

I mentioned earlier that the bakufu's main status codification related to the separation of warrior rulers from commoner subjects. It did not legislate status differences among peasants aside from setting the village officials (murakata , "village persons") apart from the rest of the peasantry, from amongst whom those responsible for the tribute were singled out as titled peasants. This legislation, however, is not to be found in the bakufu's best-known (but secret) code of 1742, the Kujikata osadamegaki , or in the famous rural administrative regulations for intendants from the Kan'ei period (the 1640s), but in the goningumi laws. That is where the overlords' expectations were made clear to the mass of commoners.

Many of the stipulations concerning tribute payment, open information about each peasant's share of the tribute, and the village budget (which was discussed earlier and for which I referred to bakufu legislation addressed mainly to intendants) were incorporated into village laws very early on. This can be seen, for instance, in the expansion of successive versions of goningumi regulations for the same village. Appendix z offers the translation of one of the earliest village laws in bakufu territories (twenty-one articles), from Shimo-Sakurai, in Kita-Saku, dated 1640. The second extant version, from ten years later, consists of forty-seven articles, twenty of them from the bakufu's nationwide directions for villages, issued twelve months earlier, in 1649/2 (see appendix 4).^[24] By 1662 this village law, now comprising fifty-six articles, had acquired the form it would have for the next two hundred years (see appendix 3).

[24] See Hozumi Shigeto^[*] , Goningumi hokishu^[*]zokuhen , 1:28-36; cf. TKKz 5:159-64 (no. 2789, arts. 28-47). On the controversy concerning the historical status of this famous edict, see appendix 4.

Before turning to these village laws, however, we shall examine perhaps the most famous of the shogunal Keian edicts, the one of 1649, which was issued for all villages in the realm. Status is hardly an issue in the edict. Only article 16 deals with it by prescribing cotton as the only fabric to be used by peasants (see appendix 4), a typical sumptuary regulation that under the guise of ethics (frugality) pretends to regulate economics (consumption) but in fact targets politics by codifying status.^[25] Economic production and well-being per se are given far more emphasis. A basic concern is the maintenance and reproduction of the means of production, that is, the peasants: they should be fed more when labor is more demanding (art. 10), keep in good health (art. 22), maintain collective productivity through mutual help (art. 29), and so on. Much advice is given about ways to increase productivity and wealth. Among the items included are how to select grains (art. 6); injunctions to sharpen hoes and sickles once a year (art. 7); how to build toilets to collect manure (art. 8); the necessity of supervising the labor force, planning around the weather (arts. 11, 12), and disposing of surplus children (art. 18); encouragement to make a profit (arts. 5, 21) and raise one's standard of living by being business-minded (shoshin^[*] , akinagokoro ) (art. 17).These were all things peasants did of their own accord, one would assume, but here they become the object of bakufu "national" legislation.

Economic well-being (shinsho^[*] ), its improvement, and its social reward in the form of respect (art. 30), as well as the scorn that can be a product of its absence, are major themes of the edict (arts. 2, 17, 30, 35). Economic well-being is seen as the basis of morality, because poverty leads to crime, a process described as an alarming cascade of worsening conditions: "poverty may cause illness, warp the mind, cause one to steal, violate the law, wind up in prison, receive the death penalty, be crucified," to which is added an ominous "etc." (art. 32). This is an interesting "economization" of virtue in the same alarmist terms the Confucian scholar Yamazaki Ansai (1618-82) used to characterize the inevitable fall from one evil thought into the abomination of abominations, the killing of the lord.^[26]

[25] During the seventeenth century in Kishu^[*] domain, village group headmen were allowed to wear pongee; headmen and elders could use silk only in collars; and peasant dress was limited to cotton (see Hirayama Kozo^[*] , Kishu-han^[*]nosonpo^[*]no kenkyu^[*] [Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1972], 185).

[26] Ooms, Tokugawa Ideology , 220, 223, 247.

In some sixteenth-century writings virtue was quantified and externalized through its identification with calculation and foresight in the management of people by lords.^[27] In Ansai's neo-Confucianism, virtue was politicized and internalized in terms of the values of respect and silent loyalty.^[28] In these village regulations, it was given an economic and social slant. Article 31 looks very much like a transposition into an economic key of the famous passage in the Great Learning that describes the expansion of the ruler's virtue throughout the realm. Here, however, the source is not the ruler but any subject whose creation of wealth will be imitated within the village, in neighboring villages, in the province, and in neighboring provinces. Another crucial virtue, filial piety, is transformed in a similar way: "No matter how devoted one may be to one's parents, it is difficult to be filial when one is in misery (fuben )" (art. 32). This was one way that Confucianism reached the masses. Buddhism and even folk belief in curses are marshaled in the Kita-Saku version of this edict to enjoin peasants to take great care of their horses and bulls (art. 14).

Social status and standing are unambiguously linked to economic well-being: people will start to respect you, be nice to you, and even promote your official status from a lower seat (in shrine associations and councils) to an upper seat if you improve your material conditions (art. 30). We know from chapter 3, however, that village practice was altogether a different matter: status was used to hold off competitors for political power who were agitating on the basis of their economic achievements.

Status issues were far more prominent in village laws and village codes than in the Keian edicts. The prohibition on wearing anything but cotton appeared in Shimo-Sakurai's village law (art. 10 [see appendix 2]) in 1640, a year after it was proscribed by the bakufu in its Kan'ei edict. In the next extant edition of that law (1662 [see appendix 3]), a sartorial status distinction is made between headmen and peasants (art. 10), and it is stressed that one should not exceed the bounds of one's status on ceremonial, that is public, occasions (art. 12). Moreover, the first article presents a hierarchized list of people, from house owners to servants, and so on, down to outcastes and nonhumans. Elsewhere too

[27] Ibid., 24-25.

[28] Ibid., 219-20, 247-48.

(arts. 2, 9, 22) the religious types are lumped together with the outcastes and criminal elements.

In numerous other village laws , similar concerns with status are expressed beginning around the mid seventeenth century. Rules stress the forms of greeting and behavior that peasants (even former samurai) should use in the presence of samurai.^[29] Small peasants were to observe a specific etiquette in their dealings with the village leaders.^[30] Interestingly, the latter stipulation dates from the end of the century, when the small peasants, who had come into their own economically, were agitating for higher status within the village.

Status maintenance, however, is threatened not only by disrespect. Self-assertive behavior can be an expression of economic security: many elements of material culture—specifically, as Weber notes, modes of consumption—function as status signifiers. Hence, regulations in this area reveal where threats to status distinctions developed. "In the building of houses, at weddings, funerals, regular village council meetings, behavior and dress should be according to previous regulations and one should not make light of status in anything" (1684, 1697). Permission was needed to build new-style houses (1698). Umbrellas and geta might keep one dry when it rained, but peasants could not use them; instead they had to make do with straw hats and, presumably, straw sandals (1828, 1838). "Only taka-holding peasants entered on the land surveys can build structures with gates, walled fences, and eaves; branch houses of kin that have such features may keep them, but from now on this will not be allowed" (1767).^[31] Similar status-related prohibitions can be found also in village codes . To cite one rather late example from 1832, cotton was prescribed for all seasons, and silk was forbidden, as were haori coats; umbrellas were only for officials; geta and leather-soled sandals were forbidden; and sake consumption was to be limited to one or two sho^[*] , that is, two to three liters.^[32]

These regulations, whether generated from within the village as codes or without as laws, were normative attempts to protect social and

[29] Hozumi Shigeto^[*] , Goningumi hokishu^[*]zokuhen , 1:33 (1650), 68 (1679).

[30] Ibid., 1:235-36 (1698).

[31] Ibid., 1:129 (1684), 222 (1697), 236 (1698); 2:1159 (1828), 1193 (1838); 1:407 (1767).

[32] Maeda, Nihon kinsei sonpo^[*] , no. 137 (177-78).

economic positions via status signs whose symbolic power rested on their being relatively rare. Such regulations were, perhaps, less necessary in the early period, when extended families prevailed and hierarchy was so obviously tied to gradations of economic dependency that proper behavior was instilled through a socialization that could dispense with written codes. However, the obvious leveling effects of the commercialization of the peasant economy necessitated codification that generated differences.

When it was dissociated from the status holders' shrinking economic base (landless titled peasants), status ceased to function as an obvious sign of class value (except as a déclassé one). The draining of the economic, however, revealed (and created) the political, now the shrunken signified of status. Hence the struggle between, on the one hand, status holders (old titled peasants) revalidating their now purely symbolic capital by reference to ancestry (when this status value was certified in land survey records) and, on the other, challengers (new economically autonomous peasants) appealing to the same logic that had created status as an expression of economic autonomy, which they now possessed, and had given political voice, which they were now being denied.

Since village codes were drafted by the village elite, it is not surprising that from the beginning some of them quite explicitly reveal a clearly defensive "class" effort to preserve privilege, status, and power, as well as their economic base. Such strategic class-based linkages, however, are hard to demonstrate if one limits oneself to the textual study of codes. Links can best be established by focusing one's research on a village or region whose socioeconomic structure can be identified. Very few historians have engaged in this kind of research, but there are at least two such studies on which we can rely: Igeta Ryoji's^[*] , for the village of Hozu in Tanba (near Kyoto), and Oide^[*] Yukiko's, for the Mino region (Gifu).^[33] They reveal a village structure different from the three studied so far (the corporate village, the village dominated by dogo^[*] , and the cooperative village).

[33] Igeta Ryoji^[*] , "Hokenteki^[*] sonraku kyodotai^[*] to mura okite: Tamba-kuni Hozu-mura gomyo^[*] shudan^[*] no sonraku shihai," Doshisha^[*]hogaku^[*] (1960-62): 58 (1960): 52-78, 61 (1960): 80-109, 62 (1960): 27-56, 65 (1961): 23-45, 70 (1962): 66-98, 75 (1962): 87-108; idem, Kinsei sonraku no mibun kozo^[*] (Kokusho kankokai^[*] , 1984); Oide^[*] , "Kinsei sonpo^[*] ."

Strategies for Elite Reproduction: Hozu Village, 1500S—1900

The Hozu locale (in Kameyama domain, Tanba province, which today is part of the township of Kameoka, some fifteen kilometers, across the mountains, west of Kyoto) consisted administratively, at least from the 1580s, of two villages, a northern (Kita-) and a southern (Minami-) Hozu, which together constituted a large community. In 1749 it numbered 376 households with 2,068 koku. Kita-Hozu's 125 households formed one kumi, while Minami-Hozu's 251 were divided into three regional kumi. In addition, there was a fifth kumi, a gomyo^[*] ("five names [shoots]"), that was not regional, but comprised a number of households in both villages. The gomyo^[*] households (24 in 1616; 53 in 1669; 61 in 1801; 83 in 1872)^[34] each bore the family name of one of the five village founders, and they called themselves samurai throughout the Tokugawa period.^[35] Officially, in the eyes of the overlord in Kameoka (less than two kilometers away), they were titled peasants (otonabyakusho^[*] ). In addition to and separate from these five kumi there was a community of outcastes concentrated mainly (in 1872, 69 of the 74 households) in Minami-Hozu.^[36]

In Tanba there were many groups like the gomyo^[*] , samurai of the soil who maintained their family identity well into the Tokugawa period.^[37] What was unusual about the gomyo^[*] was that, at some point in the sixteenth century or perhaps later, these families had consolidated into an organization that maintained itself until the Meiji period

[34] Igeta, "Hokenteki^[*] sonraku," 58:59-60. Hayashi Motoi has a different reading for gomyo^[*] , namely, gobyo^[*] (see Hayashi Motoi, Kyoho^[*]to Kansei , Kokumin no rekishi, 16 [Bun'eido^[*] , 1971], 395). I am following Igeta, who did the original research, and he confirmed the reading gomyo^[*] .

[35] Igeta, "Hokenteki^[*] sonraku," 58:55-56.

[36] For data on the outcaste population of Hozu, see Igeta Ryoji^[*] , "Kinsei koki^[*] no buraku sabetsu seisaku," Doshisha^[*]hogaku^[*] 110 (1969): 28-49 and 111 (1969): 53-84, esp. 54 and 66 for the population data; idem, "Mikaiho^[*] burakumin no iriaiken," Minshoho^[*]zasshi 78, suppl. no. 1 (I979): 201-16; and idem, "Mikaiho^[*] buraku to iriaiken: Kyoto-fu^[*] Kameoka-shi Hozu-mura no baai," Doshisha^[*]hogaku^[*] 136 (1975): 101-44.

[37] For instance, neighboring Umaji was ruled by two such families called ryomyo^[*] ("two names") (see Igeta, Kinsei sonraku , esp. chap. 2; see also Igeta Ryoji^[*] , Ho^[*]o miru Kurio no me: rekishi to gendai [Kyoto: Horitsu^[*] bunkasha, 1987], 89-101).

Plate 3.
Hozu Village. From the bank of Hozu River, facing north, midway
between Hozu and the castle town of Kameoka. Photograph by author.

when they formally incorporated. The gomyo^[*] was clearly an institution set up to defend class interests against other classes of villagers, such as the bond servants (genin) employed by these households and the small peasants, who were kept small for over two hundred years. The threat against the reproduction of this local upper class came from social change that took three successive forms. First, as landed samurai these families lost institutional support from the overlords, who did not recognize village samurai. Second, economic growth enriched the small peasants and led to the emancipation of many bond servants. Finally, the gomyo's^[*] own reproduction, if not checked, would weaken their economic base if with each generation holdings were divided among new branch families. This class succeeded in meeting these challenges until the nineteenth century. Because these families ruled the two Hozu villages, their strategies inform the village codes, which reveal where normative defenses had to be erected.

The 1636 "village" code, eleven short, one-line articles, was explicitly called "Rules for the Genin Peasants of Minami-Hozu" (the ones

for Kita-Hozu are not extant).^[38] All the articles are prohibitions to prevent status pollution: genin peasants cannot wear swords or leather-soled sandals, use umbrellas, or go by samurai names; children should not address their parents as toto (dad) and kaka (mom); a genin peasant cannot refer to himself or herself as midomo or to others as ore ; anyone rude in the company of samurai shall be cut down.

The last three rules need some explanation. Toto and kaka are children's terms, obviously devoid of reverential connotations. One can only guess why they constituted a problem in the eyes of these village samurai. Perhaps these samurai sensed that, as Bourdieu has remarked, "concessions of politeness ... always contain political concessions"^[39] and thus felt that they needed to dictate intrafamily behavior—the personal is political. Midomo and ore are status- and rank-marking personal pronouns, the former used by samurai to refer to themselves, the latter used for inferiors.^[40] Thus, genin peasants were not to speak or behave as equals to "samurai," a privilege the gomyo^[*] , who perceived themselves as samurai, preserved for themselves. This contrasts sharply with articles one finds in numerous village laws expressing the overlord's point of view that former samurai, which legally the gomyo^[*] were, are to be treated as peasants.^[41]

The article affirming the samurai's right to cut down peasants encourages the swift action that had become outlawed by Ieyasu's rule of 1603 that "the killing of peasants for no reason (muza to ) should be stopped, but if [a peasant] is guilty, he should be caught, arrested, and punished in accordance with a verdict by shogunal officers (bugyojo^[*] )."^[42] The samurai of Hozu village, one presumes, were not only going by a pre-Tokugawa practice: they were codifying it explicitly in 1636, an unusual example of a code contradicting lordly law.

[38] Igeta, "Hokenteki^[*] sonraku," 58:58.

[39] Bourdieu, Logic of Practice , 69.

[40] Nowadays, ore is used only as first-person pronoun; in Tokugawa times, however, it was also used as the third-person pronoun for inferiors. For midomo , see the entry in Kojien^[*] (Iwanami shoten, 1955); for ore , see the entry in Daijiten , 13 vols. (Heibonsha, 1934).

[41] Hozumi Shigeto^[*] , Goningumi hokishu^[*]zokuhen , 1:33 (1650), 68 (1679).

[42] The rule outlawing the killing of peasants "for no reason" was the last article of a seven-article decree issued by Tokugawa Ieyasu (the only one he issued about local governance) (see Kodama Kota^[*] and Oishi^[*] Shinzaburo^[*] , eds., Kinsei nosei^[*]shiryoshu^[*] , vol. 1, Edo bakufu horei^[*]1 [Yoshikawa kobunkan^[*] , 1966], 1).

Slow economic growth made genin potential buyers of land. In order to control the transfer of land out of gomyo^[*] hands, "village" rules were issued in 1691 (and again in 1731 and 1746) prohibiting the sale of paddies and fields to genin; they could acquire only homesteads with garden plots of dry fields. Similar economic restrictions were instituted against the outcastes elsewhere. Other sartorial regulations in Hozu, such as the prohibition against wearing leather-soled sandals, are also identical to those imposed on outcastes. In Hozu, therefore, which also had an outcaste community, small peasants, even taka holders, were treated like outcastes in a number of respects.^[43]

There were no restrictions on land sales among peasants. A samurai unable to find a samurai buyer and wanting to sell to a peasant had first to report the price to the samurai council, whose directions for the sale had to be followed; that is, the council set the price. In 1759 a new regulation forbade others than samurai to fish with nets in the Hozu River. The river was also the source of additional wealth through the rafting of logs, but the village samurai had a monopoly on this business too.^[44] Although by the mid Tokugawa period they lost to the overlord their control over the use of the mountain, they still had a monopoly on the use of the commercially very valuable standing trees.^[45] These "samurai" clearly constituted an economic class, both objectively, since they were the important landowners and entrepreneurs of sorts, and subjectively, because they were very conscious of the interests that bound them together, which they defended through status and commercial legislation that denied the small peasants economic opportunities.

In the eighteenth century, class differentiation occurred slowly within both the dominant and the dominated class in the two Hozu villages: the greatest holdings—between 1596 and 1636 two samurai had increased their holdings from 56 and 65 koku to 75 and 104 koku, respectively—leveled off to 50 koku, and peasants came to hold land. Yet the two groups remained distinct economically: the gomyo^[*] holdings clustered in the 5-20-koku bracket. In the 1720s and 1730s a number of peasants became very small owners (see table 18 for Kita-Hozu),

[43] Igeta also makes this point in his "Kuchi-Tanba chiho^[*] no hisabetsu shuraku^[*] ," in Zenkindai Kyoto no burakushi , ed. Buraku mondai kenkyujo, Kyoto no buraku mondai, 1 (Kyoto: Buraku mondai kenkyujo, 1987), 122.

[44] Igeta, "Hokenteki^[*] sonraku," 58:60-61, 65:44, 24-25.

[45] Igeta, "Mikaiho^[*] buraku," 104-5.