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.