3
Status Power

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Status and Class—Mutually Exclusive?

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

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

[2] Smith, "Japanese Village."

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

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

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

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

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

[6] Nakane, Kinship , 47, 49.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Status Divide

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

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

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

[18] Ibid.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Shared" Communities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Factious Peasants: Niremata, 1654

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fractioned Peasants: Niremata, 1615-1680

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

^a present at Umanosuke's funeral m 1645

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1687/12
Hanbei

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1687/12
Hanbei
I certify that the above is true
Yahei, Headman

Yahei, the new headman who replaced Chuemon^[*] , vouches for Hanbei's version of the three plaintiffs' ancestry: they are mutually related and tied to a kadoya. Equally important are the location of their living quarters (whether they are within or outside someone's compound—he confirms that they now live in Hanbei's grandfather's compound) and their independent tax status. The latter seems to indicate that the village headman had treated them as independent tribute payers.

These three documents were apparently insufficient for the intendant to make up his mind on this question of status, because seven months later three additional recorded testimonies were produced, the first one by the headman and the thirteen titled peasants.

4. Recorded Testimony by the Headman and the Thirteen Titled Peasants (1688/7/11)

1. We have been asked whether the three plaintiffs in question are Hanbei's kakaeya or his kadoya. Since we are unaware of circumstances long past, we do not know whether they are one or the other. They were listed separately and they paid tribute and corvée separately.

2. The three allege that their grandfather Shige'emon had been adopted by Hanbei's great-grandfather Umanosuke and that they were attached to the portion of the land on which Umanosuke retired and which he passed on to Shige'emon. Now, is there certainty that Shige'emon was Umanosuke's adopted son? It is hard to tell whether he was his adopted son or his kadoya because it is too long ago and the situation is not dear. Of course, as far as the division of Umanosuke's 44 koku is concerned, the three plaintiffs have today a portion thereof, but on what basis this was divided, that we do not know.

3. Now the question: Did the three plaintiffs pay their tribute and corvée separately and have they been listed separately on the name registers since Shige'emon's generation or not; and if not, then since when and for how many years have they been paying taxes separately? Afterwards [after Shige'emon's time] they made all their contributions, tax and corvée included, together with Hanbei, but they delivered separately the taxes and corvée of 1676, twelve years ago. Now, if further asked on what grounds this separate payment of twelve years ago took place or how the division of land occurred, we do not know, but Hanbei was headman then.

4. Hanbei alleges that the three plaintiffs are without a doubt kadoya because every year since his great-grandfather's generation down to his own they performed kadoya corvée and the villagers all know that. When investigating the truth of Hanbei's allegation, we found that although we do not know what will happen now, every year at the time of the transplanting of the rice seedlings, the three, including their wives, without exception helped on Hanbei's paddies. This is what Kichizaemon said. As for others who may have helped on that occasion, there were others, although we do not know their number.

5. Hanbei alleges that forty-four years ago, Shige'emon was recorded as kadoya on the population and house registers, documents certified by Daitokuin and separately by the whole village with the seals of the peasants. Because this was so long ago, we were not there when these documents were written, but [when we checked them] we found that it was Daitokuin's writing and that all the peasants certified those documents with their seals.

6. Hanbei alleges that "under the next three intendants, the three plaintiffs were always listed as kadoya; but that under the last intendant they were also sometimes registered as kakae; ultimately, it did not matter how they were registered since they were his dependents, who had to obey him." Is this true? In those days population registers were compiled only every five or ten years. Hanbei in the end could not remember for sure, and he and Zenzaemon admitted not knowing whether it was kakae or kadoya.

1688/7/11
Yahei, Headman
Thirteen titled peasants

The village leaders are unwilling to pronounce on the status of the plaintiffs. They state, however, that the trio was attached to Shige'emon's

land (and not Goemon's). Thus they corroborate the plaintiff's alleged filiation to Umanosuke via Shige'emon. The question then became whether Shige'emon was an adopted son or a kadoya. They say that they do not know because it was too long ago but that documents exist that could verify this. What is puzzling is that the plaintiffs seem to have become independent tribute payers, at least informally, when Hanbei was headman. His argument, however, clearly rests on his assumption that no matter how they were registered, they were his dependents.

Next is a recorded testimony (with the headman's certification) by Shin'emon, whose father, of the same name, was Umanosuke's son by a woman other than his wife.

5. Shin'emon's Recorded Testimony, Certified by the Headman (1688/7/11)

1. My father, Shin'emon, is Umanosuke's son by another woman. Of Umanosuke's 44 koku, 22 went to Goemon, son by his wife; the other 22 went to Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and myself. Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and I attended Umanosuke's funeral. Furthermore, Umanosuke's 44 koku are now in the hands of Bun'emon, Shiroemon^[*] , Shige'emon, Tokuzaemon, and myself; we pay tribute and corvée separately according to our taka. I looked into this; also into what the three plaintiffs said. My father, Shin'emon, died ten years ago, and because he was non compos mentis (fuchoho^[*] ), he did not tell me anything. As to the division of the 22 koku, I do not know of a document to that effect, but Shige'emon, the oya [parent or boss, patron] of the three plaintiffs, received 5 sho^[*] [0.05 koku] of paddies and 5 sho^[*] of buckwheat dry fields from Umanosuke when the latter died. At the funeral were Tokuzaemon and myself. The three plaintiffs did not help. Tribute and corvée were paid separately.

2. This is my pedigree. Hence I have been asked whether the three plaintiffs are Hanbei's kadoya, and since I line up in the lineage at the same [generational] level as the three plaintiffs, I was requested to talk about the times since Hanbei's great-grandfather Umanosuke, on the supposition that I was knowledgeable about them. But as mentioned earlier, since my father was non compos mentis , he did not transmit to me any details. However, in Umanosuke's generation, the three plaintiffs' oya, Shige'emon, worked for Umanosuke fifteen days a month.

1688/7/11
Shin'emon
Certified as true by Yahei, Headman

Everyone is evasive; collective memory seems blocked, this time through the state of non compos mentis of a conveniently dead man who while still alive might have casually provided his son with the right information. But he did not. A certain labor dependency of Shige'emon

vis-à-vis Umanosuke is acknowledged, but this dependency is not spelled out as one typical of a kadoya. Everybody seems to sympathize with the plaintiffs by not providing the crucial information that would otherwise nail them.

Finally, there is a recorded testimony by two of the three men who arranged Umanosuke's inheritance: Daitokuin (a Buddhist priest, judging by his name) and Chuemon^[*] .

6. Recorded Testimony by Chuemon^[*] and Daitokuin (1688/7/11)

1. This concerns the three plaintiffs' allegations that: they are not kadoya; their oya, Shige'emon, is Umanosuke's adopted son; the 22 koku of the retired Umanosuke were divided into three and given to Tokuzaemon (son of Goemon, Umanosuke's son by his wife), Shin'emon (son by another woman), and his adopted son Shige'emon; this division is well known to Daitokuin and Chuemon^[*] from this village and Jiroemon^[*] from the branch village. We were summoned and asked to investigate.

Forty-four years ago, still alive, Umanosuke told us that he wanted the 5 sho^[*] of paddies and dry fields each to go to Shige'emon. He died that year. In the spring of the following year the three of us got together and made the transfer m Shige'emon, but the talk about dividing the 22 koku into three is a lie. As to the adopted status of Shige'emon, the three plaintiffs alleged that we knew that well, but we do not know whether he had been adopted or not. We have not heard rumors that he was adopted or that he was a kadoya.

1688/7/11
Chuemon^[*]
Daitokuin

Almost a year after the suit began, in a testimony by men who knew Umanosuke, it turns out that Umanosuke's property was not divided into three as alleged all along. But at the same time, they are ignorant of Shige'emon's adoption or his kadoya status! It is striking how just about everything is a matter of dispute: the status of kadoya or kakae, the relationship of adoption, the question of inheritance, the meaning of joint versus separate tribute payments.

We do not know the outcome of this suit, but it seems likely that the result somehow favored the plaintiffs. This absence of a clear settlement, which would result in one side's admitting defeat, is rather typical, as we shall see. One also senses the lineage tensions between Hanbei's side and Shin'emon's; village politics were often lineage politics. Overall, one also has the impression of a status system in transition.

From Tribute Payers to Full Peasants: Kodaira, 1629-1849

Titled peasants are often understood to be descendants of peasants entered on the early land surveys as landowners and tribute payers. Ancestry and ownership would thus be necessary to qualify for the title of "titled peasant." Accordingly, one would expect that as the population grew (especially during the seventeenth century, when the growth rate was 50 percent) and the number of kin-related small landholders that branched off from the original households increased, the number of titled peasants also increased. On the other hand, if many new peasants came from the ranks of non-kin dependents (who were not descendants from original titled peasants) and ancestry was more important than landownership, one might expect nontitled peasants to outnumber titled peasants. Honbyakusho^[*] , "titled peasant," is specifically a title, and its rarity points to privilege and limited access. Ancestry, however, was only one way to anchor and preserve this privilege against other claimants, and it was not an absolute criterion: it was only one strategy among others to secure distinction and status.

Thus, a number of questions have to be answered with regard to the status of titled peasant. Why did the number of tided peasants tend to become limited? Whence the rarefaction? What criteria controlled entry to this status group—ancestry, ownership, wealth? And did the overlords or the village council control these criteria? How did lineage power intersect with the power or prestige individuals derived from the fide? Was this symbolic capital—which within the village was political capital—immune to devaluation (could one lose one's status as a titled peasant) or marketable (could one sell or buy the status as such)? Could one transfer the title independently from the land, or were the two inseparable? I touched upon some of these questions in chapter 1. Here I shall discuss them more fully.

In discussing the original titled peasants, identified as homestead owners in the early registers, I have described their function in rather vague terminology: they were accountable for the tribute, responsible for it, and they channeled it. This language is intentional, because non-titled peasants also produced and contributed to tribute and corvée. The original titled peasants were clearly the economically wealthier peasants, if for no other reason than that they had homesteads. The basis for the title was thus economic and rested on ownership not sim-

ply of land but of homesteads as well. By the same token, it was also political, since it was the local elite that became titled. The term "titled peasant" thus has two sides, an extramural and an intramural one, the former having to do with responsibility for tribute and corvée, the latter (both reinforced by and the basis for the former) with local status and power.

The early titled peasants managed land, not uncommonly estates of more than one hundred koku, and a number of dependents co-residing on the homestead as well. Gradually these estates were divided and parceled out to dependents, who thereby became economically independent to some degree from the original owner, who nevertheless retained his preeminent position within the expanding lineage by registering the various households (ie) and their land as being part of (buntsuke) or within (uchizuke ) the main holding. Often, but not always, the former referred to kin (affines, descendants, and relatives), the latter to non-kin.^[51] Genealogically, or perhaps more precisely, linealogically , these new units were branch houses of the main house.

In Shimo-Kaize, as we have just seen, there was a great difference between kadoya and kakae, which I referred to as semi-established and fully established branch houses, respectively; and the trend was "emancipatory" from kadoya to kakae. The evolving relationship of these kakae to the titled peasants can be described as follows. The number of titled peasants increased until the last decades of the seventeenth century, when they appear to have reached a quota in most villages that was maintained for about a hundred years. During that century the number of kakae grew, but then it decreased and by the end of the period, in the 1860s, they had virtually disappeared, having become titled peasants.^[52] These turning points in the trajectory of the relationship between kakae and titled peasants need explanation. Why a growth in the numbers first of titled peasants, then of kakae, and then once again of titled peasants?

To follow this trajectory, the struggles that determined it have to be analyzed and the question of status that constitutes their center

[51] Ichikawa Takeji, "Kakaebyakusho^[*] ," 6.

[52] For instance, in Ozawa village of Saku district in 1704, 33 percent of the peasants were kakae, but in 1864 all kakae had disappeared. The same drastic drop occurred in nineteen out of the twenty-five villages that constituted the Tanoguchi bakufu fief, of which Ozawa was a part (ibid., tables 3 and 4 [7, 8]).

addressed. With this in mind, we shall follow in some detail the history of Kodaira village (presently part of the town of Mochizuki in Kita-Saku district) as presented to us by Ozaki Yukiya.^[53] In 1647 its assessed yield was 175 koku, making it a small village.

In 1629 Kodaira counted thirteen peasant owners of residences (yashiki), making them "tided peasants" (see table 14) In 1643 there were twenty: the original thirteen plus two branch houses, all holders of between 8 and 21 koku, and five others with holdings between 4 and 8 koku as yet without homesteads. Since the latter five were entitled to a yashikibiki , an exemption of tribute owed on their residence, they must have been titled peasants as well.^[54] In addition, there were two other peasants with less than 1 koku who differed from the other twenty in that they did not enjoy the exemption; they were nontitled peasants.^[55] The number of titled peasants thus increased from thirteen to twenty in about a dozen years.^[56] Two hundred years later, in 1849, there were twenty-one Kodaira peasants marked in the registers as osabyakusho^[*] ("head peasant"), a variant of honbyakusho^[*] . Nothing seems to have changed, yet this longue durée is filled with colorful events.

The 1677 population roster shows clear status divisions. The peasant population, aside from one outcaste, then comprised twenty titled peasants (including seven patrons), thirteen clients (including three kadoya), and a number of bond servants (fudai and genin). Economically, however, the members of the two main groups are not always distinguishable. Although all holders of more than eight koku are titled peasants, some clients have equally large or even larger holdings and bond servants as well. The three clients and the one outcaste have holdings larger than that of the smallest titled peasant (under 1 koku). Nine of the clients, however, have no holdings at all (mudaka).

Over the next twenty years two great shifts occurred. In 1694 one titled peasant, a sake brewer (whose descendant is still in business

[53] Ozaki Yukiya, "Kinsei sonraku naibu no mibun kaiso^[*] ni tsuite: Shinano-kuni Saku-gun Kodaira-mura kakaebyakusho^[*] mondai o chushin^[*] ni," Nagano 29, no. 8 (1977): 752-68, no. 9 (1977): 815-30.

[54] In Matsumoto domain this amount was 1 koku (Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 85).

[55] Although the five holders of 4 to 8 koku had no yashiki they were nevertheless granted the yashikibiki , which means that they must have been (new) titled peasants (Ozaki, "Kinsei sonraku," 755).

[56] Ibid., table 1 (755).

(Table continued on next page)

(Table continued from previous page)

today) had become very successful, for he had 80 koku, which put him far ahead of the next two holders, with 25 and 13 koku. The situations of some of the kakae had also improved: the nine taka holders, the largest with 11 koku, each had more land than sixteen of the twenty titled peasants, but there were now also twenty-seven landless clients. The total number of clients now stood at thirty-six. By 1731 the picture has changed again. The sake brewer, had nineteen servants and had acquired another 28 koku, bringing his holding to almost 100 koku. But twelve of the now twenty-one titled peasants had only x koku or less. Now, there were forty clients, of whom all but one had land. This does not mean, however, that there were no landless peasants (mizunomibyakusho^[*] ): there were eighteen of them, one of whom was a client.

Ozaki does not detail the composition of the goningumi, but it is likely that the kumi were structured along lineage lines. It is important to note as well that membership in the goningumi was limited to titled peasants, twenty-one households out of a total of seventy-eight.^[57] As we shall see, lineages played an overwhelming role in village politics, one that has not received much scholarly attention. As lineages grew, the number of temples grew from one temple of z koku to three, one with less than half a koku, the other two with 5 and 16 koku. It is likely that these temples serviced nor simply "the village" but the lineages.

We should take a closer look at who the titled peasants and clients were. A comparison of three population registers (shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] ), for the years 1694, 1695, and 1698, reveals numerous and frequent changes in the identity of titled peasants and clients. Between 1694 and 1695 the number of titled peasants increased by one (to twenty-one); however, this new titled peasant, who had been promoted from the status of client, became a client again three years later, but under a different patron. In another case, a patron changed places with his client, the latter now assuming the position of lineage patron and titled peasant. Another titled peasant went into service outside the village for

[57] This was also the case in Tenjinbayashi, a neighboring village. In 1699 there were nine goningumi in Tenjinbayashi, each counting exactly five members (rifled peasants), except for one group that had only four members. Together with the headman, this adds up to forty-five rifled peasants; nineteen of them were patrons for a total of thirty-two kakae. In addition, there were six servants and four outcastes (see Ozaki Yukiya, "Mochizuki-machi no buraku no rekishi [1]," Mochizuki no burakushi 1 [1975]: 53).

several years and gave up his title. Other cases in 1698 show a similar instability in the membership of both ranks. One titled peasant passed his title on to his client when he left the village on a service stint. One Jihei who in 1695 was a client turned up three years later as not only a titled peasant but also a patron of three clients: one was Jihei's former fellow client; one was Sajihei, a titled peasant who had two clients in 1694 but only one in 1695 and was himself Jihei's client by 1698; and the third was the successor to Sajihei's former client.

The situations of a number of titled peasants were precarious, and their clients stood ready to take their place. (By now the titled peasants constituted a numerus clausus .) These clients were often second and third sons and in some rare cases bond servants. The fiction that they were all born within the village, however, was maintained; although most bond servants came from the outside, when they were promoted to client status they were recorded as "born in the village." Also, as we saw in chapter 1 to be the case in Makibuse, none of Kodaira's approximately thirty bond and indentured servants were married. Either they could not afford a family (a very widespread phenomenon beyond Japan also)^[58] or they were not allowed to have one (they needed their patron's approval to take a spouse).^[59]

In the 1702 population rosters of the neighboring village of Kasuga, one looks in vain for clients. Instead, there are a good number of mudaka, peasants without taka, recorded as doing "internal work" (naisaku ) for their parents or brothers. They had families and lived in separate quarters and were thus kin, established as branch families who officially had not been granted land by their main family.

What qualified one to be a titled peasant, and why was their number restricted at a time when more and more branch houses were being created? Economic power obviously was not the decisive factor: quite a number of clients held larger holdings than most of the titled peasants. There was no upper kokudaka threshold that automatically made one a titled peasant or a lower one whereby one lost one's title. At the same time, all of the clients who were promoted held at least close to

[58] I referred earlier to Pierre Bourdieu's study of the Béarn region in France. I still remember the live-in stable hands on the farms of the village in Belgium where I was born, all bachelors who were never taken seriously and bore the brunt of many jokes and pranks.

[59] Minegishi, Kinsei mibunron , 140-42.

five koku. Unlike the holding, the title usually could not be divided (although in Niremata it was). Hierarchical lineage structure seems to have determined all important relationships within the village. In society at large the great divide was between samurai and nonsamurai, in the village between rifled and nontitled peasants; both the nonsamurai and the nontitled peasants were subjects of governance. The nature of status in samurai society differed from that in peasant society. Whereas samurai status adhered to all descendants of samurai, for long periods of time during the Tokugawa period the number of titled peasants was limited; only one of a titled peasant's sons could inherit the title—which was also the case with samurai offices . The title of "titled peasant" thus seems to have functioned not simply as a marker of status but also as a title of office. And initially this was the case, since titled peasants were created and set up as such to provide the overlords with the goods and services they expected from their subjects. But why its scarcity, given that many nontitled peasants obviously provided the same function? Were there also extramural influences at work in the limitation of the number of titled peasants?

Naito^[*] Jiro's^[*] answer to this question, which is perhaps too one-sided, is that the titled peasants were those who had a hyakusho^[*]kabu , or "peasant share."^[60] In the beginning only the "titled peasants" (homestead owners) had such a share. While this may sound tautological (titled peasants are those who have a share in the status of peasant as opposed to those who do not), the term share , as we shall see shortly, was used very early on to refer to title holders.

In accounting for the nearly universal phenomenon of the continued restriction of the number of title owners, Naito^[*] concentrates on extramural factors, thus ignoring the increase in the number of titled peasants in roughly the first half of the seventeenth century. He cites two cases where daimyo legislated explicitly against an increase in the number of "peasant shares," one of them using the term kabu .^[61] In bakufu legislation there is no explicit reference to limiting the number of rifled peasants, but many bakufu-initiated village laws (goningu-

[60] Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 28.

[61] The two cases revolve the Kaga domain and the village law of Iwamoto village in Echizen (ibid., 94-95). The latter mentions the term kabu and is a document that dates from between 1601 and 1607. For the full text of this document, see Miyagawa, Taiko^[*]kenchi-ron , 2:304. Another case is Ueda domain (see NAK-T 4:464).

micho^[*] zensho) mention the need to provide successors to bankrupt peasant houses.^[62] Naito's^[*] interpretation of this injunction seems plausible. He argues that if shogunal policy had simply aimed at establishing small landholders, there would have been no need for such encouragement: there were plenty of small landholders with lands and homesteads who could have succeeded to bankrupt titled peasant houses. This injunction makes sense only in a context of limited access to the status of titled peasant.

Another extraneous influence was undoubtedly the bakufu's 1673 prohibition against dividing land below a certain size: For peasants the minimum size was ten koku, and for headmen, twice that amount.^[63] This law was issued around the time that the great riparian works of the seventeenth century were coming to an end. In many regions the acreage had been increased, so that an expanding population could be absorbed. Thus the further creation of branch houses would result in smaller holdings, and often, for example, in small mountain villages, even in a reduction of acreage of arable by the amount of land taken up for new homesteads. In many areas the branch houses established during this period of expansion became titled peasants.

In the registers in Ueda domain, a few kilometers to the north of Kodaira, one finds clients until around 1624, when they begin to be entered on the name rosters as equal to the titled peasants, and by 1654 they are all registered as such on the cadasters; that was when the number of titled peasants was frozen. And this seems to have been in response to orders from the overlord. Subsequently, in the 1670s, clients reappear on the kumi rosters under various labels—"kakae," "elder brother kakae," "younger brother kakae," "nephew kakae," and so on—as dependents of titled peasants and yet as owners of homesteads and lands.^[64]

The same thing happened in Gorobe-shinden (discussed in chapter 2), a few kilometers to the east of Kodaira, with the large development of new fields by a dogo^[*] . When all the available flat land was brought under cultivation by the late 1660s, the number of titled peasants froze at forty-five households, and kakae were entered on the population registers (shumon^[*] aratamecho^[*] and goningumicho^[*] ) as dependents of

[62] Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 95-98.

[63] For an English translation of this law, see Lu, Sources , 1:207.

[64] NAK-T 4:463-64.

titled peasants, hence not as full community members. Half a century later, in 1712, the number of titled peasants in Gorobe-shinden was still forty-five, but thirty-four of them had a total of eighty-three kakae.^[65]

Naito^[*] points out that if there was a limitation on the number of titled peasants set by overlord power, as was sometimes the case, and if, by bakufu order, it had become difficult to establish branch houses (and if, one may add, certain sectional intravillage interests were served by such restrictions), then new branch houses, even if they were economically independent and as well off as their parent families, had officially to be registered as still part of, or dependent on, their parent families. In other words, this limitation maintained hierarchical relations between main and branch families and the importance of lineage structures.^[66]

This arrangement looks very much like another tatemae reconciliation of the contradictions between legal principle (making branching a virtual impossibility for the majority of peasants) and actual practice (it was not admitted to on paper, but it happened nevertheless). A tatemae approach to law can perhaps best be rendered as a "nod and wink" approach—the Italians' perception of their own relationship to law. The authorities had documents showing compliance with the law (the stable number of titled peasants), and the peasants had a practice they could live with—an eminent illustration of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a misrecognition of reality that fools nobody.^[67]

Thus, the lineages used bakufu restrictions on partitioning holdings to structure themselves and were at the same time structured by it. In and of itself, however, lineage economic power was not effective if it could not be translated into political power, which meant acquiring for its members the title "titled peasant." Since the number of titled peasants was restricted, however, they had to wait for the moment that a titled peasant, for one reason or another, had to give up his share. Another bakufu institution leveraged by lineages was the kumi system. Kumi organizations were used to strengthen lineage filiations, because

[65] Ibid., 464.

[66] Naito^[*] , Honbyakusho^[*]taisei , 50, 175-79.

[67] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 133, 171. The Japanese categories tatemae (face, façade) and honne (real intention), which John O. Haley skillfully uses in his discussion of "law as tatemae " (Authority without Power: Law and the Japanese Paradox [New York: Oxford University Press, 1991], 186-90), fit perfectly Bourdieu's analytic notion of misrecognition.

all heads of the five-household neighborhood groups were patron houses. Intravillage lineage hierarchies and administrative structures, the latter ordered by overlord authority, thus overlapped.

Let us return now to Kodaira village. By 1731 forty landholding kakae and seventeen landless peasants, all incorporated into hierarchical lineage relationships, were ruled by twenty titled peasants, half of them virtually landless (i.e., having less than one koku). The situation was unavoidably wrought with tensions. Some tatemae, or cosmetic, as opposed to substantial, changes had been made in the entries of the population registers a few years earlier, changes that reduced somewhat the difference in status between tided and nontitled peasants. The former were no longer entered as having been tided peasants daidai , "for generations and generations," and to the latter's name was no longer added onbyakusho^[*] tsukamatsuri makari ari , "deferentially in service of titled peasants."^[68] But how could these nontitled peasants go about effecting substantial changes? Some overlords (in Ueda domain at one point) had legislated against such changes; others (often in bakufu territories) were not interested in such matters.

In 1769 a number of kakae in Kodaira organized themselves as spokesmen for their class, although they did not form a majority, and raised an issue that was of some interest to the authorities, namely, the structure of the neighborhood kumi. That year eighteen (out of fifty-eight) kakae filed a suit requesting that the kakae system be abolished. They argued that patrons should not also function as kumi heads because this constituted a repressive, overlapping authority structure. On 2/29, however, before the suit was even filed, sixteen of the twenty-one tided peasants of Kodaira submitted a written rebuttal to the five village officials (the other titled peasants). They argued that there had been twenty-one tided peasants in the village "since ancient times"; that they, together with the kumi heads and the representative of the peasants (hyakushodai^[*] ), made all the important decisions; and that issues of kumi membership were always discussed by all the peasants. The next day the remaining forty kakae wrote to the village officials that they disapproved of the suit by their eighteen status mates.

This attempt at staving off the suit failed, and the officials filed a recorded testimony with the bakufu's intendant at Mikage-shinden,

[68] Ozaki, "Kinsei sonraku," 767.

stating that the overlapping system was according to longtime village law and that at a meeting of 2/8 "all" the peasants had decided not to change the entries in the new population rosters that were due within a few weeks. Moreover, they reminded the authorities that prior to this suit of the eighteen, three among them had gone directly to the office in Mikage-shinden about this matter and that that office had shown little interest, ordering a private settlement (naisai ). The plaintiffs, however, had ignored the decision that was subsequently reached in the village. Finally, a few days later, in the third month, the suit was filed together with a rebuttal signed by the village officials and the titled peasants.

The plaintiffs obviously wanted to use the institution of the neighborhood kumi as leverage to break the power of their bosses, while the defendants stated that the overlapping system was village law and did not cause problems to the plaintiffs. The latter, however, argued that while Tokugawa law required that kumi be established by neighborhood and that a head then be designated, in Kodaira only patrons were kumi heads. The plaintiffs made it clear that they believed the village officials had been maneuvering to prevent kakae from becoming kumi heads. (The case of nearby Iribuse, discussed in chapter 2, was very similar.) The defendants, conceding this point somewhat, proposed a compromise whereby the titled peasants would constitute three separate kumi and the other peasants would be grouped in genuine neighborhood associations and would choose their own heads. This compromise solution was rejected. The eighteen were intransigent and wanted to negotiate only if the entry "patron" (kakaeoya) were taken off the population register. They cited the precedent of neighboring Makibuse, where the overlapping system had been abolished. But the village officials were unimpressed, arguing that Kodaira had its own village law and that it did not matter what was practiced elsewhere.

This suit describes concretely the trouble patrons caused their clients; some complaints are about the symbolic distancing of the village officials from the peasants. In the third month the new population register had to be signed. The custom had been for peasants to drop by the headman's home to certify their entries with their seals, but now they were all summoned to assemble in the headman's yard, with the officials inside and the representative of the peasants acting as a go-between. The officials gave three reasons for this hierarchical arrangement. First, since the village had become part of the bakufu domain (in

1765) the village law had to be read to the peasants once a year, which was why they were gathered together to hear the reading and sign the register at the same time. Second, the headman's house was too small for a gathering of all the peasants. And third, since the weather was fine, it seemed like a good idea to use the outdoors. The last two reasons sound spurious: it is doubtful that the headman's house was too small, and in the mountains of Nagano in the third month the weather is still bitterly cold. Obviously, the kakae interpreted this setup as arbitrarily emphasizing the differences in status between the officials, or patrons, on the one hand, and the peasants, or kakae, in general, on the other.

The eighteen had set out for the bakufu office at Mikage-shinden (some sixteen kilometers away) with their suit once before, but the village officials had gone after them and persuaded them to return by promising a private settlement. The negotiations had faltered, however, over the abolition of the patron system, and the eighteen had reintroduced their suit. Then the issue of a conflict of interests was raised, the plaintiffs expressing their concern that the decision by the titled peasants to have the village shoulder the officials' travel expenses might have had something to do with the overlapping responsibilities of patrons and kumi heads. The titled peasants simply denied the allegations and asserted that the decision about shouldering the defendants' costs had been made not only by the twenty-one titled peasants but by all the peasants. Costs had also been a factor in postponing the suit of the eighteen for over four years. They had submitted their suit to the peasant representative several times, but the village officials had ordered prepayment of the costs of the suit. The titled peasants' view of this was that all these earlier attempts had constituted only informal talks, not formal proposals for a full-fledged suit.

The plaintiffs, conscious of their economic independence, also requested that any household that could not be self-sufficient be excluded from the kumi. The officials responded by arguing that economics had nothing to do with full kumi membership: lack of economic self-sufficiency was no reason, they said, to lose one's status as titled peasant and patron. Only if one became a servant in another village did one lose one's status. But this was not the case with Kyuzaemon^[*] , whom the plaintiffs cited as an example. Kyuzaemon^[*] , patron and kumi head with a meager holding of 0.085 koku, was working as a servant (hokonin^[*] ) in

another household. He had in his kumi one successor house and one doshin^[*] (a Buddhist priest without a temple). When one of these two disappeared the field had to be taken over by another peasant, who had himself only 0.15 koku but never lifted a finger to cultivate the minuscule plot.

The suit contains yet another reference to a previous suit, this one involving a kumi head (0.4 koku) who had expelled one of his kakae "because not only had he always been insolent but he had also ignored advice from the village and he was selfish (wagamama )." The village officials had then told the kakae that because he now had no patron he could no longer live in the village. This kakae also had brought a suit to the Mikage-shinden office. The case had been stopped, however, through mediators brought in from another village. The same expelled kakae, together with his three co-kakae, were among the eighteen plaintiffs.

By the time of the suit, the titled and nontitled peasants were economically virtually undistinguishable. Only five titled peasants had holdings of more than z koku (the sake brewer, with 120; the headman, with 14; and three others, with 5, 4, and 3 koku), four more had x koku, and the remaining twelve had holdings below 1 koku. On the other hand, nineteen kakae had more than x koku. Both plaintiffs and their ten patrons were spread evenly on both sides of the 1-koku divide. Four patrons found all their kakae united on the side of the plaintiffs, and eight had succeeded in rallying all theirs in opposition, while the kakae of the remaining eight were divided between plaintiffs and opponents to the suit.

The outcome of the suit, mediated at the wealthy temple Fukuoji^[*] , appeared to be largely a victory for the plaintiffs: reference to kakae and mizunomi in the kumi membership lists was to be dropped, kumi would now be arranged geographically, and kumi leaders were to be elected from within the kumi every other year. But it was a hollow victory, because after four years, in 1773 and 1774 three separate but identical suits were submitted (by twenty plaintiffs, thirteen of them new ones) about the problem of overlapping jurisdictions. This time, however, the plaintiffs' demands were on a smaller scale: they wanted to be freed from their status as kakae and to be "recognized in the population roster as born in this village." There was no critique of the kakae system as such, no insistence on abolishing it. This obviously was not a

"class suit," for all kakae. Moreover, all petitions were also co-signed by the officials and the patrons in question. What was the rationale behind this new drive, coopted, it seems, by all those with any power? Who among the kakae signed, and why not all of them now that the drive enjoyed official sanction? (There is secondary evidence of an additional petition, now lost, by another ten kakae, bringing the total kakae supporters to thirty, still just above half of the total kakae population of fifty-six.)

The petitioners made a distinct, on between kakae that were related by kinship and those that were not. What four years earlier had appeared to be a united front as far as claims were concerned had broken down along kinship lines. Fictional kinship was fine, the petitioners seemed to say, but it was not the real thing and should not be treated as such. Distinctions were introduced, or made stronger, in order to separate the two and to produce distinction that was acceptable to the authorities.

It annoyed the thirty kin branch houses that they would have the same status as the twenty-six non-kin branch houses, and they wanted not simply to have their kakae status removed but to be acknowledged as hyakusho^[*] , "peasants." (A similar distinction between kin and non-kin kakae had been made in Shimo-Kaize.) The result, however, was not equality with the old titled peasants, here called onbyakusho^[*] , or "honorable peasants," but a further splitting of this status whereby the kin kakae became second-class onbyakusho^[*] , while the non-kin kakae became simply hyakusho^[*] , peasants—but the term no longer simply described an occupation: it now was a title designating their status within a finely graded hierarchy.

The population register of 1780 includes the following seven ranks of peasants (the number of peasant households in each rank is given in parentheses):

1. "onbyakusho^[*] [honorable, i.e., titled peasant] living in this village since ancient times" (18)

2. "onbyakusho^[*] born in this village" (29)

3. "hyakusho^[*] born in this village" (18)

4. "hoko^[*] [in service] at X with Y (born as onbyakusho^[*] in this village)" (5)

5. "X's kakae, born in this village" (3)

6. "X's mizunomi ['landless' (tenant)]" (3)

7. "mizunomi born in this village (onbyakusho^[*] since ancient times but now mizunomi)" (1)

This new status stratification was an ingenious device to accommodate some of the demands while preserving distinction and the distinctions that constitute the symbolic capital—they had hardly any other—of the dominant fraction of the village. The demands of the kakae, both kin and non-kin, were met: in ranks z and 3 they were now recorded as "born in the village" and no longer as kakae but as peasants, hyakusho^[*] . The special demand of the kin kakae was also met, for they were now distinguished from the non-kin by the "honorable" prefix on . And former titled peasants (onbyakusho^[*] ) were recognized as such: in rank 4, for those who had to give up their title because they went into service outside the village while retaining some land, and also in the lowest rank, because they had lost all their land (below the mizunomi of rank 6, who had some land). There are, however, a few kakae left, in rank 5.

Later population rosters tell the continuing story of wranglings over status promotion and maneuvers against status pollution. All non-kin hyakusho^[*] of rank 3 became absorbed as onbyakusho^[*] into rank 2, and all dependent mizunomi of rank 6 were promoted to dependent kakae of rank 5, who later were gradually incorporated into rank 2. On the 1849 roster only the names of peasants are listed, without any prefixes. Had equality been achieved? Not quite, because there are "sidescript" entries next to the names. On this roster, twenty-one peasants are marked as osabyakusho^[*] , "head peasants" (three of them mizunomi), forty-eight as hyakusho^[*] , "peasants" (among whom are three mizunomi), and two as kakae (one mizunomi). Finally, after some two hundred and fifty years all but two in this peasant village had become "peasants." Had status been superseded by class at the end of the Tokugawa period, as the historians mentioned at the beginning of this chapter argue? Not quite. Mizunomi is a clear economic marker for landless peasants. Yet three mizunomi are among the elite twenty-one.

Similar struggles concerning the status of titled and nontitled peasants took place in the area around Kodaira at roughly the same time. We shall look briefly at two additional cases that involved "mass" decisions, one involving promotion to, the other demotion from, the status of titled peasant. A group promotion of kakae to titled peasants

should not be interpreted too readily as a final step toward equality. Often, subtle or even explicit social distinctions were maintained between the old elite and arrives.

In 1780 in Nagatoro (in today's Saku city, some fifteen kilometers east of Kodaira) thirty-five clients were set free by twenty-five patrons, and they became full members of the neighborhood kumi (resulting in the creation of seven new kumi); but all of them had to be given permission by their former patrons, who thus became their guarantors.^[69] The reasons these guarantors gave for setting their clients free included the following: "he has his own holding"; "he has a separate house but no land yet, but he will cause no trouble"; "I shall give him land, and he will cause no trouble"; "he is my relative, and I shall give him 1.44 koku."

Having a clear title to some land (even one koku or less) was a basic condition for becoming a titled peasant in Nagatoro. It is ironic, however, that these amounts of land were insufficient to maintain even a small peasant household. These peasants, now nominally "full peasants," must have supplemented their income through nonagricultural pursuits. Economically, the term "titled peasant" was an empty title; its significance was purely political and social.

The "independence" thus gained was conditional upon good behavior; the guarantorship certainly suggests as much. Sometimes the difference between old and new titled peasants was codified and expressed in public signs. In Tanoguchi village (also in Kita-Saku district) the village laws of 1681 stipulated that clients promoted to the status of titled peasant were not allowed to wear haori coats, hakama ceremonial aprons, or ashida (high rain geta, or wooden clogs) or to use umbrellas, and the pillars of their houses could not exceed eight shaku (2.40 meter); nor could they use tatami mats, and they were not allowed to enter homes of "real" titled peasants, but had always to stay in the entrance way. (As we shall see in chapter 5, prohibitions identical to these were issued against outcastes.) Such distinctions within the ranks of titled peasants could be maintained for a long time. In one case, someone whose household had been promoted to titled peasant in the 1780s was reminded in writing two generations later, in 1844, that he could not wear a kamishimo ceremonial over-

[69] Ichikawa Takeji, "Kakaebyakusho^[*] ," 12-13.

coat except when he was the main mourner at a funeral or the groom at a marriage (an allowance made because of relaxing standards, it was stated). If these things were disregarded, he was warned, his house would return to its former kakae status.^[70]

The group demotion case, a rare occurrence, is from Kasuga-shinden (a few kilometers south of Kodaira), which, with only 145 koku, was a rather small village.^[71] In 1767 the headman in one stroke demoted twenty-five titled peasants to kakae status. The result was a suit (in the third month, as was so often the case) brought by the demoted to the headman. The headman, however, single-handedly, and without any further endorsement by village officials, passed the suit on to the bakufu authorities in Mikage-shinden—in an effort to doom it.

It should be noted in passing that this circumstance throws some light on the process of lodging suits. Dan Fenno Henderson has argued that villagers' suits had to be approved by the village headman and could be initiated only after conciliation efforts had failed.^[72] Japanese scholars have disputed this point. According to Ishii Ryosuke^[*] , no conciliation efforts were needed; the headman had simply to provide an accompanying letter, which the headman failed to do in this case.

All four kumi heads (the only ones among the twenty-two patrons who had not been consulted, "because this would have led to a dispute") immediately wrote to the same authorities, explaining the case and requesting an investigation. The headman had put the twenty-five former titled peasants as kakae under their relatives (brothers or parents), who thus became their patrons. His reason for this drastic step was that there were too many tiny peasants in the village with holdings of "0.02, 0.03, 0.05, 0.08, 0.2, 0.3, 1 and z koku, and too many irregularities, making it difficult to apportion expenses to each and every peasant; it was much easier to rechannel this through patrons." The intendant investigated the case and returned the original petition to the village, noting that he would attend to the matter if the request was forwarded properly, via all the village officials. In the second month of the following year the kakae were reinstated as titled peasants.

[70] Ibid., 8-9.

[71] For a summary statement of the case and some of the documents, see ibid., 10-12. All full documents for this case can be found in NAK-KS2 (1): 964-68 (nos. 490-93); for the village kokudaka, see ibid., 724.

[72] See Henderson, Conciliation 1:136; and Ishii Ryosuke's^[*] critique in his long review of this work in Law in Japan 2 (1968): 216-17.

Lineages, Goningumi, and Village Politics: Oashi,^[*] , 1840S

Lineages were left untouched by the kumi organizations established by order of the overlords. As the suit by the Kodaira kakae makes clear, lineages are not unalterable biological networks. The plaintiffs wanted to do away with the social construct of patron and client, with the inscription of dependency onto relations between main and branch houses. As Naito^[*] suggested, the maintenance of hierarchical relationships between households along lineage lines may have been prompted by the kabu structure of the title "titled peasant."

In the following case study, we shall take a close look at how lineage politics were structured by the institutions of titled peasants and kumi membership. The location is Oashi^[*] village (presently part of the town of Akashina in central Nagano prefecture). A number of kumi rosters from that village dating between 1731 and 1872 examined by Ozaki Yukiya give one a good sense of the composition of the kumi.^[73] What is striking, but certainly not exceptional, is that in every case village offices and kumi headships were passed to members of the same families.^[74] That this was a privilege is clear from the fact that when the number of kumi had to be reduced by one, and hence one family would lose its leadership position, it was decided that the two former kumi leaders would hold the position in alternate years.^[75] This tightly knit group had turned this privilege into a monopoly by devising ways to prevent any member from losing his status and hence to prevent others from joining.

[73] Ozaki Yukiya, "Chikuma-gun bakufuryo^[*] ni okeru goningumicho^[*] m goningumi no jittai: Chikuma-gun Oashi-mura^[*] no baai," Shinano , 16, no. 2 (1964): 45-60.

[74] Ozaki has documented this in detail for the period between the 1750s and the 1820s (ibid., table 7 [559]). Dan Henderson presents an agreement from 1867 between the six titled peasants of one village as evidence for a collusion m rotate the headmanship every five years among themselves and thus keep control of the land cadasters (see his Village "Contracts ," 164-66): "If outsiders raise objections, the six as a group would come forward strongly, and try to settle the matter .... If besides our six some outsiders become the headman or group chief [kumi head], some one of the six of us will carefully keep custody of the survey records, and we will make sure to agree on all issues. Hereafter, besides agreeing within the six-house group, we would definitely work together in harmony no matter what the problem is and help each other to the greatest extent" (164).

[75] Ozaki, "Chikuma-gun," 54.

Scarcity and access had to be controlled in order to maintain the value of this political and social capital.

In 1848, however, five households wanted to split off from a nine-household kumi to form a separate kumi with their own elected head because "the kumi was too big." Yet a nine-household kumi was not unusually large: the largest kumi counted eleven households, and the smallest, three. The officials consulted the higher authorities, who gave permission for a new kumi; however, "in consultation with the village officials" it was decided that the current head of the kumi would move with the five petitioners as their new head, a strategy to maintain a monopoly on political power against the threat of a newcomer. The five did not agree to this condition and so refused to sign the population register. They also rejected another peasant whom the officials tried to impose upon them as head in a failed attempt at compromise. The result was a suit and a new compromise: the village officials would be in charge of the new kumi for three years, and then they would decide on another head.

Taroshichi^[*] , the leader of the secession quintet, had been a troublemaker in the village before this incident. Nine years earlier, in 1839, he and his son had been involved in a suit against two other peasants, also a father and a son, about collecting firewood. The Buddhist priest and officials from a neighboring village, however, had worked out a settlement. In 1844 another member of the secession group, Risaemon, had been involved in a quarrel at a wedding in his home. The quarrel arose after Risaemon announced that he was going to change the name of his younger brother to Heijiro^[*] , which he claimed was the name of one of his forbears, and one of the guests made it clear that he found this ludicrous. The quarrel had simmered down, but soon thereafter Risaemon and Taroshichi^[*] had sued the guest for slandering them and causing not only trouble at the wedding but also hardship by criticizing their family pedigree. They had proof, they said, that about two hundred years before, in the 1650s, a Heijiro^[*] had been recorded in the cadasters as a titled peasant. Thus, for at least ten years before the secession incident Risaemon and Taroshichi^[*] seemed to have been buddies prone to causing trouble.

The issue of the new kumi headship flared up again when, after the three-year interim, the five requested the promised appointment of a kumi head and the village officials postponed it for another seven years!

To the new suit the five filed, the officials answered that the five in question had not changed their behavior, so none of them could be chosen as head because "in our village, heads have to come from households with a long pedigree (senrei nagatachi ni kagiri , limited to [houses] with longstanding precedent)." The five argued that headships should have nothing to do with pedigree (iegara ) or status (mibun ), that it was unreasonable to bring these things to bear on matters of village governance. Risaemon had used the public occasion of the wedding to stake out his claim to a long pedigree. Given the political importance of pedigree, undoubtedly his declaration was a political move and was perceived as such by the guest who ridiculed it.

Eight years later, in 1859, a new compromise was reached. The officials' requirement for headships was now hitogara , or character, rather than pedigree. But, the officials added, since none of the five in question had the necessary character, they had to wait until someone with the proper character emerged in the group who could be appointed as head. Therefore, each year one of the five would function, not as hangashira (the local term for kumi head), but as hangashira-dai , a proxy head.

This is another example of an ingenious solution by "splitting." It provided face-saving compromises that allowed both parties to claim victory. The village officials defended their turf: they stuck to principle by not capitulating to the demands of the five. The latter, in turn, gained self-governance, which in practice put them on an equal footing with the other kumi heads. The real solution would come about with time, which was on the side of the secessionists. It was inevitable that they would eventually get what they wanted, perhaps in the next generation, when these fine distinctions had become, for everyone, a dead letter. And this was indeed what happened. What was the nature of this "inevitability"? Why could five peasants hold out for so long?

This protracted conflict, of which we know only the peaks, points to social fault lines in the village that are invisible in the texts of the suits. It turns out that Taroshichi^[*] and Risaemon and the other three members of their kumi were related (see fig. 5). The fault lines demarcate divisions of lineage power. Over time, the five had come to constitute an economically powerful lineage. The conflict over these several decades was one between old and new lineages, the former trying to block

Fig. 5.
Lineage of Risaemon's Secessionist Kumi, Oashi^[*] , 1725-1869

Source: Adapted from Ozaki, "Chikuma-gun," table 8 (p. 58).

Note: Names are of secessionists. The numbers are of kokudaka.

the translation of the latter's economic power into political clout by appealing to family pedigree, social standing, and personal character.^[76]

Pedigree was at issue in the quarrel over names (when Risaemon and Taroshichi^[*] claimed a two-hundred-year-old ancestry) and in the disagreement about kumi leadership. Since both disputes developed into suits, it is not surprising that the village appears to have conducted a pedigree check. On the tribute list of 1725, under the ancestor Matsuemon (the holder of 1.1 koku in fig. 5), the officials noted that the

[76] Writing these lines in October I992, I was struck by how the suppression of the economic in the name of "character" during the debates preceding the U.S. presidential election was similar to the strategy employed by the village officials discussed here.

older records had been lost in a fire. Needless to say, there is no guarantee that this was an impartial investigation. Since the name Heijiro^[*] , which Risaemon intended to give his younger brother (Hei'emon), does not appear in subsequent village records, it seems likely that his claim of titled ancestry going back to 1650 was not recognized.

In the 1700s, during the first two generations of the lineage as we know it, the household's holdings remained at the low kokudaka level of 1.1. Around 1800, however, the holdings tripled, which allowed the household to create a branch house in 1815. This trend continued during the following decades, leading in 1848 to the attempt to consolidate the economic power of the lineage (which now totaled 15.4 koku) by giving it a political dimension. The lineage continued to grow, and by 1869 it counted nine households and a total of 26 koku. Ultimately, in 1872, the lineage split into two separate goningumi, headed by Taroshichi's^[*] two sons.

In order to acquire political power commensurate with their economic strength, lineages had to do more than simply create ever more branch houses. Either they could consolidate their power within the village (and thereby strengthening intralineage authority) by setting up a separate goningumi or they could acquire for some of their branch houses titled status when such a share came on the market through the bankruptcy, abscondence, or venality of some shareholder. Whichever route they decided to take, they needed foremost the approval of the local decision makers, and various factors determined the ease or difficulty with which that was given. The careers of a few titled peasants from Gorobe-shinden illustrate the process.^[77]

Gorobe-shinden, as the name indicates, was a village of newly developed fields. In the first two generations, since there was little competition for land, social mobility was not very restricted. In 1695 three villagers from Gorobe-shinden wanted a relative of theirs to move into the village as a tenant. They promised to take responsibility for him and establish him as a kakae; eighteen years later this newcomer became a titled peasant with 1.6 koku. One couple came as servants (hokonin^[*] ) in the 1640s, bought some land, rented a house, became kakae, borrowed money to buy a house, then bought land in other villages. In 1713 the household gained titled peasant status with 12 koku, two bond servants, and one horse. Another peasant also started his career as a

[77] Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku , 125-27.

servant, in 1673. In 1687 he was able to buy land, build a house, and take the place as titled peasant of one who had died. Later, however, he sold the house and title, became a kakae again, and finally ended up landless (mizunomi).

Where land was scarce—a general problem toward the end of the seventeenth century—social mobility by means of upper-status "shares" became restricted. Shares became available when a shareholder died without offspring or successor, left the village, went bankrupt, or decided to sell his share. Symbolic capital, originally an expression of real capital, could be converted back to it: in 1760 a share in Kasuga village (a few kilometers east of Gorobe-shinden) went for the outrageous price of twenty ryo^[*] ;^[78] two years later in Gorobe-shinden itself someone paid only one ryo^[*] .^[79]

The market for the title of titled peasant was restricted in three ways. First, it was a village market, limited to the actual residents. A peasant could be titled only in his own village (even if he had additional fields in other villages) because the status entailed a position of village leadership. Second, the price for the title was set within the village, not on an intervillage "market for titles." Third, cash alone was insufficient. Since the title was essentially a social one, its acquisition had to be sanctioned socially. Beyond cash, symbolic capital consisting of social esteem and communal "harmony" was needed. There were specified procedures for obtaining a title, as an incident of 1812, also from Gorobe-shinden, illustrates.^[80]

That year someone's client bought the title of titled peasant from a third peasant. At the time of the yearly registration of the population, he asked his former patron to erase his client status. The patron, however, insisted on a formal written request, which met the objection that "things were never done that way before." "Au contraire, " the patron returned, "you have to go through the village council." Inevitably, the intendant was presented with a suit.

[78] Ichikawa Takeji, "Kakaebyakusho^[*] ," 10. Kobayashi Daiji lists prices for symbols of elevated social status in the second half of the Tokugawa period (without giving place or date or citing sources): 5 ryo^[*] for a kamishimo ceremonial outfit, 10 for village headman's rank, 15 to use a surname, 20 for the rank of village group headman, and so on, all the way up to 100 ryo^[*] (see his Sabetsu kaimyo^[*]no rekishi [Yuzankaku^[*] , 1987], 193).

[79] Oishi^[*] , Kinsei sonraku , 132.

[80] Ibid., 134-35.

The officials, fearing trouble if the suit came to a judgment, decided on the following course. The plaintiff, they said, was a diligent peasant and deserved to be a titled peasant but should have notified his patron before buying the title—or certainly immediately after buying it—instead of waiting until the next population registration: he had to admit to wrongdoing. The patron, on the other hand, should be honored to have cultivated such a qualified peasant, with a sizable holding, who had contributed diligently to a government request for funds: such a peasant deserved to be set free.

Both were reprimanded, and both were satisfied. This is an example of a typical solution, with a balanced interplay of apologies, shared blame and praise, and thus no clearcut winner or loser. The aftermath of this solution is also instructive. Soon thereafter, three more clients of the same patron asked to become clients of the new titled peasant. The trio circulated secret memos bad-mouthing their patron, but this tactic led nowhere: their status remained unchanged.

Cooperative Villages

The villages discussed in this chapter were mainly dogo^[*] villages with tightly structured lineages. In contrast to the corporate so^[*] villages, predominant in the Kinai, they were characterized by strong hierarchical arrangements, their origins in large extended families. Political equality always lay just beyond the horizon, always one more status distinction away. Both so^[*] and dogo^[*] villages had their roots in pre-Tokugawa formations.

A third type, one that has not received much attention even in Japanese literature, goes by the convoluted name shozokudanteki kyogyotai^[*] , literally, "small, family-type occupational cooperative village.^[81] Harada Seiji compared the structures of twelve villages of Fukuyama domain (Bingo province, Hiroshima prefecture) as they appear in a document from 1647 and found what he calls patriarchal-type villages and cooperatives.^[82] Traditional patriarchal villages were to be found in

[81] An excellent bibliography of the few articles and books on this type of village can be found in Harada Seiji, "Kinsei zenki sonraku no shoruikei: Fukuyama hanryo^[*] o chushin^[*] ni shite," Shigaku kenkyu^[*] , no. 193 (1991): 26 n. 3.

[82] Harada rejects the term dogo^[*] because most of the large landholdings had disappeared in the warfare at the end of the sixteenth century, but his "patriarchal" villages look very much like villages other scholars refer to as being controlled by dogo^[*] .

the hills and mountains and typically engaged almost exclusively in wet rice cultivation. Cooperative villages dominated by small peasants were mostly in the coastal areas, with only dry fields, or on inland flat terrain, with a balanced economy of wet and dry fields. The latter two regions are characterized by open terrain, making expansion possible and reducing competition for land, which is in great contrast to conditions in the hills and mountains.

Harada's hypothesis linking in a general way ecological conditions with certain types of village organization is suggestive but certainly far from conclusive, given his small sample. Nevertheless, his structural comparisons put in sharp relief different village structures and can serve to conclude this part of our study. Harada divided the peasantry into the following categories: (1) titled peasants without bond servants (genin): small, independent cultivators with holdings usually between 5 and 15 koku; (2) tided peasants with genin, broken down further into peasants with 15 or more koku, that is, typical patriarchal families, and peasants with less than 15 koku; (3) genin; and (4) mawaki , or kin branch houses.

Table 15 contrasts two such villages. In Futamori, with a kokudaka of 165 koku, the titled peasants were clearly divided between those with genin (more than 20 koku) and those without; all genin belonged to the wealthier peasants. Harada argues, however, that this top-heavy hierarchy (approximately 72 percent of the arable was owned by the five peasants with holdings of 15 or more koku; 22 percent by those with 5 to 15 koku; the remaining 6 percent by peasants with below 5 koku) is not a leftover from medieval times: in 160 t the respective percentages were approximately 26, 55, and 19. Pre-Tokugawa villages would have been characterized by small holdings like those of Mizunomi village (466 koku). Typically, here only one holder had more than 20 koku, while most titled peasants, both those without and those with genin, had 3 to 10 koku, as did a large number of the genin. Of these twenty-three genin only eight were attached to the top three titled peasants; all the others were genin of small peasants with holdings hardly larger than theirs. The smallest tided peasant (with between 1 and 3 koku) had four genin, as did the titled peasant just above him.

Many small holders had genin who were taka holders; in some cases the combined kokudaka of the genin was almost twice that of their host family (see tables 16 and 17). These "bond servants" obviously were

situated quite differently both socially and economically from those of Futamori, and they look more like the clients (kakae) we have encountered elsewhere. Mizunomi was a typical "cooperative" village with large numbers of almost equal holdings among mawaki as well, the result of the division of property through equal inheritance. This was a village with high status mobility. In a relatively short time, these mawaki became fully titled peasants, and the genin seem to have had no difficulty following the same route. Part of the reason may have been

the availability of additional space: between 1619 and 1647 Futamori added only 6 koku to its arable, while Mizunomi added 55.

The reason these families organized themselves as a cooperative on a more or less equal basis was, according to Harada, to meet the overlord's extraordinarily high extraction quota, which set a premium on rice, a crop that was not produced here, or if it was, the yield was far less than in the hills and mountains. There is certainly room for debate and further research on an argument that so categorically relates geographic location and type of agriculture with social organization and, further, links the cooperative villages, through their type of agriculture, with extraction policies. What is clear, however, is that Japanese rural society offered a number of organizational patterns and that status rigidity seems to have been linked with the availability of space, a phenomenon we encountered in the case of Gorobe-shinden.

To conclude, then, status distinctions and status-generated distinction were part of village life throughout the Tokugawa period. As the frequent appearance of virtually landless titled peasants in the records shows, status was not replaced as a differentiating mechanism by economic class as such. The sources of status distinctions were intravillage economic factors and extravillage political realities, which reinforced the former: the stature of traditional, established peasants, undoubtedly the decision makers in the villages, was enhanced by their being assigned the communal responsibility for tribute and services owed to the overlords. This official duty somehow made them the only ones who were real peasants.

Some overlord measures contributed either directly or indirectly, but not uniformly and universally, to limiting the number of titled peasants. After the 1673 prohibition against partitioning holdings below a certain size, the villages seem to have resorted to fixing the number of titled peasants while in reality putting very few, if any, constraints on actual practice. This necessarily resulted in recording economically independent peasants as dependents, which solidified lineage formation, strengthened status divisions, and limited political power to small segments of the village population.

Within these institutional constraints, resistance to status mobility depended on lineage expansion and the availability of additional arable. In extended families, the hierarchical relations among members were unambiguously inscribed in their economic and social positions, for it was clear who controlled the means of production and reproduction.

Although this material reality was misrepresented symbolically through familial and paternalistic terms of kinship address and on ritual occasions,^[83] the symbolic had less autonomous determining power than it would have later. The head of the family had a clear title to the land, owned the buildings and agricultural tools, and had the final word concerning which members could set up their own families. With partitioning, control over these means was transferred to branch houses. The preeminence of the main family came then to rely increasingly on symbolic means, status distinctions being one of the most important. The availability of additional arable worked against the maintenance of rigid status hierarchies and promoted status mobility.

When Japan reached an ecological barrier in the early eighteenth century, status again came to play a greater role in village life (contrary to the opinions of many American scholars). It seems that status production, the generation of ever finer status distinctions, was a powerful tool for offsetting the politically negative implications of economic decline. Economic development affected eighteenth-century villages in two ways. Some peasants succeeded in accumulating more land, or economic capital, which they sought to translate into political capital, but they encountered status barriers. More often, however, a great economic leveling downward took place for most of the peasants, turning them into very small holders (and an "objective" class), which is also contrary to prevailing interpretations. Either way, economic development brought pressure to rearrange the structure of the political field in the villages.

This pressure could take a number of forms. Peasants could simply become nonplayers in the status game by removing themselves from it and migrating to the urban centers. They could become part-time players by seeking employment (hokonin^[*] ) elsewhere for a period of time, as many did starting in the late seventeenth century, although this negatively affected their position, standing, and status in the village.

[83] Smith astutely observes with regard m "ceremonial services" that "the participants themselves made no consistent distinction between ceremonial and labor services, often calling both by the same name. It would seem—one cannot speak with certainty in such cases—that the two services were thought of as being essentially the same. This is not because people failed m observe that one had economic value and the other not, but because this difference though evident was insignificant in view of the fact that the two had the same social character" (Agrarian Origins , 30). On kinship terminology, see ibid., 15 ff.

They could also try to change the rules of the game, yet with the notable exception (in the present study) of the first of the two drives in Kodaira to abolish the system of kakae altogether, this did not occur. Most of the demands were efforts, not to change the rules of the game, but to change one's position within the field where the game was played, which ensured its longevity.