Community and Entitlements During the Late Tokugawa Period

As pervasive as the market was in promoting improvements in population quality during the late Tokugawa period, entitlements supplemented the market. During this time the most important entitlements were those that provided insurance of sufficient food to eat in times of dearth for individual households and villages. Because entitlement insurance in the late Tokugawa period tended to be spread out among fairly small numbers of households—at the level of the village the number of households was of course small, but even at the level of the fief, which was the largest unit involved, population size typically ran into the low 100,00s—I refer to the "balkanization of entitlements." By this term I mean to highlight the local nature of the guarantee and distribution of entitlements in feudal Japan.

The most salient of the entitlements over foodstuffs were those offered by the fief. Villages paid taxes in the form of rice. What did they get in return? Certainly the fief provided protection and quelled local uprisings that might spill over from village to village. They also organized the creation of ditches, dams, and other riparian works. But most important, fiefs provided rice and other foodstuffs in times of dearth. S. Vlastos (1986) characterizes many of the three thousand or so peasant

rebellions (ikki ) that broke out during the Tokugawa period as political movements on the part of the peasantry, serving to remind the fief that it had an obligation to extend "benevolence" down to the villages when harvests were poor. It must be kept in mind that the peasants had leverage in their relationship with the fief and that organizing ikki was one way of sending a signal to the daimyo —households could steal across fief boundaries and attempt to settle in the villages of neighboring fiefs if local conditions were unbearable, thereby reducing the tax-producing capacity of their home fief—or of putting pressure on the daimyo whose subjects were becoming too restive. Typically the villages wanted either lower taxes or outright supplies of grains. Vlastos (1986) argues that during the early Tokugawa period ikki were mainly organized by village headmen, but that by the later Tokugawa period village landowners often organized rebellions to demand a redress of grievances against the headman or other groups of landowners. For instance, he argues that one reason ikki tended to break out in silk-raising areas toward the close of the Tokugawa period was that silk-producing families often devoted little land to rice cultivation and hence they were unusually adversely affected when rice prices rose in times of dearth since they had to purchase most of the rice they consumed. In short, groups of peasants did not want to abolish or negate the operation of the market with entitlements, but they did want the fief to provide them with insurance in the form of a backup in times of dearth, especially in times when demand outstripped supply on the rice market.^[9]

The fief was not the only organization providing entitlement insurance to peasant households. At the village level poorer households often sought the protective benevolence of more economically prosperous households and formed dozoku units—that is, extended households often bound together in fictive kinship terms—within which the economically inferior parts supplied labor services in exchange for access to land for production and for foodstuffs in time of need. C. Nakane (1967) argues that these dozoku, which have been extensively studied by anthropologists, are usually not groups tied together by true bonds of kinship but rather are economic organizations that in effect exchange labor services for use of land and insurance services. Moreover, even in areas of Japan where dozoku were absent, landlord-tenant relations that were well developed by the later Tokugawa period, especially in the commercially oriented region contiguous to Osaka and to the Tokkaido route leading from Osaka to Edo, often involved insurance entitle-

ments. For instance, A. Waswo (1977: 29 ff.) notes that landlords often assumed fictive roles as "parents" of tenants, or as "grandparents" (of tenants of tenants), and in exchange for the rent that they extracted from their tenants were expected to provide rent reductions or even outright grants of food in times of dearth.