17
Village and rural life in
medieval Japan
Pierre F. Souyri
Throughout the classical and early medieval periods, people who lived on the Japanese archi-
pelago territory settled—when they were sedentary—in a scattered manner on public (kōryō or
kokugaryō) or private estates (shōen), wherever there was land that could be exploited. The aggre-
gation of inhabitants of those estates into villages (mura or sonraku) is the result of a phenomenon
that emerged in its earliest configurations during the second half of the thirteenth century, most
often in the western part of the country, and that grew in a continuous manner during the
fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, until it became widespread throughout most of
the land.^1
Japanese villages, therefore, appeared, for the most part, during the latter half of the middle
ages. This concentration of population within the framework of clustered settlements persisted
during the next centuries without any major changes, other than the demographic growth
leading the transformation of some villages into small towns. Peripheral regions of the archi-
pelago, where the cultivation of lands often started at a later date, such as Tōhoku in the Edo
period, are the only places where it is possible to observe a sizable development of group settle-
ments into villages going back to the early modern period.
Historians have therefore pictured the evolution of rural life during the middle ages as follow-
ing a fairly simple pattern, progressing from a domain- based society with scattered settlements to
a village- based society with concentrated settlements. This change was a reflection of clear social
changes: an increase in the weight carried by a peasantry now structured around village com-
munities, a weakening of the power of feudal lords between the thirteenth and sixteenth centu-
ries, and a new distribution of power between lords and peasants.
Those changes can be analyzed as reflecting an increasingly dynamic rural economy, or the
development of commercial exchanges that helped open up the countryside, but also as the result
of the feudal warfare that ravaged the country and sometimes forced inhabitants to self- organize
and promote forms of political autonomy. Thus new permanent institutions—such as the miyaza
(the assembly of the heads of village families that took place in local shrines), the sō or sōson
(village communities)—as well as temporary ones, such as ikki (coalitions, or leagues of inhabit-
ants) appeared within those villages. Those institutions in turn acquired rules regulating them, or
even standardized rituals, that helped forge the symbolic unity of the village. The rural society
that asserted itself in this way produced in turn a new state of conflict that found its expression in