P.F. Souyri
But it should be emphasized that the paucity of written texts is inversely proportional to the
importance they were felt to have. What appeared to be important for community life, as a proof
of good faith, or as a manifestation of determination, was more readily preserved than more
ordinary documents that have probably disappeared. This applies to the case of the villages them-
selves, but also to that of institutions outside the village, which kept those documents only in
cases in which they were engaged in a conflict with the village. Hence, the elements of protest or
rebellion within medieval Japanese rural society have possibly been overestimated.
The historiography of Japan was for a long time dominated by a Confucian view of history,
which emphasized overriding political figures, such as emperors, ministers, warriors, and the like.
The peasantry, and more generally the people, were largely absent from these representations. It is
only since the beginning of the twentieth century that historians have begun to show any interest
in a social history of medieval Japan that increasingly included villages and rural life.
It must, however, be noted that around 1920, a major change took place in the history of
research. Some historians turned away from central records to focus on local sources, in order to
better comprehend the social changes in the countryside at the level of an estate or a village.
Makino Shinnosuke is probably the first historian to have tried to analyze those movements, in
this case, in a monograph dealing with a single estate, during the fifteenth century, in which he
showed how the evolution of rural society at that time should be placed within the slower process
of the collapse of the traditional organization of land ownership, such as could emerge in the
early middle ages.
The peasantry was also described in a more concrete fashion in their daily lives, in the mud of
the rice paddies.^6 Miura Hiroyuki was the first to show any interest in the question of peasant
leagues, and more specifically that of uprisings. Spurred on by the impact of the Russian revolu-
tion and the 1918 rice riots, Miura published in 1921 an article entitled “The Social Question in
National History.”^7 Thanks to him, medieval ikki, and, more generally, the social and economic
history of medieval Japan were able to take their place as topics for research and reflection within
the university.
During the war, Shimizu Mitsuo, who was one of Miura’s students, wrote a great study on
the relationships between shōen and villages during the medieval period that inspired many histo-
rians of the next generation.^8 But some were strongly reluctant to envision the peasantry as a
historical subject. During the 1930s, the young Nakamura Kichiji wished to engage in work on
the social history of the peasantry during the Muromachi era at the University of Tokyo. His
professor, Hiraizumi Kiyoshi, the leader of the ultranationalist school of history known as
kōkukushikan (“imperial point of view on history”) gave Nakamura’s work a frigid reception,
asking whether pigs, too, had a history.^9
Just after the war, many historians published great contributions to our understanding of the
medieval rural society. We can, for example, cite Ishimoda Shō, whose landmark monograph,
Chūseiteki sekai no keisei (“The Formation of the Medieval World”) described the rural society of
the Kuroda domain in Iga province between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries.^10 This work
remains today one of the best studies of early medieval rural society, and has stimulated many
young historians in their research on economic and social history.^11
As early as the 1920s, the Marxist perspective increasingly influenced historians who embarked
into the study of the social history of the peasantry, and this influence would remain significant
until the early 1980s. Historians of this school attempted to demonstrate that the late medieval
Japanese peasantry became more and more belligerent against the domination of the lords. The
history of the peasantry thus became, for the main part, a history of class struggles, a movement
of protest of the weakest against the well off, of resistance to exploitation, and a radical challenge
to the structure of property.