Village and rural life in medieval JapanMarxist historians of the post- war years produced a narrative of the history of Japan con-
structed in the following manner: Movements of peasant protest grew considerably in size
during the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, in particular because they
opposed the penetration of capital from usury into the countryside, and attempted to over-
throw the established order—that of lords—by creating regional alliances—or, sometimes,
socio- religious ones (ikkō ikki)—with republican aspirations. But those movements failed
during the sixteenth century, in the face of the rise of the warlords, who constituted a highly
structured feudal power, capable of confronting those organizations on the battlefield and of
defeating them. The rise of a new, strong state at the end of the sixteenth century, at the origin
of the Tokugawa regime thus built on the defeat of these peasant organizations, while, concur-
rently, the sword hunt carried on by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, as well as the later creation of a
great land registry, were milestones in the “re- feudalization” of society or the “second feudal
revolution.”
This general narrative, presented here in a fairly schematic manner, nonetheless represented in
its time a radical alternative to traditional history. It was the starting point for a blossoming of
postwar research, and notably of monographs on specific estates or regions that showed in detail
the contents of life in the countryside. The question of the very nature of the peasant classes was
considered in a debate on whether medieval farmers were slaves, serfs, or free men.
For Matsumoto Shinpachirō, the feudal wars of the fourteenth century coincided with a
key moment of the history of the emancipation of the peasant classes, a feudal revolution.^12
Araki Moriaki, for his part, attempted to show as early as 1953, in a series of articles on the
land registry put in place by Hideyoshi (Taikō kenchi) and published in the journal Rekishigaku
kenkyū, how rural society, dominated by a “patriarchal slavery system” transformed at the end
of the sixteenth century into a society dominated by land owners controlling subjugated peas-
ants that he likens to serfs. Suzuki Ryōichi, for his part, explained how, from the beginning of
the second half of the fifteenth century, village communes that resisted the mighty were
bedeviled by internal contradictions that opposed prominent peasants—who were beginning
to form a middle class in the countryside—and small, poor peasants; and how it was this split
within communes that led to the historical failure of the ikki movements during the sixteenth
century. Peasants would thus have been, in a way, betrayed by the more prominent members
of their community.^13
During the second half of the 1950s, other Marxist historians, such as Inagaki Yasuhiko or
Nagahara Kenji, criticized Suzuki for his overly schematic view, and asserted, for example, that
the phenomenon of fleeing villages had never been as widespread as during the late sixteenth
century. Those flights, whether individual, small scale, or collective, are widely reported in the
sources, and seem to show instead a broadening of social resistance, as well as the rise of poor
small farmers that seek the status of free men.
The first to shift the question and focus to practices, rather than the historical meaning of the
phenomenon, was Yanagita Kunio, the founder of the Japanese school of ethno- folklore. In the late
1920s, Yanagita attacked the community of historians as a whole, criticizing a traditional positivist
history that only paid attention to charters and official archives and was the source of a dry and
meager history. He was equally censorious of social historians, who, in his view, pretend to be
interested in peasants but in reality consider them only when they are crushed by poverty or when
they declare war on the powerful. This, Yanagita charged, distorts perceptions of daily life in the
countryside encompassed, inasmuch as peasants did not spend their lives starving or revolting.^14
The issue, according to Yanagita, was to seize the reality of peasant life in its totality, in
order to understand how societies in the past worked as a whole. Failing that, he writes, social
historians simply reproduce the same pattern as traditional historians for whom political events