Village and rural life in medieval JapanThe rules of the sō were discussed and adopted in meetings, and they evolved into administrative
rules and legislation. For example, the sō needed funds to manage their autonomous units. The village
ceremonies had to be held according to tradition. Irrigation systems had to be maintained constantly.
Above all, large sums had to be set aside to cover the costs of trials in which the village might become
involved. These needs were, in principle, fulfilled by the income from communal lands farmed by
everyone, and by a tax that the sō charged to each house in the village. Unlike the landowners’ taxes,
taxes in the sō were collected and used by the village. The communes brought back the kuji, previ-
ously collected in the estates by the lords, in a new and egalitarian form. The commune also took
over the judicial administration of its territory. Peasant society dealt severely with those who broke
the unity of the sō, with a criminal act. The heaviest penalties were reserved for arsonists, thieves, and
murderers. Because the village association was essential to the group’s survival, it could not tolerate
the slightest deviation from the common law. Theft earned the contempt of everyone because it
betrayed the community spirit. Accordingly, it was punished with example- making penalties that
were intended to create fear. To avoid any encroachment of the lord’s justice on village justice, vil-
lagers in disagreement with the community did not have the right to approach any judicial body
other than that of the village. There was no appeal possible to an external form of justice.^24
To rebel for an act of grace (tokusei ikki)
With the introduction of a cash economy in the Kinai region, the small amounts of capital accu-
mulated by peasants were forwarded to the great religious institutions, which controlled a large
number of moneylenders and sake brewers. These wealthy institutions began to reinvest the
capital they had amassed through usury, by buying up the land of peasants and low ranking war-
riors around Kyoto. Accordingly, in the Kinai, where double cropping was common, the surplus
that should have remained in the hands of the peasants because of their increased productivity
went instead into the pockets of moneylenders and usurers, thereby leading to the impoverish-
ment of the rural dwellers, who then demanded the recovery of what have been taken from
them. Direct representatives of the capital became the targets of social violence. In the fourteenth
century, peasant uprisings in the estates usually broke out after the lords collected the annual
rents, but in the fifteenth century, struggles to obtain a tokusei act (“act of virtuous government,”
or “act of grace”) were struggles against debt and for a return of an old order that was seen better
than the new one. Kasamatsu Hiroshi has written that throughout history, the peasant’s latent
consciousness was manifested through rituals.
For example, folklorists have pointed out that the groundbreaking ceremony after the first
day of the new lunar year (generally in early or mid- February) had great symbolic value, for it
made the land “come alive again” in springtime. The term jiokoshi (“awakening the land”) also has
a second meaning: the recovery of a piece of land by its former owner. This notion of renewal is
linked to an old order that had been disturbed or degraded through history, and the uprisings
were aimed at returning to that order, in which each thing had its place in a harmonious society.
These ideas took the place of political thought. One could bring back the past by destroying the
real world just as one could make the land come alive again by breaking the ground with a shovel
during the jiokoshi ceremony.
Peasant uprisings aimed at canceling or lightening the debts through a tokusei edict often took
place when political authorities were paralyzed for one reason or another, creating a power vacuum.
The insurgents knew how to use the shogunate’s hesitation—evidence of a very strong political
awareness, according to postwar Marxist historians like Suzuki Ryōichi. Kasamatsu Hiroshi,
however, sees them as a more common phenomenon linked to the amnesties accompanying a
change in rule. A change of sovereign was often followed by a change in calendar era, and peasant