P.F. Souyri
leagues saw these times as especially propitious for demanding or imposing an abolition of debts.
This is why most of the major revolts for “virtuous government” followed “disasters,” such as the
death of a shogun, or a famine. People weakened by hunger and thought to be numbed by their
miseries revealed, on the contrary, a stunning capacity for rebellion, as in 1462–1463, when the
most violent uprising of the century took place just after the terrible famine of 1460–1461.^25
A new rural middle class: the jizamurai
The clearest social phenomenon in the countryside between 1450 and 1550 was the appearance
of a rural middle class composed of a relatively large number of village prominent persons. These
men, who were designated in various ways (dogō, jizamurai, etc.) played a central role in internal
village organization and began to distinguish themselves from the myōshu and the peasants. Rural
society began to be clearly divided into two distinct categories: peasants (themselves also socially
divided into those responsible for taxes, and small- scale peasants, tenant farmers, and landless
dependents) and samurai, who accounted in certain parts of the western Japan for more than 20
percent of the inhabitants.
The enrichment of upper peasant classes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries gave rise to a
new social category, between the wealthy peasants and the local landowners, whose members
claimed warrior status by calling themselves samurai. Although they no longer worked in the fields,
they still lived in the villages among the peasants with whom they felt a kinship. But they also dif-
ferentiated themselves from the peasantry to whom they rented parcels of land to farm, by showing
off their new social position: the samurai carried swords openly and owned horses. These village
samurai or “land samurai” (the literal meaning of jizamurai), formed protective vassal links with the
great feudal lords (shugo daimyō). In the fifteenth century, jizamurai were still close enough to the
peasants to feel loyalty to their own kind, and they often led rural uprisings for cancelation of debts
and promoting local autonomy. By the mid- sixteenth century, however, they were sufficiently
detached from the peasantry that their material interests had also diverged. They then joined the
vassal organizations that warlords had started to build, and helped expand the new feudal authority.
As long as the sense of solidarity was strong, the sōson were almost invincible. But as soon as conflicts
arose between samurai and peasants in the community, the village union fell apart.^26
Thoughts for further research
Consequent to the deconstructionist discourses, which have also affected Japanese medieval his-
toriography, the new generations of historians have turned their current questioning away from
social structure as such and toward social practices and cultural representations themselves.
One of the main new themes of research is the permanent state of crisis implied by the recur-
ring wars of the sixteenth century. In particular: How did peasants survive in times of war? How
did they escape mass violence? What did they do in case of famine? In what capacity were they
recruited into their lords’ armies? And how did they practice the collective or individual aban-
donment of their villages?^27
Another great shift in the historiography is a rising awareness of gender problems, which were
almost missing in works published before 1990. While this research, reflecting the nature of the
sources, speaks more about upper levels of Japanese society than about village society itself, some
interesting new perspectives have appeared. Among the key issues here are the role of women in
agricultural production and internal organization, separation or divorce among the families in
the villages, the importance of patriarchal systems, and also the structure of families in the lower
classes, especially those called genin.^28