Village and rural life in medieval JapanToday, historians seem less attracted to grand, general explanations, and engage instead in
more specific studies. The era of great syntheses has not yet returned.
Notes
1 I will not take into account here the particularities of the social development of the northern island of
Ezo (present Hokkaidō) or what was at the time, in the south, the Ryūkyū kingdom.
2 Heian ibun is a comprehensive compilation, with critical commentary, of historical documents produced
the Heian era, edited by Takeuchi Rizō. Begun in 1946, it was completed for the most part in 1976. The
collection contains more than 5000 documents. Takeuchi also edited Kamakura ibun, along the same
lines, between 1971 and 1995.
3 Nihon shi shiryō sōkan, volume 1.
4 Tōji hyakugō monjo kept within the Tōji monastery, in boxes. This is an extraordinary archival fund of
estate records, comprised of more than 25,000 documents, and relating among other things the difficult
relationship between the ecclesiastical seigneury and the villagers of the Kami Kuze and Shimo Kuze
estates in the Yamashiro province, those of Tara in Wakasa, or Ōyama in Tamba, well known to histo-
rians for their long tradition of resistance to the demands of the lords.
5 The collection is called the Sugaura monjo, and includes more than a thousand documents consigning the
history of the village from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century.
6 Makino Shinnosuke, “Shōen seido hōkai no ichirei toshite no Kawaguchi- Tsuboe no shō no kenkyū.”
7 Miura Hiroyuki, Kokushijō no shakai mondai.
8 Shimizu Mitsuo, Nihon chūsei no sonraku.
9 Nakamura Kichiji, Do ikki kenkyū. This work is a collection of articles, the earliest of which go back to
1932–1933.
10 Ishimoda Shō, Chuseiteki sekai no keisei.
11 For a good synthesis of work on shōen, with a convenient bibliography, see Abe Takeshi, Nihon
shōen shi.
12 Matsumoto Shinpachirō, Hōken teki nōchi shoyū no seitsitsu katei.
13 It is important to note that this thesis is identical to the Leninist thesis on the worker aristocracy as cause
of the reformist shift of the Western proletariat.
14 Yanagita Kunio, Nōmin shi kenkyū no ichibu.
15 Yanagita, pp. 400–401.
16 Nishioka Toranosuke, Minshū seikatsu shi kenkyū.
17 For a general view, see Takechi, Tochi seido shi.
18 Considerable research has been conducted on this theme. See for instance Miura Keiichi, Chūsei minshū
seikatsushi no kenkyū, especially pp. 35–91; or Nagahara Keiji, Shōen.
19 Kitō Kiyoaki and Imaizumi Yoshio, Taikei Nihonshi soshō, 6, Tochiseido shi 1.
20 See Anno Masaki, Genin ron. Watanabe Daimon, Jinshin baibai, dorei, rachi no Nihon shi offers a new point
of view on these questions, revealing the extent of slavery, human trafficking, and kidnapping in
sixteenth- century Japan, especially in relationship with pirates’ activities and wars.
21 Ōshima Okitsushima jinja monjo, Kōchō docs. 2, 10, 21.
22 Fujiki Hisashi, Sengoku no sahō-mura no funsō kaiketsu.
23 On these questions, see Katsumata Shizuo, Ikki.
24 The best synthesis is provided by Fujiki, Sengoku no sahō-mura no funsō kaiketsu. See also Fujiki Hisashi,
Chūsei minshū no seikai, mura no seikatsu to okite.
25 Kasamatsu Hiroshi, Nihon chūsei hōshiron, and Tokuseirei, chūsei no hō to kanshū.
26 On the jizamurai, and their role in the village society, see Suzuki Ryōichi, Nihon chūsei no nōmin mondai;
Nagahara Keiji, Sengoku no dōran; and Michael Birt, “Samurai in Passage: Transformation of the
Sixteenth- Century Kantō.”
27 This kind of study was initiated in the beginning of the 1990s. See Fujiki Hisashi, Zōhyō-tachi no senjo,
and Kikin to sensō sengoku wo iku; Minegishi Sumio, Saigai. senran no shakaishi; Sakaba Satoshi et al., Mura
no sensō to heiwa. More recently, Goza Yuichi, Sensō no Nihon chūseishi.
28 Tabata Yasuko, Nihon chūsei no josei; Minegishi Sumio, Chūsei wo kangaeru kazoku to josei; Wakita Haruko,
Nihon chūsei joseishi no kenkyū; Hotate Michihisa, Chūsei no onna no issho; Tabata Yasuko and Hosokawa
Ryōichi, Jonin, rōnin, kodomo, Nihon no chūsei shi, 4.