NOVEMBER 2000 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 5 Community and Conflict in the village as conflictual has been articulated forcefully by Irwin Scheiner and Herman Ooms. NineteenthNineteenth---CenturyCentury Japan: Scheiner writes about the “myth of community”; A ReRe---considerationconsideration he even goes so far as to call portrayals of villag- ers acting collectively as “imagined communi- Edward Pratt 3 William and Mary College ties.” Ooms contends that the Tokugawa vil- lage is best characterized by strife and discord. “One evening at the end of March,” Ichikawa He writes, “The frequent description of villages as harmonious and consensual is a misrecognition Shōemon wrote in his diary, “there was a fire at 4 the house of Mohachi of Arata. But . this if not an outright denial of these realities.” person did not know a thing about it. I heard the Both writers leave little room for considerations story the next day. Thus, I did not go there at of the nineteenth-century village as communi- the time.”1 The failure of his neighbors to com- tarian. municate the news about the fire clearly frus- According to the Western theoretical literature, trated Shōemon. It did not matter that he was this view concerning the absence of community on seventy-nine years old and in poor health. It the eve of Japan’s Meiji transformation seems to was the duty of neighbors, after all, to lend a make perfect sense. Eminent social scientists hand, first in putting out the fire and later in the such as Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, and Tal- clearing of the ashes and the rebuilding of the cott Parsons long ago argued that collective be- house. They assisted one another, too, when havior and community necessarily decline with their roofs needed to be re-thatched and in the the arrival of “modern” society, especially with the preparations for funerals, marriages, and com- onslaught of market forces and bureaucratic cen- ing-of-age ceremonies. They joined together to tralization. Tönnies viewed this transformation offer prayers to ward off contagion from the vil- along a spectrum, with Gemeinschaft at the one lage and to go on pilgrimages to Ōyama to pray end and Gesellschaft at the other. Whereas Ge- for rain. They formed revolving credit associa- meinschaft is characterized by collective will, tions to provide themselves the funds necessary folkways, and religious life, its destruction leads to to sustain or to expand their farm operations. Gesellschaft, whereby the growing importance of convention, law, and public opinion culminate in Shōemon’s experiences, and indeed the ex- 5 periences of many other farmer diarists, seem- individualism. Since Japan witnessed remark- ingly challenge prevailing wisdom on the con- able growth in its market economy in the nine- flictual nature of the nineteenth-century village. teenth century, and because the Meiji state enacted The works on peasant revolts, for example, por- policies that increasingly eroded local autonomy, it tray a rural populace besieged by inequality, dis- seems only natural that collective activity there, cord, and rebellion.2 More recently, this view of too, would decline. 1 Ichikawa Shōemon, Ichikawa-ke nikki (hereinaf- ter IKN), in Nishitama-gun jinbutsushi, Hō kagami, Protest in Early Modern Japan, Ithaca: Cornell Minoue ichidaiki, Ichikawa-ke nikki, Ōme shishi University Press, 1995. shiryōshū, vol. 46, compiled by Ōme-shi Kyōdo 3 Irwin Scheiner, “The Japanese Village: Imagined, Hakubutsukan, Ōme-shi: Ōme-shi Kyōiku Iinkai, Real, Contested,” in Stephen Vlastos, ed., Mirror of 1996, 219. Modernity: Invented Traditions of Modern Japan, 2 See, for example, Herbert Bix, Peasant Protest in Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 69. Japan, 1590-1884, New Haven: Yale University 4 Herman Ooms, Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Press, 1986; Stephen Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Status, Power, Law, Berkeley: University of Cali- Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan, Berkeley: University fornia Press, 1996, 10. of California Press, 1986; Anne Walthall, Social 5 Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Society (Ge- Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century meinschaft under Gesellschaft) New Brunswick, Japan, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986; N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1988, see esp. chapters James W. White, Ikki: Social Conflict and Political 4 and 5. NOVEMBER 2000 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 6 Adding to the general confusion surrounding perhaps explains why many of the things he the issue of rural conflict and cooperation is the writes about are not found in other diaries, at fact that ethnographic accounts portray twenti- least not with the same amount of detail. eth-century villages where farmers engaged in a Shōemon lived in a mountain village, Mi- host of collective activities and placed a high pre- nami-osoki (currently part of Ōme city), in mium on consensus and harmony. This is clear Musashi province. from the works of John Embree, Robert Smith, Much of the diary concerns the collective ac- and Ronald Dore, for example.6 What happened? tivities of the villagers and the various relation- Was collective behavior something that came into ships among them. Surprisingly, the village being only in the twentieth century? That seems itself was not so important. The most important highly unlikely. Despite the current fascination unit for Shōemon was the hamlet or neighbor- with “invented traditions,” it is doubtful whether hood. Most collective activity centered around the modern Japanese state and its surrogates could the hamlet, not the village, and the hamlet asso- have remolded the Japanese people along commu- ciation (kumiai) frequently met to resolve prob- nitarian lines out of a cast forged from conflict. lems. Minami-osoki contained six hamlets, with Many studies have emphasized the conflictual an average of 27.5 households in each. In this nature of rural society, I contend, because the part of the Kantō hamlets were known as niwaba; documents they rely on -- materials relating to in other parts of Japan, they were known by such peasant revolts and intra-village conflict -- have terms as tsubo, kona, and kaito.7 The fact that predisposed them to this view. Perhaps because the hamlet figures so prominently is an important we lack case studies of individual villages, we also point, because with the dizzying administrative have an incomplete understanding of how farmers changes of the Meiji period, the village was con- handled conflict on an everyday level. It is espe- tinually being reconstituted into larger entities, cially important to examine community dynamics but the hamlet itself remained unchanged. This over the long term, so as to better ascertain the might explain the persistence of collective activ- enduring consequences, if any, of discord and ity well into the twentieth century. strife. This paper, as well as the broader research Minami-osoki certainly had its share of trou- project, uses diaries as a major source, not because blemakers, but Yoshisaburō was probably the they are inherently better or tell us more than other worst of the lot. At the end of 1860, he had types of documents, but because they are attuned been “acting violently,” compelling his father to to the quotidian, to the structures and rhythms of tie him up. After gnawing away at the ropes, everyday life. Though oftentimes cryptic, they Yoshisaburō escaped, shouting obscenities as he afford a much better sense of the variety and fre- fled. Neighbors rarely intervened in family quency of collective activity. disputes, but Yoshisaburō’s wild and violent be- havior demanded immediate action. When Ichikawa Shōemon’s diary, covering the pe- Yoshisaburō refused to listen to the suggestions riod 1859-1897, provides particular insight into of members of his hamlet association, they con- the dynamics of community life. Most diaries vened a meeting (yoriai) and decided to put him were written by village elites, the very wealthiest in their custody. The diary does not tell us more, people in rural society, especially headmen and but we can assume that neighbors housed him village merchants. Shōemon’s diary is unusual in that it was written by a middling farmer. This 7 For a discussion of the role of these hamlets, see Kimura Motoi, Mura o aruku: Nihonshi firudo nōto, 6 John Embree, Suye Mura: A Japanese Village, Tokyo: Yūzankaku, 1998, esp. chapter 4; and Taki- Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1939; zawa Hiroshi, Niwaba ni tsuite: mura no naka no Robert J. Smith, Kurusu: The Price of Progress in a chiisana kyōdōtai, Ōme-shi: Ōme-shi Kyōiku Iinkai, Japanese Village, 1951-1975, Stanford: Stanford 1992, esp. part 1. Even the kumigashira, one of University Press, 1978; and Ronald P. Dore, Shino- the three positions of village administration, repre- hata: A Portrait of a Japanese Village, New York: sented the niwaba; he was not chosen from among Pantheon Books, 1978. the heads of the goningumi. See Ibid., 10-11. NOVEMBER 2000 EARLY MODERN JAPAN 7 and kept him under their watchful eye until he hamlet association came out to send him off.13 was back on proper terms with his father. The The villagers’ patience with errant neighbors following evening the hamlet association had to is best reflected in their treatment of Seibei’s four convene yet another meeting. The previous year sons. Whereas Seibei appears to have been an Yoshisaburō had put into pawn the bell from the upstanding member of the village, his sons were local temple. The redemption period was about ne’er-do-wells. In 1862 Seibei kicked his eldest to expire, but he lacked the money to get it back.8 son Izaemon and his wife out of the house.14 We do not know the outcome, but the association We meet Izaemon again in 1871, when we learn must have raised the money, because the same that he put into pawn the temple bell, the same bell appears several more times in the diary.