Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law - Couverture rigide

Ooms, Herman

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0520202090 ISBN 13 : 9780520202092

Editeur : University of California Press, 1996

Synopsis

In contrast to modern Japanese citizens, during the Tokugawa period (1600-1868) villagers frequently resorted to lawsuits to settle conflicts. Herman Ooms uses colorful, skillfully analyzed case studies to trace the evolution of class and status conflicts through lawsuits and petitions in villages. Inspired by the work of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu, this exploration of social and legal history illuminates the texture and detail of village life, focusing on relations to authority.

Opening with a story of an angry peasant woman's lifelong struggle against village authority (a story involving murder and revenge), Ooms highlights the role played by obscure historical actors including local elites, commoners, women, and outcastes. He also discusses the important role lineages played in village politics and examines the origins of discrimination against Japan's burakumin, or outcastes.

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Herman Ooms is Professor of History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is author of Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs (1570-1680) (1985) and Charismatic Bureaucrat: A Political Biography of Matsudaira Sadanobu (1758-1829) (1975).

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Tokugawa Village Practice: Class, Status, Power, Law

By Herman Ooms

University of California Press

Copyright © 1996 Herman Ooms
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520202090


Introduction

Class, status, power, and law are not new topics to non-Japanese macrostructural treatments of Tokugawa society (1600-1868). Scholars have described well their historical specificity, though often without discussing their interrelationship. Together, as a cluster of general questions, they constitute a Marxian-Weberian problematic perhaps so familiar that it seems disingenuous to persist in treating them still as questions. Indeed, one might ask what the point is of returning to them if they are in reality answers given long ago posturing posthumously as questions—an "answeramatic" disguised as a problematic. How is this book situated within the fields of Tokugawa history and general sociological theory? A second question a reader acquainted with my previous interest in Tokugawa ideology might raise concerns my new orientation.1 Why this shift from intellectual history and representations of reality to social history and institutional practice?

Post factum justifications for what one has gotten into in the first place without clearly knowing why, except that it looked interesting, partake of retrospective fiction. This is especially true for questions regarding one's intellectual trajectory. With the proviso that reflections of this genre never get at real reasons, I can offer some rationale that one may expect from an introduction.

Previous scholarship, including my own analysis of ideological constructs, approached the issues of class, status, domination, and so on, from a position that was located in the political center. The scholar's

My book Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680 was published by Princeton University Press in 1985.

totalizing perspective—"modernist" some would call it now—from such a vantage point is the cognitive equivalent of the rulers' reach of dominion. Past works described how the system of governance was set up, how it functioned, reproduced itself, collapsed—and begat modernity. Even when I argued that the ideology of the times was not produced or even commissioned by the rulers, my emphasis was clearly that it served their interests. Perhaps less explicitly, I also implied that ideas or social representations mattered as much as they did because of their direct link to practice.

I formulated some of those structuralist and functionalist interpretations on the basis of insights gained from Pierre Bourdieu's writings. His writings have further led me to turn my attention to ways in which institutions, like laws, not only constitute sites of ideological embodiment but also define fields of practice and power contests. To a considerable extent, institutions circumscribe, directly, with less mediation by ideology than one might think perhaps, what people are, do, can be, can do, or feel instinctively to be unthinkable or impracticable. This simple truth calls for a kind of history that focuses on what people do within and with institutions. In regard to Tokugawa Japan, this insight translated for me into a desire to examine what peasants did and could do in their villages. How did the institutional setting of a military regime influence intravillage power distributions? Conversely, did village politics affect institutions?

Questions of this genre have received hardly any attention in Western scholarship, and although Japanese historians have produced a staggering amount of work about local rural history, very little of it has crossed the language barrier. Thomas C. Smith's admirable classic The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan touches only briefly on intravillage politics. Scholars writing about peasant resistance (Bix, Kelley, Vlastos, and Walthall) deal mainly with what peasants did when they left their villages to protest extravillage authority and only occasionally with the allocation, use, and contestation of power within villages. These studies are also limited to the mid and late Tokugawa period, when the most dramatic collective protests took place.

Class has been discussed far more than status by these scholars, who either emphasize its growing importance or argue its irrelevance. Either way, the assumption has been that status may explain collective action in the first Tokugawa century but not later, when class in-

terests prevailed (or, according to an anticlass argument, when less stable group alliances cut across various social strata). Schematically, class either replaced status as the motor of social stratification or failed to do so contrary to expectations. In either case the issue was class, not status.

My critique of this kind of diachronic dichotomizing is inspired by Bourdieu's reworking of the Weberian categories of class, status, and power through his flexible model of convertible capital (economic, social, and symbolic). Within this perspective, class and status, far from being mutually exclusive, constitute forms of power that are complementary and occasionally substitutable for each other. Chapters 2 and 3 of this book address this class-status question and, like the two concepts, are hard to separate. In chapter 2 I concentrate on the role of class-based rural power even in the early period, following in this principally the lead taken by the Japanese historian Mizumoto Kunihiko. In chapter 3 I examine the manipulation of power through status positions in village political struggles throughout the period.

Some time ago class ceased to be an almost obligatory subject for social historians, many of whom were attracted to insights promised by discourse analysis or the new cultural history. Bourdieu's work, however, has opened up possibilities to engage the topic anew by "bringing in" status. In an interesting turnabout, in 1992 the well-known British historian David Cannadine also called for a reengagement with class analysis, via the study of status.2 I share this point of view.

When discussing class, it is important to maintain the distinction, however elementary, between objective socioeconomic conditions shared by a number of people or groups and subjective awareness or practice (not to be taken for granted) based upon a recognition of those conditions. Too often, either a subjective class is postulated automatically on the basis of the existence of objective conditions (in doctrinaire Marxism) or the significance of an objective class is belittled because of the absence of class agents (in anti-Marxist arguments). An objective class is an analytical construct that is simultaneously the initial impetus for a query and its final result. Although classes in seventeenth-century Japan (or France) obviously do not look the same as modern classes—a

See David Cannadine, "Cutting Classes," New York Review of Books , Dec. 17, 1992, 52-57, esp. 57.

fact that is often forgotten in class analyses of Tokugawa Japan—their absence clearly is hard to argue.3 An example of an objective class in this study is the dogo* , or rural magnates, which Japanese historians, long interested in class, have identified as existing as an identifiable socioeconomic stratum from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century. Yet even the term that names and thus constitutes this group as a group is a modern scholarly creation. When, however, dogo* organized armed resistance against land surveys in certain regions toward the end of the sixteenth century they acted subjectively as a class.

In the seventeenth century there are numerous instances of peasants agitating around issues of village governance. Analysis identifies these peasants as belonging successively to different socioeconomic strata and acting to further shared interests by submitting group petitions. In this instance also, it is justified to speak both of an objective property class and a subjective social class, although their membership is not identical. The objective class may be identifiable across whole provinces, while peasant demands were always limited to the immediate environment; thus theirs was a social class consciousness expressed in practice but embedded in and circumscribed by the village.

Often these village disputes concerned issues of status. At a macro and official level, Tokugawa Japan was, of course, a society of "orders" (Stände ), legally defined status groups. Thus, all villagers were commoners, and most of them belonged to the status order of peasants. Yet this commonality, sanctioned legally by the state (from a distant center), should not be reconfigured into an equally distant image of village solidarity. On closer examination, it is clear that villagers always differentiated among themselves within a clearly marked hierarchy comprising multiple status gradations. This status was in part indirectly sanctioned legally by overlords (and thus an "order"), in part locally generated (and thus closer to the modern meaning of social standing).

This intravillage status hierarchy, expressed in prescribed forms of social interaction and normative gradations of material consumption, was closely related to economic power as either an addition to or a

For a cogent defense of the need for a class analysis of seventeenth-century France, a "society of orders" like Tokugawa Japan, see William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 1, esp. 7-9.

substitute for it. That economic power translates into political control, which it supplements with privileges (often based on tales of ancestry), thus creating and securing rare status positions, is not difficult to understand. Once the dog grew a tail, however, the tale could whip the dog. Status could be made to function as a first line of defense of political privilege, even when economic underpinnings had given way, by holding off new claimants who, pointing to their new wealth, insisted on a share in the control of village affairs. This tug of war for political power between peasants differentiated by economic and social status can be documented throughout the Tokugawa period.

The discussion of status and power in villages is limited in this book to those aspects of this dyad that were the subject of explicit written regulations and contestations. This means that the players discussed here are households, not individuals. It goes without saying that within households too power was distributed and exercised according to status, in this case along gender and age differentials. This is the area of (mostly un- or undercodified) dispositional habits, which does not belong to a study of explicit social and economic stratification that, moreover, extends beyond intrafamilial roles.

This limitation does not mean that I hold a monolithic view of human agency. Individual identities are plural, not singular, because they are constituted by multiple differences in kin, gender, age, lineage, neighborhood, and regional systems. In the public political realm, however, such multiple identities are simplified and channeled to create single group agents in accordance with the needs of policymakers—or their challengers. In Tokugawa Japan this was especially true of households, neighborhoods, and lineages. They were politically overdeter-mined by extravillage lordly authority. Many a village dispute centered around the way power was distributed through these institutions.

Status is a system of stratification through socially recognized honor, esteem, and privilege. The positive connotation of these terms, however, is misleading since such a description of a status system is the work of an outside observer who perceives grades of more or less honor, esteem, and privilege and relates to the whole hierarchy at once. This structuralist gaze is of a different quality than the experience of those who occupy a position within the status system. Status holders always relate to the system differentially, from a specific position that determines the scope and intensity of their interest in other positions, especially neighboring ones. One can at least say that, while they enjoyed public social

honor and esteem from those below them (and private envy and resentment as well), status holders must look down upon occupants of lower positions (with fear perhaps) as undeserving of such recognition, as embodiments of dishonor. Things are obviously more complicated than this dichotomy indicates. Even in a rigidly stratified society like Tokugawa Japan not all of the aspects of social interaction were patterned on status prescriptions. For instance, the "outcastes," too often still referred to by the pejorative term eta , were not treated as polluted in every social encounter. The point is that a status system is always also a system of socially sanctioned dishonor.

This is particularly true in the case of the outcastes, victims not only of social disrespect but also of stigmatizing ostracism and outright discrimination. For the last two decades, Japanese historians have produced a monumental body of research about the Tokugawa history of today's burakumin (in part descendants of the outcastes), a subject virtually untouched by non-Japanese scholars. This record, however, is not only a collection of particular histories of individuals, families, or communities. It also reveals changes and developments in the status of outcastes as such over the whole Tokugawa period and suggests that other factors besides cultural prejudice were at work.

Obviously, a study of status cannot neglect the subject of outcastes, although I almost did. Only after the other chapters were written did I become aware of the need to address this difficult issue. This near oversight is not without its own significance. The outcastes lived with their own headmen in hamlets near but apart from peasant villages and, in eastern Japan since the 1720s, under the direct jurisdiction of their seminational leader, or Danzaemon (an office name), in Edo. Since they formed a "society outside society," as Japanese historians often put it, they have usually been treated separately in modern historiography as well. Their serious study has been a ghettoized subdiscipline until very recently. Thus, it is possible to read endlessly about status, class, and power within Tokugawa villages without encountering them. And yet, as I argue in chapter 5, the treatment of these outcastes in Tokugawa and modern times constitutes perhaps the clearest and ugliest example of the operation of status.

The topography of power within villages was not shaped solely by intravillage factors. Extravillage lordly authority helped draw some of the lines over which confrontations took place. This authority interfered as a source of prestige and power, directly by creating "titled

peasants" and the village offices of headman and neighborhood heads and by issuing village laws, indirectly by allowing the officialization of village-generated statuses as they appeared on documents drawn up locally and by sanctioning through noninterference separate, "autonomous" village codes.

Nevertheless, it has often been said that villages were self-governing to a very high degree. A headman and the neighborhood heads who assisted him constituted the core of the village council (where only titled peasants had a seat), which took care of all public affairs, foremost the delivery of tribute and corvée to the overlord's district intendant but also many judicial and penal matters. In domains of the daimyo and shogun a district intendant (a bannerman in the shogunal houseland, a special port, on of the shogunal domain) was in charge of from a dozen to over a hundred villages. Often there were also village group headmen, who channeled communication between the headmen of a number of villages and the intendant. Tribute and population registers were kept at both the village and the district level. Matters that could not be settled by the neighborhood heads or by the village council or headman could be taken to the district intendant (via the village group headman) in the form of petitions or suits or, ultimately, to shogunal or domainal higher-ups, usually in Edo. Defendants were routinely invited to respond to the accusations in writing, thus completing the record of the plaintiff's lawsuit. The written testimonies of witnesses or interested parties would be taken into consideration by the authorities as they tried to reach a solution—a verdict or an ordered settlement. It should be understood that at all these levels administrative and judicial functions overlapped; Tokugawa Japan did not have an independent judiciary and was a society without lawyers.

Although the sketch above may blur distinctions between locality and center, the degree to which Tokugawa villages enjoyed autonomy has long been debated among Japanese historians. This debate has centered mainly on the structural position of village regulations within the overall power distribution of society. Did these codes constitute limits to, or were they vehicles for, the penetration of supravillage authority within the village? I engage this question in chapter 4, where I supplement the traditional approach, which is based almost exclusively on the study of legal texts, with an analysis of actual practice. This perspective emphasizes the articulation within a single juridical domain of two specific legal authorities, a supra- and an intravillage authority,

which created a distinct space that allowed each one to choose whether to use the other explicitly or implicitly.

This strategic area, where village headmen or district intendants exercise some discretion in deciding which laws to apply, overlook, or subvert (and to what extent) is, of course, hard to explore. We usually know only the outcomes of such deliberations, not the processes by which they were reached. Local historians, however, have discovered diaries, notes, and queries by village headmen that reveal strategies they weighed or used in applying, interpreting, or circumventing existing regulations. All too often one feels obliged to choose between a "naive" view that equates written law with actual practice and a skepticism that questions the effectiveness of laws. Headmen's private papers provide an escape from this simplistic dilemma. They reveal judicious appraisals by historical actors of the relative power of law and other circumstantial constellations of forces.

The approach to the study of Tokugawa law followed here is twofold and aims at the interplay between the normative power of laws and actual social practice. On the one hand, in the final chapter I attempt to sketch a general macro picture, not of Tokugawa laws, but of the juridical field and the specific power generated by laws. On the other hand, most of the other chapters are constructed to a large extent around lawsuits and law cases, where one can witness how laws figured in various local power struggles and contestations. To change unwanted situations, the peasants relied far more frequently on suits and petitions than on mass protests or uprisings. One cannot avoid the impression that lawyerless Tokugawa Japan was far more litigious than the Japan of today.

Even though contention often took the form of litigation, one should keep in mind that the distinction between petitions or requests and what we would call suits or legal action is not at all clear. There are several reasons for this. Suits were always drawn up according to an official format in a formal language of entreaty ("with fear and trembling") as supplications professing in advance willing subjection to the good will of the authorities.4 Furthermore, there were no attorneys

The phrases "formal language of entreaty" and "willing subjection" are taken from Geoffrey Koziol, Begging Pardon and Favor: Ritual and Political Order in Early Medieval France (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 8, 45 His description of tenth- and eleventh-century France applies well to Tokugawa Japan, perhaps not surprisingly given the "feudal" character of these two societies: "Petition and concession, humility and grace, dependence and domination; these were the categories that expressed the fundamental political relations of the tenth and eleventh centuries" (81).

available, and the governing authorities (village councils or overlords) were the "judges." The outcomes of suits/petitions, rather than being "verdicts," were often conciliations or compromises without clearcut winners or losers, reached with the help of appointed ad hoc mediators. Because restoring social order was more important than conforming to an abstract rule of law or justice, apologies were often the decisive moment in legal closure.

Since petitioning or litigating is only one way for individuals or groups to exercise power, a regional study of such action viewed against a detailed background of other forms of social and economic power would be ideal. I was led to explore that possibility after coming across a particularly well documented case of a poor peasant woman engaged in a protracted confrontation against all levels of village and even supravillage authority. The woman was from a village in Kita-Saku district in eastern Shinano (Nagano prefecture). I begin the book with her story.

Ultimately, however, my goal was a more comprehensive statement than an area study would allow. Although much is to be gained from regionally controlled research, I abandoned this way of organizing my project. Nevertheless, I was able to use much of the material thus gathered, often in the form of other cases presented throughout this book, giving it a strong regional emphasis. Thus, in good part, this is a study in rather than of a region.

A legal case usually yields a narrative, a fragment revealing what people cared about and why. Knowledge of circumstantial detail is often essential for an adequate understanding of the issue. An analysis of practice through a number of case studies with ever-changing actors and settings, however, can be taxing to the reader. The detail can at times be bewildering and overwhelming. Yet, the alternative of a quick summary of the issues to please the hurried reader sacrifices too much of what makes history—an old-fashioned idea—interesting and what reminds us that cases are about people.

It is just as appropriate to remind oneself that we get to know those

people because others, namely, local historians, have retrieved their stories. Without their assiduous efforts, a study like this, which touches upon the history of many locales, would be impossible. With this in mind, I have chosen not to relegate their names to footnotes in order to protect a seamless narrative and uninterrupted analysis. The reader will have to bear with this reminder in the text that it is the work of these historians that carries the study forward.

To a considerable extent, this book is a collection of essays that can be read independently and in almost any sequence. Linking the different topics and chapters, however, is the fact (and I use the term without hesitation) of inequality and often the reality (again, no apologies) of social suffering as they were institutionalized in the communities of Tokugawa villages. The frequent description of villages as harmonious and consensual is a misrecognition if not an outright denial of these realities.

Continues...

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Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: University of California Press
• Date d'édition: 1996
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0520202090
• ISBN 13: 9780520202092
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 424
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
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