Peasant struggle in Japan, 1590–1760

Abstract

Peasant uprisings in the Tokugawa period have been studied by Japanese scholars since the Second World War as ‘manifestations of the struggle of the oppressed masses against the despotic power of the feudal system’, but Hugh Borton, the doyen of American scholars concerned with Japanese peasant studies, argues in the introduction to a reissue of his 1938 opus that there is little new evidence to support this prevailing interpretation. His somewhat cavalier dismissal of the thesis is based on the premise that only a concerted effort by peasants of many regions to overthrow the feudal system could be considered a revolutionary struggle. It will be the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that concerted efforts by peasants in many of the relatively autonomous domains, though often uncoordinated, mounted a serious challenge to the various feudal regimes, and moreover, that peasants often developed a keen political consciousness and effective, though impermanent, political organisation in the years before a new stratification within the peasant class disrupted the struggle in the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Notes

Department of History, University of British Colombia.