18
and the landlord sometimes even standing as a guarantor for the tenant farmer when the latter
joined a cooperative credit organization. Even if a systematic stratification within the peasantry
never evolved across the villages and hans, landlord-tenant relations within a village were an
important case of crystallized status differentials and hierarchical personal ties passed down
through succeeding generations of the respective families.
39
Decision-making authority corresponded to the sharply stratified social structure of the
mura, and was thus extremely centralized. The village headman (shoya or nanushi), usually a
powerful landlord, was responsible to the provincial (han) administrators for the collective
payment of taxes and law-abiding behavior throughout the village. The headman was usually the
patriarch of the most powerful family in the village, usually the largest landholder or the landlord
with the most tenants. It was he who mediated between the village community and all outsiders,
including other village headmen and feudal authorities.
40
There existed a village assembly
consisting of “farmers’ representatives” (mura yoriai) and a council of high-ranking leaders,
each representing groups of five neighboring households (gumi).
41
These bodies were supposed
to approve all the collective decisions of the hamlet and they even determined the tax burden for
each household in the course of collecting the land tax assessed collectively for every village by
han authorities. In everyday practice, however, most representatives in the assembly usually
deferred to the headman’s decisions; their main function was thus limited to ensuring that the
households or five-family groups abided by the laws and met their collective obligations.
42
Thus,
village leadership became virtually hereditary, suggesting continuity of status relations over
generations and the concentration of leadership functions in the hands of the heads of the highest
ranking families within each village.
43
It is important to note that these aspects of hierarchy, and whatever value was attached to
them, did not preclude the diffuse sense of equality that emerges from the mere fact of shared
identity and common membership in the mura. While this diffuse equality is nothing like the
more explicitly egalitarianism of the Russian mir, it does point to some important limits to the
39
Fukutake, 67-70, 85-6.
40
See Scheiner, “Benevolent Lords and Honorable Peasants,” 43-7.
41
Gumi (or, gonin-gumi, or kumi) including the “three houses opposite and the one on either side.” In some cases,
the gumi consisted of members of the same extended family (dozokudan) with the neighbors being members of
the branch families that had evolved from a single stem family.
42
T. Smith, “The Japanese Village.” See also Bellah, 41; Fukutake, 96-110; and Magagna, 231.
43
Fukutake, 138-45; and Black et al., 50.
Convention