THE FARMERS IN TRADITIONAL JAPAN

The main function of the farmer was to grow rice for the samurai; but the growing of rice, although it was his most important occupation, was not his sole one. Rice, as it is grown in Japan and in the other great production areas of Asia, requires absolutely flat fields that can be flooded at the appropriate moment; these fields are surrounded by low embankments to prevent the water escaping. Plains are not very extensive, but where they exist, such as behind Tokyo, behind Nagoya, and around Nara, fields can be fairly large and regular in pattern; the more characteristic fields, however, occur up the valleys and hill-sides, where fields are cut out in terraces, and here they are much more irregular than in the plains because they have to be adapted to the terrain.

Since all of the three islands of old Japan (i.e. not counting Hokkaiō) were divided into domains or directly held territories, it was necessary to grow rice throughout the country, even though there were many marginal districts where climate or terrain made this difficult. Other characteristic units in a farming village, apart from the flat rice-fields, were the dry fields on which other crops might be grown—wheat, millet, and other grains, cotton, tobacco, hemp, and sweet potato—and also the permanently planted areas where, according to region, there would be oranges, grapes, mulberry plants, tea, or bamboos. Scattered fruit trees, such as persimmons, plums, and apricots might be found; some crops, like beans, were even grown on the embankments between the fields. In more favored districts the rice-fields would support an off-season crop (that could be grown and harvested before the land was needed for the rice), such as rape, grown for the oil extracted from the seed.

Life in the country, especially in the north, is regulated by the seasons, which are clearly marked in most parts of Japan. Nature and the seasons are a constant theme in Japanese poetry, for the Japanese are very sensitive to their manifestations. Spring, which is misty and mild, sees the blooming of the plum, followed by the cherry; with its gentle rain it is the season of renewal, heralded by the fresh green of new leaves, while a little later the falling of the cherry blossom adds a touch of melancholy to the scene with the reminder that, just as the flowers are scattered in the breeze, so also is human life doomed to end. Summer, although an ideal growing season for rice, is unpoetical, a season to be endured rather than enjoyed, for it is hot and sultry, and brings heavy rains followed by typhoons. Autumn, on the contrary, is a most welcome season, with its clear dry weather affording relief after the heat and heavy rains; in the country it is, of course, the time of harvest, but it is also the time of change and decay, and so poetically the most characteristically Japanese of the seasons, with signs of impermanence everywhere, symbolized by the momentary dew on the now scarlet maple leaf. Although winter is of short duration and rather dry in the south, over much of the country Japan is just a snow covered landscape in this season; the Japanese cope valiantly with the cold weather, for their houses do not provide much protection against it. The farmer in Japan has therefore the advantage of weather that, whatever its other faults, is reasonably predictable, so that agricultural operations seldom have to wait upon it. This does not mean that there are not occasional droughts, while the occurrence and precise course of typhoons in late summer cannot be foreseen. The first act in the cycle of rice-production was to prepare the nursery bed in May. For various reasons, rice was not sown directly in the place where it was to grow, but plants were reared in a nursery bed for later transplanting. This method, economical of seed, concentrates the seedlings in a small area where they can be easily supervised, and allows any secondary crops in the main fields a longer time to mature. The preparation of the bed involved plowing up the area if beasts were available—horses being more common in eastern Japan and oxen in the west or digging by hand, adding manure and producing a smooth area. Water for the fields either came by gravity-fed channels, led into and from the fields by arrangements of watergates or bamboo tubes, or, in flat areas, it was raised by mechanical means, waterwheels if the flow was fast enough, tread-wheels or other devices where it was not. The seed, saved from last year’s crop, was often sprouted before sowing, being soaked, in the straw bales in which it was stored, by suspension in a pond, then spread in the sun. It was scattered on the bed from the banks and sank to the surface of the soil. Forty days was required for it to grow to sufficient size for planting out—something like 12 inches overall.

The main fields were prepared by plowing or digging, to get rid of any stubble remaining and to turn in weeds and manure in the form of vegetable compost, ashes, mud from ditches, and so on. If the field was not already naturally flooded, this cultivation might be done before the water was brought in, but at all events the field was flooded before the planting. This was one of the great occasions of the year. It was organized as a communal operation, with persons from a group of farms co-operating. The actual planters were usually young women, partly perhaps because of their dexterity, but mainly from a traditional feeling that their potential fertility as child-bearers would transfer itself to the rice. They worked in line—usually backwards, but sometimes forwards—across the field, pushing the roots of the plants into the soft mud at regular intervals. Plants were taken from the beds by more experienced workers, to avoid root-damage, tied into bundles and thrown into the fields so that the transplanters could pick them up. An important duty of the owner of the field was the provision of food, and pictures of rice planting nearly always include a young girl loaded with trays and carrying liquid refreshment. The work is very arduous, done with bent backs and requiring speed, rhythm, and endurance; in many places songs were sung accompanied by music and dancing on the embankments, as much to relieve the tedium of the planting and provide a rhythmical stimulus as to celebrate the joy of restarting the crop cycle. Some of this music is very old, and became incorporated in the beginnings of the classic nō drama, centuries before 1600.

With the planting completed, the fields have now their most characteristic appearance, covered in water reflecting the sky and dotted by the green of the young rice plants. These grow steadily until the all-over color is a light green, and the water is hidden by the plants and a film of waterweeds. Frogs breed in the fields, and the air is full of their croaking. Hoeing between the rows must be done to keep the weeds in check, the embankments need attention to prevent them crumbling, and the water-level has to be maintained. This is the time when disputes about water would arise, especially if rainfall was below normal. One farmer might divert water into his own field, or open up a channel from a higher field than his own, and such actions would lead to bitter recriminations.

Generally speaking, during the time from planting to harvesting, rice does not require a great deal of attention. There were years, however, in which insect damage was heavy, heavy enough virtually to destroy the crop in some regions. Round about the end of July was the time when the infestations were likely to build up, and this was an anxious time. Various remedies were available, some using fumigation and catching by hand the winged form of the pest. One very effective treatment was apparently discovered in Kyūshū, which averted the worst ravages; it consisted of heating together whale oil and vinegar, and spraying the growing plants. It was found that whale oil could be replaced by other oils, and the practice spread to the whole of Japan. The liquid was scattered over the plants with straw brooms. Another treatment depended upon quite other principles, those of magic. Straw images of the larvae that caused the damage, or of human figures representing either an evil spirit or a good spirit who was requested to take away the insects with him, were paraded around the fields, the villagers bearing blazing torches and beating upon bells and drums. The images were cast into a river to be washed away, or burned or otherwise disposed of. When the effigy is human, it is often called Sanemori, after a warrior who died in the great civil wars of the twelfth century. More straightforward recourse to religion would be occasioned by a shortage of rain at a critical time, when prayers were offered, either to implore the gods that were thought to give rain, or to appease some hostile spirit that was withholding it.

In late August or September the flowers opened on the rice, and it was ready for harvesting in October or early November, depending upon the latitude and local climate. Normally winter does not come to Japan until late in December, so that November is still autumnal, with calm weather and colorful leaves in the woods, and the frosts that would be fatal to rice have not yet started. During autumn, while the crop is ripening, the water in the fields is allowed to evaporate or drain away, so that the ground is usually firm by the time reaping begins. The harvesting was done by hand, with sickles, and the rice was cut low down, to leave long stalks; it was tied into bundles or small sheaves, and if necessary was stored by piling in circular stacks or hung head downwards to dry from ropes strung between trees. In the earlier part of the Tokugawa period the grain was stripped (the technical term is “rippled” or “heckled”) by pulling the plants between two sticks, or even by striking them against the top of an open tub. Later in the period there developed a toothed device, through which they were drawn to separate the grains. Flails, like those used in the West, with a hinged piece of wood at the head of a pole, existed in Japan at the time, but they were probably used for threshing other grains such as barley or wheat rather than rice. The grains that had been stripped from the plants were next winnowed by being scooped up in flat baskets and thrown in the air. What was left was the brown rice with the husk still on, known as genmai, “black rice.” It was at this stage that sufficient was selected as seed for sowing next year, and put aside. It was also as genmai that most of the rice went to the samurai, after it had been sorted over by hand, and packed into barrel-shaped bales, which were made of rice-straw and of double thickness to minimize spillage.

The other crops were grown either in special fields, round the edges of the rice-fields, or in raised strips in these fields. The grains other than rice included some that closely resembled wheat and barley as they are known today (used to supplement rice as the staple food, and in the manufacture of some products, such as soy sauce). Bread was not known outside Nagasaki, where wheat-flour was used in making kasutera, the sponge cake that presumably came in with the Portuguese, since its name seems to be derived from castella. Millet was also used to supplement rice, and also to make cakes and dumplings. Buckwheat was eaten in the form of noodles. All these were grown in dry fields, in intervals of work on rice.

These supplementary crops were manured with human excrement and urine, ladled out of the cesspits that directly underlay the holes in the floor that served as privies. The handling of this material in the towns was a large-scale operation, with boats transporting it to where it was needed. In the country it had to be transported over shorter distances, and could be carried in wooden buckets slung on a pole. Roads passing through villages would have tubs conveniently placed for the use of passers-by, so that nothing should be wasted. Before being applied to the plants, this manure was normally diluted with water, and it was then poured round the roots of the crops, or trees. Noses could not afford to be too sensitive. A more serious drawback to its use was the spread of some diseases; in particular, human intestinal worms flourished in these conditions. It was not used for the general manuring of rice, which depended upon dry material worked in when the fields were prepared, and on matter brought in solution or suspension by the water supply.

Other crops included fruit such as plums (usually small, more like dam-sons, and eaten after being pickled), persimmons (a fruit tending to be astringent unless fully ripe, when it glows golden in the autumn sun, and becoming very sweet when sun-dried), pears (spherical in shape and crisp in texture) and oranges (small tangerine-like mikan). Usually these were grown for eating on the farm, but in some places, such as the Kii province for oranges, and Koshu for grapes (grown only for eating as fruit), land was set aside for their cultivation on a commercial scale. Tea was grown as individual bushes scattered around the farm, as well as in the specialist regions, like Uji to the south of Kyoto. Certain vegetables, like the giant radish and lotus roots, were produced partly for commerce, while the woods would be searched for mushrooms, wild fruits, and green herbs, the first sprouting of bracken being a considerable delicacy.

Certain regions had specialized crops for industrial use. For example, the northwest corner of the island of Shikoku, the province of Awa, produced indigo for dyeing. This was a plant that was reared in nursery beds and transplanted, being harvested just before flowering. It was cut up fine, and sundried, the product being then fermented in a little water. For commerce it was then ground down and worked into balls about the size of billiard balls.

Plants giving material for textiles included hemp, used extensively for outer clothing, like the hakama of warriors, and grown widely in Japan, especially where the climate was more rigorous. The growing of cotton  seems to have started in the late sixteenth century, although it had been imported from China for some centuries. It was not an easy crop and required considerable attention from the farmers. It needs plenty of water during the growing season, but dry weather after flowering, and this latter requirement can be met only in the coastal areas round the Inland Sea, and in fact the main producing region seems to have been round the city of Osaka. It was often grown in conjunction with rice, either by an alternation of crops when the fields could be completely drained, or by building up raised beds in the rice fields. The picking of the cotton was largely done by women. The clothing of farmers was restricted by decree to hemp and cotton, so that a good deal of the production was reserved for home use, spinning and weaving being two of the more usual occupations of the womenfolk.

The third widely used textile material was silk, which, although they produced it, the farmers were not allowed to use. By far the greater proportion of silk thread came from worms reared in special rooms, very often in the upper floor of farmhouses, rather than from cocoons collected from outside, where the silkworms had been feeding on trees. Silk rearing was virtually restricted to the main island. The normal procedure was that eggs were kept in a cool place over the winter, adhering naturally to the paper on which the moths had been induced to lay them the season before. The mulberry trees that provided the food for the grubs were every year cut down nearly to ground level so that shoots grew out in spring, which produced particularly large and succulent leaves from the middle of May. When he saw that the leaves would be available in time, the farmer or his womenfolk would bring out the eggs from the cool store, and spread out the papers on which they still stuck in the special rooms, which have to be dry, with fresh air and no direct sun. As the larvae emerged, they were transferred to a bed of chopped leaves, either individually by hand, or by some device such as spreading the leaves on a sheet of paper in which holes were made, and covering the eggs with this: the larvae soon found their way through the holes on to the leaves. It was very important to keep the foodstuff clean and fresh. The larvae were provided with up to five meals a day and their beds had to be cleaned at least once during this time, which lasts a little over a month and in the course of which the larvae cast their skins four times; then they spin their cocoons, attaching themselves to twigs or straws provided for them.

It takes three or four days for the spinning of the cocoon to be completed, and it is left for another week or so to mature: it then consists of an outer covering of loose silk which cannot be reeled off as a single thread, but is used as floss or wadding for padding quilted clothing. The bulk of the cocoon forms a length of silk, perhaps 500 yards long. The best cocoons are picked out for breeding, the moths being allowed to develop and make their way out of their integuments to mate and deposit their eggs for the next season. In the process of breaking out, they split the silk, and the cocoons that are to be used for thread do not reach this stage, but are killed by being exposed to the sun or immersed in hot water. Before the thread is unreeled, the cocoon is soaked in warm water, which frees the outer layers and makes it possible for the end of the thread to be discovered. The various sorts of yarn used to make different varieties of fabric are made by spinning together the threads from varying numbers of cocoons.

The care of the silkworms took up a great deal of time and energy on the part of the women whose duty this normally was. It is typical of the thrift of the farmers that hardly any of the silk was discarded—even ill-shaped or diseased cocoons could be used for some purpose, even though the thread could not be cleanly reeled off.

All the occupations that have been described so far were concentrated in the summer months. Except in cases where a back season crop was grown, there was no agricultural activity from November to April. There were, of course, many other things to be done, such as the collection of fuel, in the form of dried leaves and wood, and of fodder for any beasts that were kept, as well as the usual winter chores of making and mending tools and equipment. Spinning and weaving were the chief productive activities, along with certain other handicrafts, and some brewing of sake, the alcoholic liquor prepared from rice and drunk on festive occasions.

Ihara Saikaku, an eighteenth-century novelist, included a story in his collection, The Japanese Family Storehouse, about a farmer who made good: he was considerably idealized, being given credit for improvements that were certainly not the product of just one man’s brain, but the story demonstrates the reward that virtue might bring. In typically Saikaku fashion, the second half of this story shows the farmer’s son, after his death, squandering his fortune and reducing the family to penury. The following is a paraphrase of the first part of this little tale:

There was a small farmer called Kusuke who scraped a wretched living in the village of Asahi in Yamato. He worked his land by his own efforts, for he had no oxen, and his wife toiled from first light at her loom, weaving hempen cloth. In many an autumn he had measured out the one and two-tenths koku of taxation-rice, and until the age of over 50 he carried out the usual rituals at the New Year, hung sardine heads and holly at his tiny windows like everyone else, and threw beans down as a protection against the invisible demons that come around. One year he gathered the beans together again, and on impulse sowed one of them in a piece of wasteland. That summer it produced a mass of stalks green with leaves, and in the autumn there ripened more than a double handful of beans. These he sowed along the water-channels between his rice-fields, and each year without fail he harvested them. The yield increased until after ten years it reached 88 koku. With the proceeds of this he had a great lantern built to lighten the darkness on the Hase highway: it still shines and is known as the “bean lantern.”

All things gradually accumulate, and man’s greatest desires sometimes come to fruition. Kusuke continued to work in the same spirit to increase the prosperity of his household. He acquired more land for rice and other crops, and in time became a big farmer. At the proper time he manured his fields and removed weeds, and let in water, so that the ears of his rice ripened plump and full, and the flowers of his cotton plants looked like flights of butterflies. If his prosperity was greater than that of other men, it was not only by chance, but because he worked unceasingly, morning and evening, hard enough to wear out his spade and hoe. He was a man of great ingenuity, who did much for the good of mankind. He made the rake with its rows of iron teeth, and there was nothing of more use to men for breaking up the soil. He also introduced the Chinese Winnower and the Thousand Koku Sieve. The work of threshing corn by hand took a great deal of time, and he invented an implement with a row of bamboo spikes, so that whereas two men had been needed to thresh his crop, now one could do it without great effort. He also developed a device whereby a woman could prepare many times more cotton for spinning in a day than before. He bought snowy mountains of cotton, employed many workers, and sent countless bales to Edo. In four or five years he acquired great wealth, and became one of the most notable cotton-dealers in his province.

The authorities would doubtless have approved highly of Kusuke, exemplifying as he did thrift and continuous activity by the farming community, but their characteristically contemptuous attitude to the major section of the population, on whom, after all, they depended directly for their whole livelihood, is expressed very clearly in some extracts (which are quoted by G. Sansom in his A History of Japan, 1615-1867, London, 1964) of an ordinance that was issued to villages in 1649:

Farm work must be done with the greatest diligence. Planting must be neat, all weeds must be removed, and on the borders of both wet and dry fields beans or similar foodstuffs are to be grown, however small the space.

Peasants must rise early and cut grass before cultivating the fields. In the evening they are to make straw rope and straw bags, all such work to be done with great care.

They must not buy tea or sake to drink, nor must their wives.
Men must plant bamboo or trees round the farmhouse and must use the fallen leaves for fuel so as to save expense.

Peasants are people without sense or forethought. Therefore they must not give rice to their wives and children at harvest time, but must save food for the future. They should eat millet, vegetables, and other coarse food instead of rice. Even the fallen leaves of plants should be saved as food against famine....During the season of planting and harvesting, when the labor is arduous, the food taken may be a little better than usual.

The husband must work in the fields, the wife must work at the loom. Both must do night work. However good-looking a wife may be, if she neglects her household duties by drinking tea or sightseeing or rambling on the hillsides, she must be divorced.

Peasants must wear only cotton or hemp—no silk. They may not smoke tobacco. It is harmful to health, it takes up time, and costs money. It also creates a risk of fire.

The cotton and hemp garments worn by the farmers varied from region to region, and to some extent with the affluence of the wearer, but considerable generalizations can be made. The full-length kimono was occasionally worn by both sexes, especially in any moments of relaxation as they had, such as taking part in some local ceremony. The women might wear it in the house during the winter months, when there was little work to do outside, or the men might sometimes wear it at work, tucking its skirts up into their narrow girdle, to give freedom of movement. But work clothes usually consisted of a short jacket worn with a trouser like garment. In some regions the women wore ample bloomers, drawn in round the ankles, but elsewhere they wore tighter breeches, like their men-folk’s but usually with an apron. Both sexes wore girdles about five inches wide. In hot weather men could remove their jackets and work stripped to the waist, or go one step further and remove their lower garments, leaving only their loin-cloth, a piece of material passing between the legs and fixed round the hips; it, too, was subject to regional variation in style. The loincloth was usually of white cotton, but it could be red, a color which was believed to keep off demons. Women wore an undergarment rather like a short skirt, but they did not make any concessions to the warm weather other than to loosen their clothing a little to allow the air to move around their bodies.

Cold-weather wear included leggings, and coverings for the lower arms, the latter with a flap to cover the back of the hands. Straw sandals were the normal footwear, but clogs (geta) with high pegs would be worn for walking in mud or a light fall of snow. Districts in the north and east had several feet of snow in the winter, and to cope with such conditions snow-boots of straw, or paddle-shaped snowshoes or even a primitive sort of ski, were common. Similar paddle-shaped devices were sometimes worn to prevent the wearer from sinking too far into the mud of the rice fields, although in some fields it was more convenient to move around in punts, even for planting. To keep off the rain or snow the countryman would wear a cloak made of lengths of straw sewn together, with a hood or conical straw hat on his head, the latter also doing duty in the summer. Once again, in the shape and decoration of these articles there would be a considerable variation from locality to locality.

The basic food of the farmer and his family, as directed in the ordinance, was not the steamed rice that the samurai and rich townsmen enjoyed but a sort of porridge of which millet, or perhaps some barley or wheat, formed the greater part. Green vegetables, and giant radish pickled in a liquor made from rice bran accompanied this, along with such fruit as he was unable to sell and the occasional scraping of dried fish to add flavor (and incidentally a little protein to an otherwise largely carbohydrate diet). The rice-fields attracted a lot of wildfowl in the winter months, and some of these may have found their way into the pot, in spite of the Buddhist prohibition against taking life, and fish from the streams were also a delicacy. Beef and horseflesh were never eaten, though the animals’ skins were sold when they died. The prohibition on the eating of beef was based on a specific Buddhist principle, probably going back to the sacred cows of India, but it was reinforced by the necessity for keeping cattle for draught purposes, just as horses were required for military use, as pack animals, and for work on the farm.

The way of life of the farming community was closely linked to the design of the houses: this, too, showed considerable local variation, due partly to climatic influences, and partly to local custom and social organization, but there were many common features. For example, all houses were of wood-frame construction, with steep roofs and overhanging eaves to allow the heavy rainfall to run off. The eaves normally projected over a veranda, while the walls of the rooms were often arranged to slide or be removable to allow the free movement of air in the hot, humid summers. The roof was of thatch or faggots, or sometimes of shingles or even tiles. Single-story houses were most common, but in silk-rearing districts there was very often an upper floor beneath the roof for a silk-room. In some areas of central Japan, such as parts of the old provinces of Hida and Etchu, the family group was more numerous because it included a wider spread of kinship than elsewhere, and there large houses were the rule, with very steep roofs and three or even four storys.

One of the consequences of the Japanese preoccupation with cleanliness and the avoidance of pollution was that the ground floor of a house was clearly divided into areas in which the outside footwear could be worn, and those into which one did not go without taking them off. (It was, incidentally, the grossest insult to strike anyone with a sandal or clog.) The beaten-earth floor at an entrance or where rough work was done would be considered an extension of the ground or street outside the house, and stepping up on to the wooden floor of the living-room would mean stepping out of whatever footwear was being worn, and stepping down meant thrusting the feet again into the waiting sandals or geta. Very often this earth floor would go right through the house from front to back, with the space on the right taken up with a store, or, in colder regions, there might be a stable instead, open to the rest of the house, so that the horse could be looked after without braving the winter weather, and the animal could share whatever heat there was available with the family. The quarters at the back of the house might be reached along the same earth floor, and could include other stores for tools and equipment, and a scullery with places for washing vegetables, the water being brought into a wooden trough, perhaps by a bamboo pipe from a convenient stream, perhaps carried in buckets. There might also be a stove for cooking the grain that made up the meal, though this was not necessarily in the back. In such a house, to the left of the earthen passageway, was the fireplace, which was truly the focus of life in the house: it provided warmth, and facilities for cooking, and was where the occupants had their meals. In the illustration the earthen passage is in the foreground, and the raised planking is the living area, with the fire at one end of a sort of trench. The firing was wood or other inflammable vegetable matter, the smoke from which was considerable, rising upwards to the roof, where it would make its way out, sometimes through holes or gratings at the ends of the topmost ridge.

Status in the family was indicated and rigidly maintained by the seating round the fire. The head of the house, that is, the senior active male, the grandfather of the young children, always had the place facing the passage, and his wife sat (or rather knelt) at right angles to him, in a position facing towards the entrance to the house at the end of the passage. The other fixed seat was opposite to the wife, and was the guest’s place, where any honored guest would sit to have his meal. (If the farmer was an important man, such as the headman of a village, there might be a reception room in the position behind the guest’s place, that is, at the front of the house, with a separate entrance, through which a visitor of samurai rank might come to do business: such an important guest would not demean himself by sitting at the fire, but would remain in the reception room, and be offered refreshment there, though it was by no means certain that he would deign to partake of it.) If there was no guest, then that place would be occupied by the eldest son or the eldest daughter’s husband. The other menfolk, younger sons and farmhands, would sit where they could at the end opposite the head, but the rest of the women, including the eldest son’s wife, did the cooking and the fetching and carrying, and ate in snatches in the scullery or after the others had finished, or even, if work pressed, would have to make do with a hasty bowl, sitting on the edge of the planking, remaining in the passageway without removing their footwear.

Around the fire there would be a few pieces of equipment, such as a trivet and some pokers, or a pair of iron bars, held like chopsticks, to serve as tongs; and, most characteristic, the hook suspended over the fire from which hung a kettle or cauldron, adjustable for height and held in position by a jamming-bar, which was often in the shape of a fish: this fish was sometimes thought to be the residence of a household god of fire.

The other rooms in the house would depend for their equipment upon the circumstances of the family. The living room would normally be boarded, with some straw mats or cushions for the important members of the household to sit on. If the family was above the level of extreme poverty, the wife of its head might have a small room of her own with thick mats as floor covering: this was softer to sit on, and more comfortable to sleep on. There might be survivors of the generation older than the family-head—still probably a strong influence, even though retired from active control of affairs— with a room for themselves; the elder son and his wife and children might also have a room. In a house preserved in the city of Takayama in Hida one such room was more like a large cupboard under the steeply sloping roof. Servants would sleep where they could. There were no beds as known in China or the West; the Japanese slept, and most still do, on mattresses spread on the floor, one per person, for there was no equivalent to a double bed. Young children slept with their mother until they were big enough to have their own mattress. These mattresses, seldom more than an inch or two thick, were stored in a cupboard by day. Instead of pillows, wooden headrests were used, sometimes padded, positioned under the neck. Of course, samurai slept in the same way, but with more luxurious bedclothes. In important farmhouses, where there were many servants, they might have dormitories or even separate rooms, like junior samurai in castle-towns, arranged in the upper story of a large gatehouse.

The head of the family was of course supreme, and all the other members deferred to him. His wife might in fact have considerable influence over him, but this would be exercised discreetly and in private. The normal marriage between children of houses of some substance was a result of negotiation involving two go-betweens or sponsors, with the sentiments of the persons directly concerned being only minimally consulted; the advantages of an alliance between the two families was of greater importance. The bride brought with her a dowry and what might be termed the contents of her bottom drawer—bedding and clothing. The wedding was sanctified in a ceremony conducted by the sponsors, in which there was a ritual exchange of cups of sake. With people near the line of poverty or even destitution, family advantage was much less of a consideration, and marriages were far more haphazard and likely to depend upon the feelings that the couple had for each other. Some villages had houses for young people where they might live a communal sort of existence, sometimes with a mixing of the sexes, and in these circumstances there was a good deal of pairing and separating; permanent associations might arise from love or from the pregnancy of the girl. It is probable that at this level a marriage was not recognised until a child was on the way. It was also easy to get rid of a wife, especially if she was childless—the husband had only to send her back to her parents’ home with her belongings.

A young bride in a more affluent home can hardly have looked forward to going to her new husband’s house, apart from the satisfaction of accomplishing her duty. Many of the chores that had been the responsibility of her mother-in-law were now transferred to her. Many mothers-in-law began a life of leisure and of bullying the new arrival, who had often, in addition to the more strenuous tasks that now fell on her, to act as a sort of maid, combing out her mother-in-law’s hair, massaging her shoulders when she complained of being tired; she had also, of course, to look after her husband, a duty which would range from providing delicacies for his meals to giving personal attentions such as cleaning out his ears and washing his feet when he came home from working in the mud. The birth of a son relieved her of some part of the heavier work, but one can only presume that she prayed for the day when she, too, could become a mother-in-law in her turn.

Land-holdings were normally handed on to the eldest son, and younger sons were often in a sorry plight, being obliged to work for their brothers, or going off to work for other farmers; one solution for them was to migrate to the expanding towns. When there were no sons, a son-in-law would be brought in for the eldest daughter. Technically what occurred was the adoption into the family of a son. In this sort of marriage, the dominance of the husband over the wife might not be so marked; in fact, the adopted son-in-law was traditionally an unassertive figure.

Just as the household had its status hierarchy, so too the village itself had a clear-cut class distinction. In his great survey of 1582-98, Hideyoshi had registered the holders of land, and when Ieyasu had assumed power, he did nothing to alter the pattern thus recorded. The names of the farmers that appeared on it formed the class of the honbyakushō, “original farmers”; they were often descendants of long lines of landowners, and some of them had chosen to abandon the sword and become full-time farmers. The larger houses in the village belonged to them, and their families would certainly maintain the formal marriage customs. Below them were the smallholders and landless men, living in small houses, or in the houses of their employers; they had very little status, being the dependants of the landholders, nor did they appear in the tax-registers, or have the right to join in the various corporate groupings in the village organization. Nevertheless, in a regulated country like Japan, the existence of these men could not go unrecorded, and the means by which this was done was the religious register. When Christianity became illegal, each family had to become the registered parishioners of a Buddhist temple, and each village had to make an annual return of all its inhabitants, including servants and womenfolk, with their religious affiliations, and declare that every person of every grade had been examined and that no persons suspected of Christianity were to be discovered. This return was signed by the priest of the temple concerned and the village officials.

Each person in the village had his place in the web of interconnection that was characteristic of Japanese society. The honbyakushō had to form groups of five, with one of them being appointed as spokesman for the rest. The whole group assumed responsibility for the tax of its members, and could also be punished for the shortcomings of any one of the five. They had to sign an annual pledge not to harbor any criminal. The groups were all responsible to the village headman who was in charge of the village office, and had to answer to the official of the domain of his village. The position of headman was very often hereditary, but sometimes the appointment was either by selection of the lord himself, or by the lord’s approval of a former headman’s nomination, or in some cases by election by heads of families. There were intermediaries between the five-family groups and the head-man, who acted as his assistants, and were chosen either by him or by election from the leaders of the groups. There was another village officer known as the “farmers’ representative,” who negotiated for them, transmitted instructions to them, and also on occasions seemed to have acted as a sort of constable for the headman. The headman often belonged to an old family of the district, perhaps one that had established the village, and had chosen to give up the sword for the plough. His position between the villagers and the lord’s representatives was sometimes not an enviable one: in some villages he became very much a lord’s man, and an instrument of oppression, but from time to time a headman would find himself leading a protest, at the risk of his life, and even being executed for his villagers’ misdeeds.

The social connections between village people are often described in terms suggesting that they were parent-child relations. Thus a honbyakushō would be father to his own children and any adopted children, but also “father” to his servants and landless laborers who worked for him. He had a semi-filial relationship with the head of his five-family group, and through him with the headman’s assistant and the headman himself. He could look for some protection and favor from his “fathers,” but in return he had to support them, by carrying out their decisions, and performing appropriate rituals, such as paying respects, accompanied by presents, at the New Year. He had also the normal filial duties towards his real parents, or his adopted ones, and towards those who had acted as go-betweens at his wedding.

The appointment of headman carried with it either an income or exemption from taxation, and in return for this not only had he the heavy responsibility of representing the village, but also had to deal with much paper work. Annual returns, such as the religious register and the pledge of the five-family groups, had to be seen to, with one copy kept in the office and one passed to the officials; then there were papers connected with occasional events, like the passing through the village of a lord on his way to or from Edo, or some court aristocrat on an official visit to a great shrine. For this sort of event he had to arrange for the road to be swept and sanded, and to see that the required amount of porterage was available, that adequate refreshment was offered and so on. Originally the farmers would have provided their own labor for all this, but as time went on the tendency was for the headman to exact money payments from them in lieu of labor and materials, and to employ labor from the pool of under-employed—small-holders, younger sons, and other dependants—which existed in most villages; sometimes special contractors were employed. All the time there was need for copying instructions and filing the copies, passing on the originals to the next village, and generally dealing efficiently with bureaucratic demands.

The greatest responsibility of the headman was the collection of taxes. At regular intervals a survey was made of the village land, taking into account the area of the rice-fields, their productivity, the area of land given over to dwellings, the size of the dry fields and crops, the products of the woodlands, any change in usage such as reclamation of waste land, or reversion to waste of former productive land. Samples of crops were taken, and from all this the amount of rice and other taxes to be exacted was decided upon. Usually some 40-60 per cent of the estimated rice-crop was taken, along with money payments to represent other products. The whole attitude of the officials was that the farmers would do their best to defraud them, so that the straw bales had to have a double skin to avoid spillage, for example, and there was a further percentage of rice exacted to make up for any wastage during transportation.

For various reasons, such as insect damage, failure of the rainy season or ruin brought by a typhoon just as the rice was ripening, crops might fail, and the farmers be unable to produce their taxes. In these circumstances a lord with a large domain and considerable resources would excuse the payment of part or even the whole of the tax, and even, if his stores allowed it, hand out rice to starving farmers. But there were some lords who could not do this, and were hard put to it to get together enough rice to feed their retainers. If their farmers had no rice to hand in, they insisted on the payment of the money equivalent, and if the farmers had not the money, they had to borrow it against the security of future crops, at exorbitant rates of interest. Such a lord might find difficulty in feeding his men even in ordinary years, and would exact a money payment early in the season: here again the farmer would have to mortgage his crop to the money-lender, and in severe cases would have to pledge crops not only for the year in question but for the years ahead.

When things got as bad as this, a farmer would naturally think of abandoning his land and moving off to seek employment elsewhere, either in more favorable rural areas or in the developing towns. The selling or abandonment of land was strictly forbidden, but obviously took place regardless of the ban. In an effort to prevent abandonment of holdings, it was ordained that a farmer had to obtain a permit from his shintō shrine before he could leave his village. If a farmer left his land, or did not work it for some reason, the group or village would have to take it over, and work it to provide revenue. At the same time great efforts were being made by lords to increase their revenues by opening up new fields, either in the valleys or by land reclamation, and they had considerable difficulty in getting occupiers for them. All sorts of devices were used, such as giving new land to those whose present holdings were of poor quality, giving people bonuses of money or sake to take up land, or even, it is reported, obliging those who were unmasked as the lovers of married women to cultivate new fields, presumably as a punishment.

Farmers were thus continually being pressed for money, and if they had no good crops to sell, and could not leave their village, they had to seek other ways of raising it. Many were forced to sell their daughters into what amounted to slavery. The brothels and entertainment districts were provided with their women by this means. A father would receive a loan from the proprietor of such an establishment, in return for the use of her services for so many years. At the end of the term she could go back; often, however, the father had to extend the term in order to obtain a further loan. An outsider who was willing to repay the money advanced to the father could buy the girl out to make her his mistress or his bride. Sometimes a husband would use his young wife in this way to provide for himself or his parents. Although there was considerable distress in individual cases, there was no general condemnation of this practice, because it was seen as one way of serving one’s parents, and in the atmosphere of the times it is probable that the majority of girls found their new life at least no worse than the one they were leaving. Should a girl manage to return home eventually she could well be in demand as a wife because of the education and experience of the world which she had acquired while she was away.

Sons, too, would try to relieve the situation at home by taking temporary jobs in a castle-town, and staying on after their contract was terminated, or even by running away to Edo or Osaka, so that they were no longer dependent on their family. The depopulation of the countryside had reached such proportions in the early nineteenth century that the central government carried out forcible repatriations of refugees from rural areas.

Another way of reducing the number of mouths to be fed was the widespread use of infanticide and abortion. In country districts it seems that the former was more common, perhaps because the sex of the child could be determined, babies, especially girls, being smothered at birth. Attempts were made in various domains to control this “thinning out,” as it was called, by demanding that pregnancies be reported and their course inspected, and by giving bounties payable on the birth of a child, but by and large the control was not effective.

From time to time circumstances would drive villagers to attempt recourse to communal action in an effort to ameliorate their situation. Any sort of combination was, of course, illegal, but they protested all the same. Sometimes they tried to complain about the behavior of a village official, or to get the tax-rate reduced: in one case, which is recorded, word was passed secretly round, and a meeting was held by night on a river-bank (the one available open space), at which members of various villages agreed to make a direct approach to the lord—in itself an illegal procedure, since it ignored the proper channels.

Unfortunately for them, spies of the head-man of one of the villages were present, and reported the assembly to him. The villagers had to send a letter through the headman to two samurai making very fulsome apologies for their wicked action, with reiterated promises not to do such a thing again, and asking them to intercede with their lord. In some other cases, if it was thought that the normal procedure of approaching the headman would be ineffective, there was an attempt to send on a complaint or request by means of a round robin, in which the names of all the villagers, with their seals, were arranged in a circle, so that the identity of the ringleaders should not be disclosed.

When peaceable protest failed, and things were desperate, the villagers joined in an armed rising, although the weapons at their disposal were not normally anything but agricultural tools. It is estimated that some 1,500 peasant revolts occurred during this period, ranging from those involving the inhabitants of a single village to one in which those from more than 200 took part. This represents an average of more than six incidents a year, so that while they were hardly a feature of most farmers’ lives, news of these risings must have reached everyone’s ears, and the thought of them must have been in all minds. One of their characteristics, as it was of all protest in the Tokugawa period, is that they did not seek to overthrow the regime or threaten a local lord, but had only limited objectives and looked for redressment of a specific wrong, such as oppression by certain officials or the insistence on tax payment in a year of crop failure. A villager seemed to think that it was worth while taking part in a rising provided that somebody else organized it: his participation increased the numbers, making the mob more formidable in appearance, and giving him the opportunity to vent his resentment by smashing down a few doors or burning a house or two in a castle-town, and possibly getting at a rice-store or breaking open some barrels of sake. There was a very good chance that the demands would be met. The disturbances themselves seem to have been remarkably bloodless, with the samurai making sure of getting out of the way, and being strangely unwilling to open fire on the mob from the castle.

Punishment for the leaders of these risings was, however, often severe. For example, at one place in north Japan, the crops had failed in 1745 and 1746 and by early 1747 there was no more rice available. The local authorities refused to permit rice to be brought in from outside, and 33 villages rose and presented a series of demands, largely concerning local conditions. These were granted, and in addition the farmers received a considerable sum of money and an issue of rice. But then the reprisals began. The leaders were arrested, and confessed under torture. Eventually, five leaders were executed, and some of their relatives sent into exile. Seventeen farmers and four group-leaders received heavy fines, but it is clear that the majority of those who took part in the rising reaped only the benefits. In folk memory and in plays there is often the suggestion that the leaders of such a rising went into it with the full knowledge that death might well be the outcome for them, but they considered that the benefit to the community made their sacrifice worth while. The high proportion of cases in which the leaders were punished would lend color to this interpretation.

In most of the literature of the time the farmer is depicted as a crude, uncultured creature, with little in his favor. It must be realized, however, that this was largely written for townspeople, who fancied themselves as smart and progressive, enjoying themselves as only they knew how, and despising anything rustic. The samurai thought of the farmers most often as near-criminals, out to deprive them of their just dues. The farmer clearly did his best to keep to a minimum the amount of rice and tax that he handed over, and there is no doubt that surveyors were bribed or deceived whenever possible into not recording new fields, or that domain administration was sometimes slack enough not to carry out surveys, so that the percentage of tax actually handed over was less than the full amount due. The sentiment expressed by some warriors that the farmers always had good rice to eat might have been true from time to time and from place to place, but the frequency of the risings, and the practices, against human nature, of infanticide and child selling, must indicate that life for many must have been very hard.

In every village, however, there were times in the year when people enjoyed themselves. The New Year was the time for the farmer to visit his patrons, and for his dependants to visit him: at this season small pine trees were brought down from the mountains and placed at the gate, and round rice-cakes, made from especially glutinous rice, were offered to the various gods who watched over the home—looking after the fire or the kitchen—and to the spirits of the ancestors inscribed in the household Buddhist altar, and were, needless to say, eaten in large quantities by children and adults. All sorts of ritual, loosely thought of as shintō, took place, and there was hardly a village but did not have something exciting to look forward to—even in the north, with its snowy winter, strange wild men might appear and burst into houses and frighten the children until appeased with refreshment. At the village shintō shrine, which was often the residence of the god or ancestral spirit of the oldest family, there was usually some fertility or hunting dance, or some representation of myth, interspersed with comically obscene dances, performed by young men of certain restricted families, and this was an occasion when the whole village would turn out to watch.

Perhaps the most widespread festivity of all was that of the midsummer bon dances in July, which were Buddhist. At that time the souls of the dead were thought to return to earth, and the villagers would dance for their entertainment. These bon dances, and the songs that go with them, have survived until today, although many have become separated from their local origins, and form one section of the repertory of traditional performers all over Japan. They are processional or circular dances, by men and women together, with a group of older persons providing the accompaniment, typically a combination of drums, flutes and shamisen (a three stringed instrument played with the hand or plectrum). In some regions the dances are very energetic, but more often they are slow and graceful, with languorous hand and arm movements, in keeping with the sultry heat of the season. The words of the songs are more often than not in praise of the region. As the sun set, the heat and the excitement of the day had their effect, along with the sake that was drunk, and orgiastic scenes are said to have developed. The bon festivals brought with them a great release from tension, and in a society the members of which were incessantly concerned with their obligations and their status, such a relaxation of normal standards was of the greatest psychological benefit.

Other opportunities for enjoyment were rare but not entirely absent. Weddings were celebrated with wine and food for all, with the bride having to do a great deal of the entertaining: no honeymoon privacy for her, and as the whole emphasis was on her duty to her husband and his family, she did not really expect to get any pleasure out of a marriage, so she was not disappointed—the status and security were sufficient compensation. Other excuses for a good time involved communal labor, such as rice-planting, well-digging, and re-roofing, and, of course, a successful harvest had to be rounded off with as great a feast as could be afforded.

Agricultural festivities came round every year, but the supreme opportunity for enjoyment for the poorer farmers came only once in a lifetime, with the pilgrimage to Ise. The great shrine of Ise, on the east of the Kii peninsula, and reached by a diversion from the great road between Edo and Osaka, had been established in early times as the shrine of the sun goddess, the ancestress of the Imperial family. It was not until the sixteenth century that commoners had gone to worship there, but during the Tokugawa period the number of pilgrims increased greatly, and it became the ambition of nearly everyone in Japan to go there at least once in a lifetime. The actual act of worship was not complicated; it consisted of going to each of the two shrines that made up the Ise complex, prostrating before the sanctuary, clapping one’s hands to call the attention of the goddess, and, in return for a contribution to the shrine funds, receiving protective tablets and amulets to take back home. There were other small shrines and also temples to be visited, but by the seventeenth century the main object of the trip for the pilgrim was the entertainment that was available when he got there.

At Ise there was a street called Furuichi, full of brothels, eating houses, and souvenir shops, and there was also the chance of seeing a kabuki play, or the puppets, or less artistic performances—juggling, conjuring, freaks and so on—at the theatres that were set up in the enclosures of the temples and shrines, but not of the great shrine itself, which maintained an ambience of sanctity. Ise had the most important theatre group outside the main centers of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, and was also a stopping-place on the circuit that actors from these centers followed during the summer months, between rice-planting and the harvest, when the farmers could take time off from the fields more easily. Only the richer farmers could afford to go at their own expense, and although men were in the majority, women could go too; it could be one of the things a woman looked forward to being able to do when her son got married and his wife took over the hard work.

The poorer farmers, however, were not deprived of the opportunity of going to Ise, for there was a widespread custom of forming Ise-associations, the members of which contributed a certain amount to the general fund, and sufficient was accumulated each year to send a certain number of members. The order in which they went was determined by lot, and the lucky ones were accompanied to the village boundaries by the entire populace. They were thought of as representatives of the whole community, and brought back enough amulets for distribution to all. The priests of Ise had agents throughout the country who made the necessary arrangements both for the journey (on foot, of course), and for the actual time spent in the vicinity of the shrine. For such people the pilgrimage to Ise might very well be the only chance to see the outside world, with its wonders and its opportunity for pleasure.

Ise was the most important shrine to be visited on a national scale, but there were others, like Miyajima in the west of Japan, and Kotohira in Shikoku, which had a more local appeal. Other religious trips that farmers might take part in were connected with the very widespread mountain cult, which combined climbing mountains, such as Fuji, or peaks in Yoshino, with feats of endurance, exemplified by standing under waterfalls. Although the religious content of these pursuits was high, considerable importance was also attached to the festivities that concluded the rites.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the rural communities had, if one ignores the bad years of famine, a higher standard of living than before, and one result of this, and the improvement of communications that accompanied it, was the spread of the drama to villages. We begin to read accounts of visits by professional actors to rural areas, including typical contemptuous townsmen’s stories of country audiences, of the stupidity of extras recruited locally, and even anecdotes that can surely be matched all over the world of the ill-behavior on the stage of a horse that the company had to use, because of shortage of manpower, to replace the more predictable kabuki animal played by two actors. From this period date the majority of the village stages that are known from the region of the Inland Sea and from the mountainous areas behind Edo. They are usually built in the precincts of the village shrine, and consist of a covered stage, complete with traps and revolving stage, worked by manpower from the dressing room below, known as the “underworld.” Technically, performances on them were given to amuse the god of the shrine, but the audience, sitting in the open for a performance lasting several hours, eating, drinking, laughing, crying, feeding their babies, slipping back home to relieve themselves so as not to waste precious fertilizer, obviously took their share of the pleasure. Performances might be of live actors or puppets, and were sometimes given by strolling players, sometimes by local amateur talent.

If the former, the local inhabitants had to be careful not to allow them to stay in their homes for fear of official rebuke, but they could usually be found accommodation in the temple precincts. The strolling puppeteers, often from the island of Awaji, but also from Awa or Kyūshū (the base of some wandering kabuki actors as well), were beneath the class system, but tradition has it that the lords of domains used them as convenient sources of intelligence about what was going on in the neighbors’ lands. Some villages acquired sets of puppets and put on their own shows, using playbooks and descriptions brought back by villagers who had gone on pilgrimage.

In the early years of the Tokugawa period, farmers had usually not been allowed to see plays because the authorities feared that the sight of luxurious living would make them want to improve their standards, and also that time might thus be wasted, reducing their rice-production. The growth of the rural drama was therefore symptomatic of the fact that the grip of the warrior class on the country was slackening.

Written by Charles J. Dunn in "Everyday Life in Traditional Japan", Tutle Publishing (an imprint of Periplus Editions (HK),USA, 1969, excerpts chapter 3. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.