Comparative research about the continuity of the peasant households in the Japanese pre-modern farming society

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The elucidation of household succession rules in traditional peasant societies, still leaves considerable vagueness in spite of a lot of research that have done in many regions in the world. By the way, most scholars in various disciplines believed that the existence of extended family household which contained the kin members over three generations was usually found and was stable over many generations despite of members' displacement in Japanese traditional society. However, even in Japan, more recent works have gradually begun to find for the extended household formation to be difficult to 'achieve, especially in the case of economically poor family situations.This paper tried to document the true reality of household succession, household separation, and household extinction by the use of longitudinal archive data which were constructed from Nishinango's population registers and the land registers (in the year of 1672)in the successive periods from 1666 to 1719. As a result, we found perhaps a finding to be basic, that is, the possibility of the continuance of the household over generations is positively correlated with the economic power (i.e., the size of land and the productivity of lands) at the starting point of observation.Not only a few of powerful households in the village concerned easily reproduced themselves over generations, but also their branch households could be created in the village so that powerful households were increased their related households in the village through the time span of our observation. In turn, middle class-households seem to have a biggest effort in reproducing oneself, and it is difficult for it to create a branch household. However, a lot of the other small-scale households were going through hardships of the household continuance over generations.