Elucidation of the attainment of pre-modern Japanese society through a systematic analysis of domain and regional documents

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The primary purpose of this research is to clarify the configuration of the attainment of regional and peasant society in the 19^<th> century until in the first year of the Meiji Period through an examination of the structure of the accumulation of related historical materials, matching historical materials of domain affairs known as the Hosokawa Family Eisei Archives in the collection of the Kumamoto University Library and regional documents including those of village headmen, landowners and others in the prefecture. Oboecho, records of civil administration of the Kumamoto Domain (han), served as the documents of central importance at that time. The oboecho are records of the Korikata, the department within the domain offices that was in charge of civil administration. They extend from the early period of domain administration until the first year of the Meiji Period (1868) and actually contain a diversity of regional historical materials. To be precise, subsequent to the so-called Ho … More reki reform in domain administration, the character of the oboegaki was reinforced as records of a circulating collective decision-making system of the department consisting of the acceptance of reports from peasant society including negaigaki (requests) and ukagaigaki (questions) from tenaga (intermediary administrative districts between kori ("counties") and villages) and villages, deliberation by the department of their content and responses to them. By the Meiwa Period, the oboecho had become collective decision-making records with the reports from the so-called tenaga and villages serving as drafts and, by the 19^<th> century, reports contained in the oboecho were recorded as original documents submitted by tenaga and villages. Based on this clarification of fact, Yoshimura, Inaba and Misawa, as editors, published the Regional Society of the Kumamoto Domain and Its Administration (Shibunkaku Shuppan, March 2009). Moreover, in the present research, I decided to undertake a concentrated analysis of the oboecho in FY2009, focusing on trends in administration surrounding reirakusho (a type of village), from which originate a group of reports from peasant society in the oboecho, and to challenge the issue in the present year targeting the typical reirakusho. Selecting Shoin tenaga in Yamamoto-gun and Gocho tenaga in Akita-gun as the subjects of analysis, I detected one form of the attainment of Japanese society at the end of the Edo Period within the context of overlapping reports from peasants regarding relief for individual reirakusho and response measures from domain administrators. Less