Agricultural Structures and Regional Societies at the End of the Tokugawa Shogunate and Early Meiji Period: A Re-Examination of Ushu Murayama County

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In this paper, we comprehensively analyzed regional social change and the integration process in the Murayama region of Yamagata Prefecture at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate and early Meiji period as a process of complicated opposition and coordination between the local governor of the Shogunate and various prefectural and regional social classes.We clarified the existence as a class of large-scale tenant farmers and who were not addressed in the prominent situational theory of world reform. We elucidated that these farmers were not village association representatives, and that they led widespread tenant farming disputes and organized commodity production at the end of the Tokugawa Shogunate. In the Meiji period, they supported large-scale wealthy farmers who proposed regional industry development to Yamagata Prefecture and collaborating small–medium scale wealthy farmers. For this reason, regional integration by the wealthy farming class progressed as a whole.