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

尽管世界上许多地区已经进行了大量的研究，但对传统农民社会中的家庭继承规则的阐释仍然存在相当大的含糊。顺便说一句，各学科的大多数学者都认为，日本传统社会中，尽管存在成员流离失所的情况，但包含三代以上亲属的大家庭的存在通常是存在的，并且在许多世代中是稳定的。然而，即使在日本，最近的研究也逐渐发现扩大家庭组成很难实现，特别是在经济贫困的家庭情况下。本文试图通过使用西南町1666-1719年连续时期的人口登记和土地登记(1672年)的纵向档案数据来记录家庭继承、家庭分离和家庭灭绝的真实现实。结果，我们可能发现了一个基本的发现，那就是家庭世代延续的可能性与观察起点的经济实力(即土地的大小和土地的生产力)呈正相关。不仅有关村庄中的少数有权势的家庭很容易世代繁衍，而且他们的支系可以在村里建立，这样在我们观察的时间跨度内，有权势的家庭在村里增加了他们的亲属。反过来，中产阶级家庭似乎在繁衍自我方面付出了最大的努力，它很难创造出一个分支家庭。然而，其他许多小规模家庭正在经历家庭世代延续的困难。

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.