EXCLUDED FROM THE NEW VILLAGE SYSTEM

IN 1888 REGULATIONS on the reorganization of municipalities were issued and during the following year villages that had existed since the start of the Edo period were merged to form much larger units of local government. On this occasion too the discriminated Buraku were repeatedly excluded from the process on the basis of the social ideas that we have already described.

We have the records of the preliminary investigations based on the informal ‘standards for municipal amalgamations’ that were issued in 1887 by Mie prefecture at the start of the amalgamation process. According to these, the standard size for one of the new towns or villages was to be over 300 households but one of the exceptions to this rule, which would permit the formation of a village smaller than this, was ‘where it was not possible to peacefully merge a former eta village with another town or village’. In other words where there was resistance from the other town or village because it was a discriminated community and a peaceful merger was not possible, they should not force the issue. It was the same in the internal guidelines instructing the survey of ‘conditions in current towns and villages’ that was issued in May 1888.

The fact that the prefecture issued these kind of instructions goes beyond a simple confirmation of the discriminatory ideas held by people outside the Buraku communities and can be considered positively to promote the exclusion of discriminated Buraku from the amalgamation process. The prefectural authorities rather than actively implementing the principles of the Liberation Decree judged it expedient to take a route that minimized trouble. Two villages in Mie prefecture in Iinan-gun (now Matsusaka-shi) and Anogun (Tsu-shi) were both formed from solely discriminated Buraku as a result of compliance with prefectural policy. According to the records for 1909, it is clear that one of the villages in Iinan-gun that was formed in this way from a discriminated Buraku was so short of money that it could not admit all of its children into the primary school nor could it afford a teacher for each class.