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Relations Between the School District System and the Feudalistic Village Community in Nineteenth-Century Japan: A Study of the Effect of Law Upon Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Masaji Chiba
Masaji Chiba*
Affiliation:
Tokyo Metropolitan University
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Extract

It has been said that Japan's modernization was the most rapid and striking in Asia and that it was one of the best examples of this process in the world. Although there is considerable truth in this assertion, the modernization process was not completely successful. The defeat of Japan in World War II disclosed many aspects of social, economic, and political life that were not successfully modernized; examples are the patriarchal family system with its patrimonial inheritance patterns, the closed village community structure with a peculiar land-tenure system, the underdeveloped state of labor relations, the rule of the zaibatsu (financial combines based on family ties) in industry and commerce, and the insufficient protection of human rights under the absolutistic Tenno regime.

Type
Law and Social Change
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , February 1968 , pp. 229 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © 1968 by the Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

Author's Note: This paper is a summary of my book written in Japanese, Gakku-Seido no Kenkyu: Kokka-Kenryoku To Sonraku-Kyodotai [A Study of the School District System: State Power vs. Village Community] (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1962). I wish to acknowledge the encouragement to publish this paper from Professor E. Adamson Hoebel and the late Professor Arnold M. Rose.

The materials and references used in the original study include both governmental and private sources as listed in the Japanese edition. They are omitted here because they are all written in Japanese. Instead, some references in English are given below which discuss the particular events in greater detail. Among them two books are recommended for general background: H. Passin, Society and Education in Japan (1965) and K. Steiner, Local Government in Japan (1965).

References

1. J. F. Embree, The Japanese Nation: A Social Survey (1945); K. Yanagida, Japanese Manners and Customs in the Meiji Era ch. IV (C. S. Terry transi. 1957); B. J. George, Jr., Law in Modern Japan in Twelve Doors to Japan 509-16 (J. W. Hall and R. K. Beardsley eds. 1965).

2. R. P. Dore, Land Reform in Japan pt. IV (1959); T. Ushiomi, La Communaute Rurale au Japon (P. Anouilh transi., Paris, 1962).

3. J. Bennett & I. Ishino, Paternalism in the Japanese Economy: Anthropological Studies of Oyabun-Kobun Patterns (1963).

4. A. W. Burks, The Government of Japan 45-48 (1964); H. S. Quigley & J. E. Turner, The New Japan: Government and Politics 29-33 (1956).

5. M. Maki, Government and Politics in Japan: The Road to Democracy 18-23 (1962).

6. Efforts are made especially to disclose the latent function of law. As to latent function, see R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure 50-72 (2d ed. 1957) and cf. L. Nader, The Anthropological Study of Law in Ethnography of Law 18-19 (Am. Anthropologist Vol. 67, No. 6, pt. 2).

7. Cf. K. Steiner, Local Government in Japan 24-25 (1965).

8. This system is said to have been founded after the French model.

9. The average number of the households in a village community at that time is estimated at not more than seventy. The number is usually too small to meet the financial burden of establishing and supporting a school. Only those communities which had substantial common properties, such as forestries, pastures, or waters, or those which succeeded in raising the necessary revenues through community activities, could endure this burden without having to join with other communities.

10. For the historical background of these years, see K. Steiner, supra note 7, at 25-32.

11. Id. at ch. 3.

12. H. Passin, Society and Education in Japan ch. 7 (1965).

13. The solidarity of the village community is analyzed in two intensive studies: J. F. Embree, A Japanese Village: Suye Mura (1946) and R. K. Beardsley, J. W. Hall & R. E. Ward (eds.), Village Japan (1959). Note that the community treated in the latter book is one of the more highly developed.

14. T. Fukutake, Village Community (Buraku) in Japan and Its Democratization in Japanese Culture: Its Development and Characteristics 86-90 (R. J. Smith & R. K. Beardsley eds. 1962).