Evolution of the image of autonomy and privilege in a mountainous region: a medieval history written in early modern times in western Japan

Abstract

Some folklorists and cultural geographers have described medieval mountainous areas as regions formed by energetic and self-sufficient people, whose power was reduced under the Tokugawa regime in early modern times. But throughout the period, mountain villagers did not simply conform with the orders of the Tokugawa shogunate or feudal lords. having made efforts to insist on their own logic in negotiations with the government, they demanded that their circumstances had to be taken into account. They claimed, for example, that their distinctive subsistence economy was based on the mountainous environment. Therefore in early modern times people began to define the characteristics of the mountainous regions. But was their logic only economic? Did their medieval status play no role in early modern times? The author (Komeie 1997a) analyzed one mountain dweller's attempt to reconstruct the process of occupation in medieval times in order to confirm his family history. But such a purely personal retrospective undertaking could not determine whether characteristics were shared regionally. In this paper, the author examines a typical case in Yoshino county, southern Yamato province (Nara prefecture), where a common regional logic that stressed autonomy in medieval times, was found: the residents did not enter the service of feudal lords and did not pay tribute. The author investigates two types of historical documents. One is an indigeneous history of Yoshino written in the 18th and 19th centuries in which descriptions of medieval history are mainly limited to references to the South Court (1331-1392), its successors (-1457), and resident local magnates called shoji or kumon (both originally meaning a manor officer). The other is petitions for exemption from increasing shoyaku or miscellaneous tributes, which were to be paid to a local administrator of the Tokugawa shogunate in the 18th century, and were preceded by most of local histories mentioned above. Petitions c and d began to assert that all of Yoshino county had the privilege of exemption from miscellaneous taxation and ascribed it to a medieval self-sufficiency regime controlled by the families of shoji and kumon, although early petitions did not refer to medieval times. More villages signed petition c than petition b, and the areas said to be the territory of these families overlapped. A comparison of these patterns suggest that expanded combinations of villages intended to utilize and share the history of those families as the history of all of Yoshino county, although both shoji and kumon were distributed only in the northern part.