2014 Volume 20 Pages 6-27
The Sunagawa Village Office Archives（Sunagawa-mura yakuba bunsho 砂川村役場文書）were created by the local administrative office, which successively changed from a small administrative district office（bankumi 番組or shoku 小区kaisho 会所：1873-1878）to an administrative district office headed by Kocho（kocho yakuba 戸長役場：18781889）to a village office（mura yakuba 村役場：1889-1954），and finally to a town office（machi yakuba 町役場：1954-1963）．On May 1, 1963, Sunagawa Town（Sunagawa -machi 砂川町）merged with Tachikawa City（Tachikawa -shi 立川市）．
This paper examines the structure of the Sunagawa Village Office Archives basedonananalysisofthe organization of the creator of the archival records and states their characteristics. Most of the surviving records were created during the period when the Town and Village Districts Law（Chosonsei 町村制）was in effect（1889-1947）．When this law was in effect, the Sunagawa Village Office was small, only having five to ten staff members, including the village mayor, and was not divided into sections. When the existing records created by such a small office are categorized according to the types of clerical works, often, most of the records are correspondences between the village office and the county office（gun -yakusho 郡役所）．This feature is a consequence of the fact that town and village offices（choson yakuba 町村役場）served as terminal organizations in the centralized administrative framework, with documents trickling from the top down（joi katatsu 上意下達）．
