Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to study the farming system of Southern Kyushu in the middle of the 19th century. In Japan, about two hundred kinds of farming books were written during the Edo Period, and among them nearly seventy ones were written, reflecting the physical and cultural conditions of these seventy regions. They are what we call “regional farming books” and using them we will be able to study and reconstruct the regional characteristics of farming. The author has been studying the characteristics of the regions making use of those kinds of regional farming books and has already published some studies.
There are, however, no regional farming books in Southern Kyushu because of the remaining medieval systems of politics, society, and economy in the Edo Period. Such books were usually written in the areas where individual and commercial agriculture developed in the late medieval period in Japan. But owing to the remoteness from the capital of Japan and the fact of being governed by medieval manor lords, there were no such conditions in which regional farming books would be produced in Southern Kyushu during the Edo Period.
There, however, remain a few agricultural husbandry records which were written by the upper gentry who lived in the countryside in Southern Kyushu. The husbandry of these gentry was the most intensive farming systems, so that they received the most plentiful harvest in these districts. In this paper, the author has examined two agricultural husbandry records written in the middle of the 19th century and using these books he has studied the most intensive farming systems in Southern Kyushu in the above-mentioned periods. One of them is called Kôsaku-Yorozu-no-Oboe or “records of all farming” written by the Nagoyas, and the other is called Moriya-Toneri-Nicho or “diary of the Moriyas.” The Nagoyas and the Moriyas were in the upper class gentry and had some farmlands under their direct management besides their rent lands, so that the contents of these two records were their agricultural husbandry practices in their own lands.
The main research point of the present paper is to find the common characteristics and uncommon points in the farming systems in the two records, considering the distribution of the farmlands and crop-combination patterns. In Southern Kyushu farmlands were intensively used in the first half of the 20th century, and the author has hypothesized that factors of intensive-use of farmlands at that period were already shaped up in the 19th century. And the author would like to prove his hypothesis by making his main research point clear.
Some points have been made clear. Two records showed the most advanced farming in each region; they also showed that the varieties of crops and crop-combination which contributed to the intensification of the farmland-use in the first half of the 20th century in Southern Kyushu had already been found in these districts; furthermore differences in physical and cultural conditions in the two regions were reflected in the difference of ine tensity of the farmland-use.
