Abstract
This paper deals with the historical changes of the village ruling classes from the formative period of capitalism in Japan to its full scale established period of monopolistic capitalism in an advanced rural area called “Bisai” which is situated in the northwestern part of Aichi.
In the field of rural sociology, the sociologists have been drawing up monographs for about the past twenty years. Now, we must arrange and analyze them by area groups for the purpose of achieving more effective results. Then, we will be able to reconcile the historical changes with the area structure theoretically. This paper is one such attempt.
Considering the characteristics of rural communities from the standpoint of commodity production in village communities, we can understand “Bisai” area as one of the advanced central areas.
From this point of view, we can consider that the effect of historical change on village ruling classes depended on commodity production in village communities. Therefore, the stages of their historical change were based on the stages of development of capitalism in Japan which regulated commodity production in village communities. In the following, I tried to analyze the historical changes of this area's ruling class at each stage.
The first stage (1840's-1890's); the village ruling class in the formative period of capitalism in Japan was the Gono class. Since the late period of Tokugawa feudal times, they controlled the peasants in their village communities by dirt-cheap buying of rural commodity products.
The second stage (1890's-1920's); the village ruling class in this stage was the parasitic landowner class. Gono classes were deprived of their productive means with the establishment of industrial capitalism in Japan, and they were established as a parasitic landowner class (semi-fendal landowner class). In this way, we make their establishing process clear.
The third stage (1920's-1930's); this stage was a period when industrial capitalism in Japan was transformed to full scale monopolistic capitalism. The village ruling classes in this stage were the farming landowner class and the upper class of textile manufacturers who appeared with the decline of many parasitic landowners.
