村・村中入会・家の連関構造

行政村と村落共同体の関係

抄録

　Is the basis for Japanese village community strong or weak? That's also the question of how the village's self-government and the feudal rule or management relate to each other.
　In the Tokugawa era, Japanese cooperative relations or community life consisted of the smallest unit, "Ie", which was also an administrative unit in the "Baku-Han" governing system. "Ie" means residence, family, family estate, household, and so on. But it is most important that "Ie" was the unit of rights in a village. Japanese peasants didn't have any rights as individuals, all of them had to belong to "Ie" which the village (as an administrative unit) and the feudal lords defined coercively, and they had some rights only because of their "Ie"-membership.
　This article treats the matter that "Ie" bears the public duties and all the rights inside the village, and that it binds communal relations and "Herrschaft" together.
　Of course in modern times most "Ie" lost the meaning as a unit of the rights and the membership to a village at least officially. But some (and not only a few) regions retain the meaning unofficially as a custom, for example in Hamaji and in Shirakawa. Similar cases will be found elsewhere.
　We can conclude that in the Tokugawa era, "Ie" themselves had the private (as an occupation unit) and the official (public) character. This duality had double role of village community and administrative village.
　It is not easy for modern "Ie" to renounce their dual status, so this is the reason why Japanese communal relations are so close and tight and why Japanese villages have had so little autonomy and so much dependence upon "Herrschaft". The "Ie"-problem has been connected structurally to the community- problem as well as to the village (as administrative unit)-problem, and these are connected to each other by "Ie".