The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865–1925 (review)

Partner begins The Mayor of Aihara by recounting his visit to an information center in the area where the subject of this book, Aizawa Kikutarō (1866–1963), had lived. He discovers that no one there really knows anything about Aizawa. Meanwhile, the village of Hashimoto, in which Aizawa spent nearly a century, now possesses neither a legal status nor a communal identity. Like many other former villages in the Kanto region, Hashimoto has been swallowed up by the suburban sprawl of the Tokyo-Yokohama area.

Partner opens with this incident, it seems, to remind us that his book is about a person whom no one remembers and a place that, essentially, no longer exists. The first of two main purposes of this book, in turn, is to correct this state of affairs: to bring "this forgotten individual back to life," and, by doing so, to "pay homage to those who have been forgotten by history" (p. 182). Partner's second purpose is to use Aizawa's story to illuminate the larger narrative of Japan's social transformation during the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taisho (1912–26) periods. These two purposes—the first, commemorative, and the second, analytical—do not often complement each other. In the case of The Mayor of Aihara, they do. Partner's narrative of the modern transformation of Japanese rural society is infused with a kind of vivid human detail that bespeaks an author who is personally invested in the individual whose life story he seeks to tell. At the same time, Partner assiduously and skillfully locates Aizawa's story within the larger context of Japan's modern history.

There was a time when Partner's choice of Aizawa as a biographical subject would have been surprising. After all, almost no one (not even the staff at the local information center near where Aizawa once lived) has heard of Aizawa, and he did not play a decisive role in the major historical events or policy decisions of his day. But there is now a scholarly niche for historical biographies of relatively obscure individuals. In the Japan field, there are a handful of such works, including Partner's other biographical work, Toshié: A Story of Village Life in Twentieth-century Japan (University of California Press, 2004). Partner's two books can be seen as companion volumes: The Mayor of Aihara addresses the Meiji and Taisho eras, while Toshié covers the early Showa era to the present. These two books, like many others in this subgenre of biography, seem to be intended primarily for a general, nonspecialist audience and are well suited for use in the undergraduate classroom. Their subjects were chosen not on the criterion of fame or influence but because their lives left behind a trace of documents that permit the author to explore those lives in unusual detail. Partner's telling of Aizawa's life is based on a particularly compelling source: Aizawa's diary, which he kept on an almost daily basis from 1885 until the last week of his life in 1963.

Many biographies of this sort attempt to redress a bias in historical scholarship toward elites by telling the stories of marginal individuals, or at least those who could be described as "ordinary." Partner clearly sympathizes with this goal. However, as he points out, Aizawa could not, by any definition, be considered an "ordinary" member of his community. The Aizawa family was the wealthiest in the village of Hashimoto and enjoyed a level of comfort and security far removed from that of its neighbors. As a hereditary headman family, the Aizawa possessed political power as well. While in many ways they were members of the village of Hashimoto, they also belonged to a regional network of commoner elites whose perspectives and lifestyles were distinct from others in their local communities. Partner is acutely aware of Aizawa Kikutarō's privileged place in his community...