Cultivating Commons: Joint Ownership of Arable Land in Early Modern Japan by Philip C. Brown (review)

This well-argued monograph attempts to answer questions of how Tokugawaera villagers managed their fields, dealt with the risks of natural hazards such as floods and landslides, and distributed tax burdens among themselves. They are important questions, for despite the remarkable urbanization and economic growth of the seventeenth century, agricultural production (and therefore land management) remained the largest segment of the economy, and rural peasants (or farmers) constituted the overwhelming majority of the population. Philip Brown provides interesting answers by focusing his study on warichi, an umbrella term to describe various ways of periodically redistributing fields among village residents. Brown translates the term literally as “dividing the land” and uses it to refer to a wide range of joint ownership practices.

In doing this, Brown builds on his own earlier scholarship. He addressed warichi in his first book, Central Authority and Local Autonomy, as well as in several journal articles over the last two decades.¹ The earlier book, which challenged the idea that central government reforms issued by Toyotomi Hideyoshi and the early Tokugawa shoguns were uniformly applied across Japan, cited warichi as one example of a practice that defied land surveys aimed at assigning individual ownership to each field and plot of land. In the current volume, however, warichi is the main focus, and while it revisits some of Brown’s arguments about the limits of central government authority, Cultivating Commons also engages convincingly with debates over landholding, village communal life, and economic growth.

According to the way many of us learned Tokugawa history, authorities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries implemented a legal separation of peasants from samurai and moved the latter into castle towns. This allowed villages to become more autonomous: as long as taxes were paid and no major crimes were committed, government authorities generally left villagers to their own devices. But how did those farmers manage the land and distribute tax burdens? Farm families appear to have worked scattered fields that had been designated theirs in the land surveys; in effect, a form of fee simple private ownership was established. It was significant that they owned the fields (or so we were taught), because ownership gave peasants the incentive to improve the land and increase yields. Taxes, however, were the collective responsibility of all status-holding residents, who divided the burden among themselves more or less equitably. So residents owned land privately but paid taxes as a community.

However, Brown’s research shows that ownership of specific fields was not the only pattern. An alternative was joint land ownership, which was used by perhaps as many as one-third of Japanese villages (p. 96). In such communities, the entire village “owned” the land and periodically redistributed parcels to resident families. As Brown writes, in these villages “no direct link existed between a farmer and the land associated with his cultivation rights” (p. 1). But there was tremendous variation from village to village, even within the same region. Some reallocated lands in keeping with demographic changes (giving more land to larger families), while others rotated fields among resident households. According to Brown, the most common system was a lottery, with each family holding a number of shares (or draws) in the lottery in keeping with its wealth. Thus, warichi was not a means of alleviating income disparities. If a prosperous family controlled most of the village’s arable land before redistribution, then it would receive more draws and therefore still control the most land after redistribution, but the specific parcels that it held would be different.

The frequency of reallocation also varied widely: some villages only redistributed following a calamity such as a landslide or flood that rendered certain fields unusable. Others, however, practiced warichi on regular intervals ranging from 5 to 40 years. Irrespective of these differences, all of the practices that Brown groups under the term warichi involved some form...