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  • The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865-1925
  • James C. Baxter
The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865-1925. By Simon Partner. University of California Press, 2009. 248 pages. Hardcover $55.00/£37.95; softcover $22.95/£15.95.

The mayor in Simon Partner's excellent book, The Mayor of Aihara: A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865-1925, is Aizawa Kikutarō (1866-1962). The second son of the headman of Hashimoto, a small village in the domain of one of the shogun's bannermen (hatamoto), Aizawa was, in the prime of his adulthood, elected chief of a larger village in the unified Meiji state. Today his birthplace is part of the sprawling city of Sagamihara in Kanagawa prefecture. Its location gives it relatively easy access to both Yokohama and Tokyo, and it is just six kilometers from Hachiōji. In the mid-nineteenth century, Hashimoto was sustained by dry-field agriculture, the gathering and sale of firewood, and, most importantly for an economy newly open to foreign trade, silkworm raising and silk reeling.

The Aizawa family was prosperous, possessing land that was registered as yielding the equivalent of seventy koku of rice annually, which put them on a level with lower middle-ranking samurai. Within the main family, birth order determined that Kikutarō "was not predestined for leadership, and ... [had] to accept that his elder brother [Yasuemon (1862-19??)] had everything, and he was guaranteed nothing" (p. 202). It was Yasuemon who inherited the family headship and its large residence in 1879. Rather than follow the path of many younger sons of his era and leave the village, however, Kikutarō stayed in Hashimoto, proved himself highly capable and responsible, and in 1895 was rewarded by being established as head of a branch family and given a share of the Aizawa landholdings. He thus became a landlord with sixty tenants; he was already "well read for his level of education, well traveled for his status, well informed on agricultural affairs, and a highly experienced and shrewd farmer, moneylender, and property investor" (pp. 60-61).

The Meiji state reorganized local entities, reducing their number, in 1890. Hashimoto was merged with neighboring Aihara, Oyama, and Hara Shinden. The newly created village took the name Aihara, although its office was in Hashimoto on land owned by the Aizawa family (pp. 64-65). Far more than his wealthier brother, Aizawa Kikutarō involved himself in community affairs. In 1896 he was elected one of two deputy mayors, and in 1908 he was chosen as mayor of Aihara. He held the office for two terms, until 1920, performing a job that was, despite the relatively small scale of the village, full of "stresses and thankless labors" (p. 179). He played many other roles in his lifetime, including that of bank branch manager after his retirement from public office, and Partner describes and contextualizes those roles with wonderful skill. More than anything else, however, it was his dedicated service as mayor that made his identification with his community visible, and it is entirely apt that the book focuses on this role as the defining element of Aizawa's career.

Of all the local notables in all the villages of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan, why Aizawa, and why Hashimoto/Aihara? Partner concedes at the outset that the "story of Hashimoto is not in any way typical of all Japanese villages" (p. 2), but he argues (persuasively, I think) that residents of Hashimoto from the 1860s to the 1920s shared with other villagers around the nation the experiences of "government-mandated universal education; military conscription; participation in national projects of war and empire; increasing [End Page 413] consumption of goods produced and sold in the national and even the international market; increasing communication outside the village through railways, telegraph services, and wheeled transportation; and increasing integration—for better or worse—into the cash-based national and international commercial and industrial economy" (p. 3). What attracted Partner, a historian, to his subject was a diary that Aizawa kept from 1885 to 1962 and wrote in daily, except for two one-week periods separated by some six decades...

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