ABSTRACT
For as long as any of its inhabitants could remember, Yanaka had been one of the most fortunate villages of the Shimotsuke region. Protected from the nearby Watarase by a long dyke designed two hundred years earlier by the famous seventeenth-century reformer and practical economist, Kumazawa Banzan, its value was recognised by the small daimyo to whose fief it belonged; his samurai retainers would regularly join the peasants in repairing any serious breaches of the dyke. Moderate floods about once in three years provided the fields with rich manure from the mountain forests surrounding the upper reaches of the Watarase.
