ABSTRACT
Most historians of Japan would like to write history that would be widely read. Japanese agriculture is not currently sustained by peasants, although one Japanese scholar argues that most cultivators in the inter-war period were not farmers in the sense of independent agriculturalists living from the surplus of sales to the market. This chapter aims to demonstrate that the study of Tokugawa peasants and their participation in protest movements has relevance for politics today. In Tokugawa Japan, the exploitation of the peasantry, some 80% of a population varying between 18 and 30 million, benefited the 10 to 12% belonging to the samurai class. In the matter of mobilization for protest, there are lessons which can be drawn from the peasants of feudal Japan. The ability of the village to unite around issues which affected all peasants depended on a similarity of incidence of the impact of feudal policy on all peasants.
