ABSTRACT
THE great heimin class includes not only the peasants of Japan, but also the artisans and merchants; artisans ranking below farmers, and merchants below artisans, in the social structure. It includes the whole of the common people, except such as were in former times altogether below the level of respectability, the eta and kinin,! - outcasts who lived by begging, slaughtering animals, caring for dead bodies, tanning skins, and other employments which rendered them unclean according to the old notions. From very early times the agricultural class has been sharply divided from the samurai or military. Here and there one from the peasantry mounts by force of his personal qualities into the higher ranks, for there is no caste system that prevents the passing from one class into another, - only a class prejudice that serves very nearly the same purpose, in keeping samurai and heilnin in their places, that the race prejudice in this country serves in confining the negroes, North and South, to certain positions and occupations. The first division
of the military from the peasantry occurred In the eighth century, and since then the peculiar circumstances of each class have tended to produce quite different characteristics in persons originally of the same stock. To the soldier class have fallen learning, skill in arms and horsemanship, opportunities to rise to places of honor and power, lives free from sordid care in regard to the daily rice, and in which noble ideas of duty and loyalty can spring up and bear fruit in heroic deeds. To the peasant, tilling his little rice-field year after year, have come the heavy burdens of taxation; the grinding toil for a mere pittance of food for himself and his family; the patient bearing of all things imposed by his superiors, with little hope of gain for himself, whatever change the fortunes of war may bring to those above hiIn in the social scale. Is there wonder that, as the years have gone by, his wits have grown heavy under his daily drudgery; that he knows little and understands less of the changes that are taking place in his native land; that he is easily moved by only one thing, namely, the failure of his crops, or the shortening of his returns from his land by heavier taxation? This is true of the heiInin as a class: they are conservative, fearing that change will but tend to make harder a lot that is none too easy; and, though peaceable and gentle usually, they may be moved to blind acts of riot and bloodshed by any political change that seems likely to produce heavier taxation, or even by a failure of their crops, when they see theulselves and their families starving while the military and official classes have enough and to spare. But
though, as a class, the farmers are ignorant and heavy, they are seldom entirely illiterate; and everywhere, throughout the country, one finds men belonging to this class who are well educated and have risen to positions of much responsibility and power, and are able to hold their own, and think for themselves and for their brethren. From an article in the "Tokyo Mail," entitled "A Memorialist of the Latter Days of the Tokugawa Government," I quote passages which show the thoughts of one of the heimin upon the condition of his own class about the year 1850. It is from a petition sent to the Shogun by the head-man of the village of Ogushi.
