<論説>地方書 (じかたしょ) にみる近世の村落類型観

Abstract

村落を農村・山村・漁村に分類する視点は近代の所産であるが、これに似た村落類型観が近世にも存在していた。それは「里方」・「山方」・「貴方(浜方) 」・「野方」その他の村落類型から成るもので、主として一八世紀以降の幕府の地方役人による地方書、およびその影響下にある地方書に見ることができる。その背景には、「里方」以外の諸類型に対して、農業以外の収入を貢租額査定に積極的に考慮しようとする判断が働いていた。しかも地方書における「山方」は、一方では山稼が奨励され、他方では「耕作第一」でないことが否定的に言及されており、百姓の生業を農業と稼に区分しようとする近世の価値観の狭間に立たされていた。そこには、石高制を前提とした農業中心主義的な立場から、支配下の諸村を俯瞰する地方役人の視線を窺うことができる。

Japanese politicians, social scientists, and schoolteachers have used a triadic model of villages to classify settlements by their location and economy: rural villages in plain land (no-son), mountain villages (san-son), and fishing villages (gyo-son). Their custom to distinguish these three types of villages, which has had a strogg influence on the Japanese way of seeing rural settlements or the country side area, takes its origin in the civil administration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Reading jikata-sho or the handbooks for government officials written by administrators in the Tokugawa shogunate and some domains, the author illustrates how and why they came to use the concept of village type. The handbooks of the eighteenth century, mostly written by the Tokugawa officials, demanded that they themselves observe the geographical condition of each village in order to assess its annual tax. These administrators had to recognize some economic distinction between a paddy village in alluvial plain (sato-gata) and other special types of non-agricultural economies: such as mountain villages dependent on forestry (yama-gata) and fishing villages at seaside (ura/hama-gata). Ultimately, the paper demonstrates how this agro-centric view differentiated between, and thereby classified, villages into one standard type and other secondary or peripheral ones.