日本村落の封鎖性と開放性 | The Closedness and Openness of the Japanese Village Community

The 15th Meeting of the International Institute of Sociology was held at Istanbul in 1952,where I had the privilege of assuming chairmanship of the section on Rural Sociology. There I also made my own report on the Japanese village community. ("Actes du XV^e Congres International du Sociologie, 1952,vol. 1,p. 181 ff.), and discussed briefly, from my sociological viewpoint, eleven aspects of the Japanese village community. The aim of the present paper is to make a more detailed study of the first of the eleven aspects, namely the closedness or openness of a community. For our research on this particular theme I am deeply indebted both to the Japanese government which has subsidized it for almost a dozen years, and to the Rockefeller Foundation for a five year grant which has enabled me to continue it since 1957 and will enable me to complete this survey on a national scale. The country is divided roughly into several districts according to climate, geographical features, and cultural patterns. According to modes of subsistence the Japanese villages may be divided under the three categories of the agricultural, the fishing, and the forestry (mountain) village. Our sociological research was made by selecting a number of villages from each subsistence category in each district. The Japanese village is now finding itself in a transitional period from an older type of village to a new one. To understand the Japanese village in transition, it is necessary to ascertain to what extent the main characteristics of the old and new types are increasing or decreasing with the lapse of time. In this article I have tried to specify 18 major factors which either determine or represent the opened or closed nature of a village, i. e., the degree of its contact with the outside world, whereby one may know to which type the village in question belongs. Our analysis of these factors has been based on concrete objective materials. With regard to each factor full account has been taken of the changes the agricultural, mountain, and fishing villages in each of the districts have undergone in the course of time. And in respect to the mobility of people, differences in sex and age have been duly taken into consideration. Let us begin with the factors relevant to the closed village community : (1) The peculiar way of earning a livelihood in a village is closely related with the degree to which it may be considered closed. In an agricultural village, the extreme difficulty of reclamation makes its people cling to their present strips of land and the small-scale intensive labor of cultivation makes it difficult for them to leave their farms. In a mountain village the inhabitants have hardly any leisure to go out of the village, being always busy with the work of forestry, trimming, lumbering, carrying down lumber, making charcoal, etc. In a fishing village, as its fishing area is limited to the sea immediately off its shore, its inhabitants seldom have a chance to go out of their village. Thus it may be seen that in these cases agriculture, forestry, and fishing all have the effect of closing a village community to the outside world. (2) We must consider the fact that there are certain properties and facilities commonly and equally shared by the villagers. The kinds of such common goods, the economic contents of these, and their importance for the economic life of each villager have been specified. Leaving one's village means, therefore, losing one's share in the benefits drawn from the common goods of the community. This situation also deters villagers from going away from the village. (3) Strangers are not easily permitted to make use of the common properties and establishments of the village or to join the village shrine festivals. They are required to fulfill certain qualifications such as a specified number of years of residence before they are admitted as villagers with full rights, and they must go through certain formalities before they are admitte