Narratives of Peasant Uprisings in Japan

Abstract

Some records of social protest written during the Tokugawa period contain more fiction than fact. Their form owes much to the structure of folktales, and their content relies heavily on the military tales of the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. Although they do not describe what peasants actually did, narratives of uprisings say a great deal about how their listeners and readers viewed themselves and their society. In them peasants became heroes—the subjects of action in a system that had defined them as the passive objects of authority. As a paradigm for behavior at times of crisis, however, the narratives came into increasing conflict with the dictates of individual self-interest by the middle of the nineteenth century. The author draws on the theories of Victor Turner to explain the function of fictionalized history for its audience and then develops a historical model to correct the lacuna of the anthropological perspective.