Introduction

This is an examination of the state of literacy in Ōzenji Village on Zōjōji Temple territory in Musashi Province in the suburbs of Edo (renamed Tokyo in 1868) at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, rebellions of peasants against village leaders were continually breaking out. Considerable tension between the parties can be seen in documents concerning land taxes and property ownership that led to concessions from village heads, and provide evidence for the existence and spread of literacy among ordinary farmers because they often signed or put a personal mark these documents.

Up until now the nature of commoner literacy in Japan has consisted mainly of research on popular writing schools (tenaraisho or terakoya). Ishikawa Ken's quantitative research on these schools was so influential that it even influenced foreign researchers like Herbert Passin and Ronald Dore and became a model for subsequent research. In these works popular literacy in Japan has been seen as the result of the quantitative increase in numbers of writing schools and enrollments at them. Probably the culmination of this sort of research was the work of Kagotani Jirō. Kagotani was strongly influenced by earlier work on the history of writing schools such as Ototake Iwazō, Passin, Dore, Hirooka Ryōzō and Tone Keizaburo. He used Ototake's estimate of over 86 percent enrollment rate at writing schools in Edo and suggested that, “Almost all children of small merchants and master artisans studied at writing schools.” Using Hirooka's inference that the enrollment rate for boys in the Kyoto mountain villages of Kita Kuwada Province never dropped below 70 percent during the late Tokugawa to early Meiji period (roughly 1850s– 1870s), Kagotani went on to analyze enrollments of 37 Kita Kawachi villages in the late Tokugawa period and concluded that almost all boys and over 60 percent of girls had enrolled in writing schools.

The very high level of school enrollments reflected in the above works is generally based on school enrollment data in the Ministry of Education's charts in Volume 9 of Nihon kyōiku shi shiryō. In addition, school enrollment estimates were increased using data on the increase in published works, the spread of popular text materials known as oraimono, and some correspondence found in farming villages.