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This chapter provides an overview of the evolving agricultural community and to elaborate on the relationship between the transformations in village life and the changes in the mode of agricultural production. During the Edo period, agriculture passed through three technological stages of varying degrees of complexity: the slash and burn technique, the self-contained village economy, and the commercialized cash crop economy and the shift from one stage to another lay at the bottom of three different life styles. The rise of the samurai marked an important stage in the transition from the increasingly ineffectual shoen system to the social institutions of Tokugawa society. The gap between the upper-class farmers and the rest of the farming population was both a product of traditional social custom and a consequence of economic privileges and laws favorable to the elite rural families. Fertilization with night soil has often been viewed as a hallmark of Japanese agriculture.

Japan underwent a major transformation in its social organization and economic capacity during the latter half of the sixteenth century. The three hegemonic leaders, such as Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, who forged the military unification of Japan during the latter half of the sixteenth century. This chapter focuses on the events of the late sixteenth century, the pivotal transitional years that separated the chūsei from the kinsei epoch. The expansion of the productive capacity of agriculture was the keystone supporting the economic foundations of Japan's early modern society. Commerce and urban centers grew together during the sixteenth century. At this time Kyoto was still Japan's most important political city, as well as a center of a superlative tradition of craft and artisan production. The specific characteristics of the early modern social system were also closely associated with the requirements of the commercial economy.

The meteoric urban growth that occurred in Japan at the beginning of the early modern period had profound and diverse consequences for Japanese history. Historians have identified seventeen temple towns, all founded in the middle decades of the sixteenth century. In some cases, the daimyo actually converted the temple towns into their own castle headquarters. It has become a historical truism to say that Oda Nobunaga initiated the political and economic programs that resulted in the early modern state; that Toyotomi Hideyoshi amplified them; and that Tokugawa Ieyasu supplied the final institutional refinements. The policies of the shogunate toward currency and the minting of coins also encouraged an expansion in the volume of commercial transactions and contributed to the emergence of castle towns as nodes of economic exchange. The expansion of urban markets was closely linked to the emergence of local towns, such as Johana, where businessmen could produce competitively priced goods.

A AN ERA of nation-building in Japan, the 1870s and 1880s witnessed the creation of institutions rich in both quantity and variety. Among these, institutions possessing a national focus, such as the Imperial Diet, have been the subject of numerous studies; while those with a more local orientation, such as the prefectural assemblies, have received considerably less attention. Yet, in many ways-as arenas for the settlement of local political disputes, as training grounds for politicians, and perhaps most importantly, as mechanisms for the integration of regional entities into the national polity-the prefectural assemblies established in 1879 played an important role in the political development of modern Japan. An examination of one of these assemblies, the Fukui Prefectural Assembly during the 1880s, provides a convenient point of entry into the study of these local deliberative bodies.1 Historians have evaluated the significance of prefectural assemblies in various ways. Some, George Sansom and Roger Hackett for instance, see such assemblies