Simon Partner's study of life in Japan from 1865 to 1925 demonstrates the best of historicism, here defined as recreating a convincing sense of the past free of anachronism and overgeneralization. Using the meticulously kept diary of Aizawa Kikutarō (1865–1963), a wealthy landowner, entrepreneur, and mayor of rural Aihara, Partner presents a carefully nuanced view of village life during a period of dramatic economic, social, and political transformation. Part of the nuance is that these broad changes are told almost in passing. Partner is reluctant to use Aizawa simply as a ventriloquist's dummy to give the biographer's version of national tax reform, village consolidation, Japan's first modern wars, and the devastating 1923 earthquake. Partner's interpretation of the historical significance of the major events in the village and surrounding region are presented, but consistently in the context of his subject's recounted experiences.
Partner extends his emphasis on distinctiveness, evident in his treatment of Aizawa's individuality, to the wider local community. Of Hashimoto, Aizawa's home village and a “subunit” of greater Aihara, he writes, “The story of Hashimoto is not in any way typical of all Japanese villages. No village could fill that role; there is just too much diversity” (p. 3). Concentrating on local particularities risks drowning the story in a flood of details, an outcome that Partner avoids by paying attention to village experiences “both unique and common.” The result is historical representation akin to deep-focus photography that at once captures life close up and far away.
Although Hashimoto-Aihara was probably not entirely “unique,” it did differ from thousands of other villages thanks to its place in Tokyo's powerful orbit. It was closer, in time and space, to the center of reforms that transformed technology, economy, society, and culture between 1865 and 1925. The degree of transformation, as Partner is careful to point out, was never total. Past practices and persistent values shaped how the new was apprehended and applied. But people in Aizawa's village became familiar with bicycles, international markets, public schools, and new political officers in many cases sooner and more directly than did villagers in places more distant from Tokyo.
Northern Kantō Plain villagers also differed from their counterparts elsewhere in relying on silk instead of rice (or fishing, logging, or mining) as the basis of the local economy. Commodity production in Hashimoto-Aihara resulted in taxes being paid in cash even before a new central government made the practice compulsory. With the mid-century opening of new diplomatic and economic ties with Western countries, local silk production became more fully integrated into an international market. Although the market's vagaries caused busts as well as booms, Hashimoto-Aihara's local economy was generally invigorated by overseas trade.
While Partner points out how specific conditions in Mayor Aizawa's village made for distinct variations in local prosperity, educational opportunities, and chances to partake in new forms of popular culture, he also considers, however implicitly, common problems faced by villagers throughout Japan. Local people everywhere had to come to terms with a new national government dedicated to creating a system of centralized political and economic control that intruded into their affairs as never before. Their leaders, men similar to Aizawa in worldview and perhaps even in temperament, had to figure out how to pay centrally exacted taxes, provide local men for a national draft, build schools mandated centrally but paid for locally, and capture a share of the central resources to pay for dams, roads, and rail lines. Partner does a superb job of explaining how such problems were solved in Hashimoto-Aihara.
Despite the common problems of village life in turbulent times, the mayor of Aihara, as Partner readily admits, was no Japanese rural Everyman. Aizawa headed the village's wealthiest family and had a hand in virtually every new money-making enterprise locally and, in some cases, beyond. He was also a family patriarch, a proud recipient of imperial decorations, and a father whose sons managed to avoid military service. He may have been even more than the sum of these parts. Unfortunately, his life story is incomplete because his diary, although dutifully kept until his death at age ninety-seven in 1963, is only available for the period from 1885 to 1925. Partner takes the issue of his subject's representativeness head-on by announcing at the outset, “But for better or worse, it is on Aizawa that I hang my story of village life in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Japan” (p. 5).
There is obviously much more that is better than worse in this engaging story of a local elite's role in quotidian events during turbulent times. In using The Mayor of Aihara in the classroom, however, it would be helpful to pair it with other works that provide a grittier, less dutifully virtuous view of rural life. Despite Partner's careful qualifications and emphasis on Aizawa's distinctiveness, readers may take the mayor's world, a place where probity rules and the landlord knows best, as more representative than the biographer intends. More critical readers might also find that relying so heavily on Aizawa's truncated diary does not take them beyond the diarist's class-based interpretation of the period. In other words, they are left with a perspective that might be expected from a member of what historians once referred to as the “parasitical landlord class.” In Partner's interpretation of Aizawa's life and times, the mayor appears more benignly symbiotic than downright parasitical. But the biography, so closely based on Aizawa's diary, unavoidably leaves out other voices. Reading the Mayor of Aihara together with ethnographic studies of other farming or fishing villages would provide balance. One might also turn to fictional works, such as Ann Waswo's superb translation of Nagatsuka Takashi's The Soil. The novel may not be factual but nonetheless seems truthful in its depiction of a village's social, economic, and political relations in a time of deep transformation.
