沖縄

Before the introduction of civil and criminal laws and the right to land ownership to Okinawa by the Meiji government, the peasants' lands in each village in the Okinawa island proper had been reallocated with the intervals of 2 to some 30 years and each village had its own bylaws. Those bylaws might have originally consisted of the rules for the use of farm lands and woodlands and for the ways of lives of villagers, but with the passage of time some of the directions or notices by the Ryukyu Dinasty had been included into the village bylaws. It has been pointed out that these bylaws are similar to each other and an emphasis has been placed quite often on the articles provided the measures for the tribute in arreas, i e., traffic of wife or children of a peasant who could not have paid his tribute, though the human traffic here meant in most cases an engagement in farming or domestic work for a certain period of years under a person who paid a lump sum of money. Observing a little in detail however, considerable differences are found between village bylaws from one county to another, though the bylaws of each village are quite similar to each other within one county; and on the other hand not all of the village bylaws have the articles of traffic of family members in order to pay the tribute in arreas In this study, the village bylaws in the Okinawa island proper are classified into three types from an aspect of historical evolution in a logical sense. Type Ⅰ: includes the bylaws that consist mainly of the rules between the members of a village community. Type Ⅱ: includes the intermediate ones. The bylaws in this category are divided into two; Type Ⅱ-A stands for the bylaws having a close relation to those in Type Ⅰ, but Type Ⅱ-B stands for the ones having some close relation to those in Type Ⅲ. Type Ⅲ: includes those bylaws of which articles involve many directions or notices by the Ryukyu Dynasty, so that the bylaws in this type are considered to be a means of control of village communities by the central government. The bylaws in Types Ⅰ and Ⅱ-B have no article on the traffic of family members in case a peasant had tribute in arreas. The bylaws prescribed in this case that his relatives first and next his neighbors should pay the unpaid tribute. If remained any, it should be shared among the other peasants in the village. The articles on the human traffic are found in Type Ⅱ-B and then in Type Ⅲ. The bylaws in Type Ⅰ consist mainly of the rules between the members of village community in farming and daily life. According to bylaws, the village meeting was held under the presence of all members each of whom represented a family. An abesentee had to pay a fine in rice. No article of this kind is found in bylaws in Types Ⅱ and Ⅲ. Compared with bylaws in Types Ⅰ or Ⅱ, the bylaws in Type Ⅲ consist of many articles. The former includes some 30 articles, but the latter consists usually of about 100. It is due to the fact that these many articles were set to deal with many trifling affairs, for example, how to handle the office records or how to keep the village office clean, etc. Thus the bylaws in the latter may as well be said no longer the rules for the community members themselves but rather a collection of the notices and directions to keep villagers under the control of central government, the Ryukyu Dynasty. Somewhat similar bylaws were enforced in villages in Japan proper in the pre-Meiji era. When compared with them, one of the features of bylaws in Okinawa lies in the role of relatives to meet the problem of tribute in arreas. When a peasant could not afford to pay his tribute, most village bylaws in Okinawa, with or without the articles on human traffic, prescribed that his relatives firstly should pay the unpaid tribute in place of this peasant; secondly, the neighbors who belonged to the same kumi (a kind of group) with this peasant; and thirdly, the other peasants in the village. In Japan proper, the first aid was the neighbors of the same kumi, the second, the relatives, and the third, the villagers. This shows that the village communities in Okinawa were in am ore primitive stage than those in Japan proper. The counties, on the other hand, can be classified into three types by the practices of reallocation of peasants’ lands and the ones by the village bylaws.