Household registers before Meiji
Marking the boundaries of the sovereign's nation
By William Wetherall
First posted 1 April 2008
Last updated 20 July 2008
Early registers
6th-century registers
Peerages
Shinsen Shōjiroku
Temple registers
Shūmon aratame chō
Early registers
Keeping track of people in an organized community does not require writing. Human memories are sufficient as repositories of information about who's who among the living and dead. Writing merely facilitates the keeping of minute records that can be shared with anyone able to read them.
One can imagine in pre-literate Japan, as in all early societies that had no system of writing, how members of families kept track of their ancestors through the sharing of the memories of older people with younger people. Certain members of a family probably assumed the responsibility of keeping the family's collective memory alive through sharing stories with other members, who in turn shared their memories of the shared memories.
Some details were undoubtedly lost, and stories some stories were corrupted or embellished, in their oral transmission of stories through the generations. Written stories were also subject to change when paraphrased or summarized. Today, family histories compiled by genealogy enthusiasts are likely to be full of misinformation and unverifiable "tales".
Reading the various stories about the origins of Japan collected in the Kojiki (712), but especially in the Nihon Shoki (720), is proof that orally transmitted stories, based on human memory, are fragile -- vulnerable to memory loss and imagination. Writing a story -- representing its content in graphic symbols -- has the advantage of fixing a story at the point in time when it was written, so that it could be read a thousand years later, unchanged -- one might think. The text if the original, to the extent that the script remained legible -- and if not the original, to the extent that it wasn't corrupted by a copyist -- will convey the same story. Whether a reader a millennium later will be able to understand it in the way that a contemporary reader did is another matter.
To be continued.
6th-century registers
See Reports from early records in the "History" section for numerous examples of how people from places not reached by the authority of the Yamato court were enrolled in registers on land within the court's control and jurisdiction as a culmination of changing allegiance. "Allegiance change" was most commonly called called graphed 帰化, read "kika" in Sino-Japanese, the term for "naturalization" in Japan's nationality laws since 1899.
Note that "naturalization" in Japan today continues to be confirmed by enrollment in a primary domicile register (honseki 本籍) identified by an address within the jurisdiction of the municipality (village, town, city, or ward) where one legally resides within Japan's sovereign dominion.
Peerages
A peerage is a record of people who share a similar social status or group of statuses associated with titles or ranks. In early societies, such as those that developed in England and other kingdoms, influential and powerful families were generally favored by titles of what came to be called "nobility".
Japan is a fairly recent alien name for a country that styled itself "Yamato", during the 7th century became known as "Nihon" or "Nippon" -- according to its own early 8th-century historical accounts. According to 2nd-3rd century accounts from China, it was "Yamatai" as in "Yamataikoku" (邪馬臺國、邪馬台国) -- which most historians have taken to mean "Yamato". All historical evidence -- the mythological quality of "age of the gods" stories, and the implausible reigns of "tennō" ("emperors") whose existence cannot be independently confirmed, and were not actually called "tennō" in their own time -- suggests that Yamato was formed through conquest and amalgamation of a number of other territories within the island that are now part of Japan -- most likely with some significant infusion of migrants, some of considerable social status, from one or another "kingdom" on the Korean peninsula.
Evidence of the infiltration of Korean and also Chinese migrants of high and low statuses into pre-Japan Yamato is suggested in the Shinsen Shōjiroku, a peerage of titled families published in 815.
Shinsen Shōjiroku
Newly compiled record of titles and families
This section has been developed into an independent article titled Shinsen Shōjiroku: "Newly compiled record of titles and families" in 815 Japan, which see numerous images and translations of several family profiles in this important early 9th century peerage of titled clans.
See also Shinsen Shōjiroku in on the Reports from early records page for some family profiles.
Temple registers
As of the middle of the 19th century, Japan was definitely a "country" but whether it qualified as a "state" in the sense that this word is used today is arguable. Nor was it a "nation" in the sense of a people who clearly identified as "Japanese".
Japan, before the Meiji period (1868-1912), definitely had a "ruler" who was part of a "ruling body". But the quality and reach of the rule was fragile. The government was neither a monoarchy nor a democracy, but more like a dynasty that oversaw a loose confederation of local lords.
From 1603 to 1868, local domain lords served the Tokugawa dynasty -- a succession of descendants of Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616). In 1600, Tokugawa Ieyasu come out victorious in a major battle in a series of civil wars that spilled into the 17th century. His appointment in 1603 as Shōgun, a military title, represented a consignment of political authority by the then figurehead emperor and the nobility that both served and controlled the emperor. The Shōgun exercised his authority through the loyalty of local lords, who maintained order in their own domains through cadres of samurai bureaucrats and law enforcers. Disenchanted domain lords, and factions of samurai, could at any time bolt from the controls imposed on them by the Tokugawa government in Edo. Spurred by the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry's fleet of gunships in 1853 and 1854, some did just that, resulting in civil wars that, in 1868, topled the Tokugawa dynasty and restored the emperor, then just a boy, to nominal power. The emperor was served and controlled by an oligarchy intent on turning Japan into a state, its domains into prefectures, and their populations into a single nation of Japanese.
To effectively govern a population -- to collect taxes, raise an army, conscript labor or military forces, maintain public order, provide public services from education to sanitation, and otherwise oversee the welfare of the country -- a government needs to know who lives where. It needs a count of heads of the residents of each village, town, and city in the country -- by age and sex, and family relationship, among other elements that determine a persons civil status.
Japan, in other words, needed a nation-wide demographic accounting that included everyone considered subject to the government's authority in the name of sovereign -- the emperor -- hence the 1871 Family Registration Law. Before that -- during the most of the Tokugawa period that dissolved into the Meiji era -- census-like family records were kept at local temples. Standards varied from locality to locality, and the more mobile people became, moving from place to place, the greater the likelihood that people would go unregistered. The 1871 law established the first truly country-wide "national" standards for local governments to keep track of their residents.
Shūmon aratame chō
Forthcoming.