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• 1 2020-12-21T11:59:06-05:00 An Alternative to Village Relay 131 plain 2021-10-06T10:52:54-04:00 35.944509, 136.183610 Sabae 1720 1850-1860 Maren Ehlers

  There were in fact more sustainable ways than the village relay method for getting the protective cowpox virus under the skin of rural children. Yanagisawa Fumiko has identified one such method in Echizen province by investigating the case of Sabae domain.

  Read the two research papers (in Japanese) that have informed this page: Yanagisawa 2019 and Yanagisawa 2021.

  Sabae domain was the last domain to be established in Echizen province. It was pieced together in 1720 from scattered lands formerly governed by the shogunate and other entities and given as a fief to the descendant of a formerly powerful shogunal courtier.

  Sabae's physicians had received transmissions from Kasahara in 1850, and in 1859 and 1860 they conducted vaccination campaigns in Ikeda, a group of mountain villages governed by Sabae domain about 20 km away from the domain headquarters and the clinic. Many details about these campaigns remain unknown, but it is clear that they were large-scale undertakings, covering almost all of the domain's villages in this area (35 villages in 1859 and 31 in 1860). In that sense, they were more successful than Kasahara's campaign to the coast.

  The few sources surviving from these campaigns (which might have taken place also in other years) show that Sabae's physicians did not try to build chains between villages. Instead, they went to one village at a time and used it as a base camp to vaccinate children from up to three village communities. Vaccination events were held every six days during the spring, summer, and fall, but the date for each community was determined by lot rather than geographic proximity. Village headmen were asked to report the names of two local children who could be sent to Sabae as “pox bases” to prepare for the big day. This method gave physicians greater flexibility than village relay. First, they could easily line up villages of different population sizes on their itinerary because they did not depend on “pox bases” from a previously visited village. Second, they could rearrange the schedule to suit villagers' needs, especially their agricultural calendar. Third, they did not need to fear interruptions due to transportation problems—a major worry in a mountainous area such as Ikeda. By 1859, vaccinations in Echizen province, including Sabae, were probably established enough to send teams of vaccinators into the mountains. 

  Like village relay, this system, too, could not have functioned without governmental coordination. But Sabae domain was more effective than Fukui domain in involving local leaders. The village group headman (ōjōya) of the village group in Ikeda (38 villages) was in charge of coordinating the vaccination schedule, and village headmen below him regularly identified unvaccinated children to be used as “pox bases.” As wealthy peasants, these leaders were deeply familiar with local conditions in their communities. What is more, Sabae's village group headmen, though no samurai, were unusually powerful, perhaps precisely because this domain territory was so incoherent and the grasp of domain government weak.

  In Fukui domain, by contrast, Kasahara found it difficult to gain the cooperation of village headmen, especially those whose villages had already been vaccinated. Although subjects on the coast were quite eager to have their children vaccinated, it seems that their village leaders perceived vaccination management as a burden, adding another difficulty to the implementation of village relay that was not inherent in the procedure itself. Failure to involve local leaders also thwarted part of Sabae's own vaccination campaign. In the case of one particularly remote exclave, Shikadani in the Ōno district (see the map above), Sabae's domain physicians did not consult many of the local village headmen in advance and thus received no help from them in persuading skeptical villagers and setting up vaccination stations. Among the villagers of that exclave, only those with the will and means to travel to the castle town of Ōno domain, which was closer than the main village of Sabae domain, thus had regular access to smallpox vaccinations [Yanagisawa 2021, 70-73].

  In the absence of a strong central government, reliance on local community leaders was the next best solution. These conditions persisted long into the Meiji period, and local leaders therefore remained central to vaccinations in the Ikeda area for decades to come.

  Follow the link below to explore the next two pathways on vaccination practice in Ōno, another domain in Echizen with a relatively scattered territory.

• 1 2019-11-18T17:16:26-05:00 The Territoriality of Warrior Rule 25 plain 2021-10-22T15:43:25-04:00 35.984018, 136.23969 Echizen Province 1770 1850 Maren Ehlers

  In Tokugawa Japan, warriors constituted the ruling class, but only the highest-ranking samurai were able to hold and govern fiefs. The Tokugawa shoguns governed about one quarter of the country directly and granted the rest to relatives and powerful vassals. The country was thus fragmented into shogunal lands; about 270 domains ruled by lords (daimyō); the fiefs of lower-ranking vassals called bannermen (hatamoto); temple and shrine fiefs and other miscellaneous fiefs; and sub-fiefs of various kinds. While some domains were quite large and covered one province or more (the spatial unit of the province was a vestige of the ancient imperial state), most fiefs were smaller in size and their territories in many cases scattered. The spatial structure of warrior rule was relevant to the vaccination process because physicians required governmental support to mobilize recipients for the vaccine.

  The land in Echizen province was divided into fiefs of many different sizes. Such fragmentation was not necessarily a problem as long as rural government concentrated on the collection of taxes, management of agriculture, and keeping the peace. But over the course of the Tokugawa period, the functions of government gradually expanded, and in the nineteenth century many rulers developed an interest in public health. The feudal, decentralized structure of government posed a major obstacle to the building of a public health infrastructure.

  Within Echizen, there were six domains in the eighteenth and nineteenth century whose lords maintained headquarters directly in the province. Besides these six, there were several exclaves belonging to lords based outside of Echizen province, as well as shogunal territories and five small fiefs of bannermen (hatamoto). Even if the smallest miscellaneous fiefs are excluded, one arrives at a total of seventeen jurisdictions for this one province alone.

  Fukui domain dwarfed all the other domains in Echizen with land holdings of 320,000 koku (a unit measuring the productivity of the land). Its lands were concentrated around the castle town of Fukui as well as in the western part of the province and along the coast. In addition, the Matsudaira lords of Fukui, who were a branch family of the Tokugawa, administered a large area of custodial land on behalf of the shogunate. At the same time, the Matsudaira had entrusted 20,000 koku of their land around the town of Fuchū to their most powerful house elder—the House of Honda—as a sub-fief. Despite the Honda's status as mere rear vassals, they governed their territory with a great deal of autonomy and were treated as quasi-daimyō (lords of a domain) in the shogunate's feudal hierarchy. Domain and town doctors in the castle town of Fuchū thus established their own chapter of vaccinators in 1850, though they maintained close ties to their colleagues in the castle town of Fukui (Umihara 2007).

  Other significant domains in Echizen province included Maruoka (50,000 koku), Sabae (50,000 koku; 40,000 after 1862), Ōno (40,000 koku), and Katsuyama (22,000 koku). Among these, Ōno domain features prominently in this module. The Doi family of Ōno governed four distinct patches of territory: a relatively coherent block around the castle town of Ōno, as well as two exclaves in the mountains in the eastern part of the province and one scattered exclave—the so-called Nishikata fief—in the Niu district near the Sea of Japan. East of Ōno and Katsuyama, there was a large mountainous area governed by the lord of Gujō domain, whose headquarters were in the town of Hachiman in neighboring Mino province.