Abstract
This article is about villages and peasants during the Edo period. Beginning with the rule of Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 1580s, and continuing after the Edo regime was established under Tokugawa Ieyasu, most of the men were forced to withdraw from the villages and take up residence in castle towns. The burden placed on village commoners was relatively heavy when compared with taxes and levies required of merchants in urban areas. However, these tax burdens were not imposed by the domain lord on individual farmers. Conceptually, the village was a communal unit made up of a series of concentric circles around a nucleus of commoner households, surrounded by paddy lands and dry fields, and an outmost ring of forests and other uncultivated areas. Some villages centered around one group of family households; others, however, were divided into a variety of communities, and still others consisted of regionally scattered households.