Browsing by Author "Troost, Kristina"

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Common Land in Late Medieval Japan
(1985) Troost, Kristina
"In late medieval Japan (1300-1600) the village community emerged as the unit with responsibility for irrigation and common land. This development coincided with Japan's maturing as an agricultural society. The stabilization of agricultural land in the eleventh and twelfth centuries had led to the intensification of agriculture in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and to the increased importance of irrigation and common land. These changes in turn led to the independence of small farmers in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the emergence of the village community based around around patterns of land and water use."
The Medieval Origins of Common Land in Japan
(1985) Troost, Kristina
"Many villages in Japan held common lands until after World War II. Yet while common property in the Tokugawa period and its post-1868 survival or privatization has been studied extensively, research has not addressed the question of how open access land or water became communally owned and regulated. Uncultivated land was used communally for centuries, but in the fourteenth century village communities in central Japan began to regulate its use. At a time of increasing scarcity of uncultivated land resulting from population growth and expansion of cultivated land, villagers agreed collectively to exercise mutual restraint in order to ensure the longterm availability of resources derived from common land."