Regional History and the Politics of Subsidiarity

This presentation examines the growing field of regional history (chiikishi), its contributions to the study of the early modern countryside, and its explicit anti-Neoliberal politics. Though Japan’s early modern villages had long been a target for historians, contemporary regional history is marked by its emphasis on the village as the most relevant site for daily life. Rather than beginning with some broad, arbitrary region, this method uses local archives to uncover the social structure of one village to understand larger social and cultural processes that intersected at the village level. This method has produced a better understanding of how trends like the emergence of capitalism in the eighteenth century altered the social makeup of rural villages, or how hegemonic merchant capital drew in larger numbers of social groups under its influence.

Scholars of regional history have also made their work directly political. As Japanese politicians merge local municipalities into ever-larger units in order to reduce or abolish social services, a politics of subsidiarity has emerged that seeks to preserve and strengthen local autonomy for towns and city wards. Historians of regional history have consciously moved to support this movement by enlisting community groups in the creation of local narratives based on local archives. By emphasizing the agency of regional actors, this project moves to replace dominant historical narratives that focus on a political center, and delegitimize the politics of top-down control.