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Available From UC Press
The Mayor of Aihara
A Japanese Villager and His Community, 1865-1925
Aizawa Kikutarõ (1866-1963) was born into the wealthiest family in Hashimoto, a small agricultural village specializing in wheat and silk. By 1925, the village was undergoing rapid commercial development, residents were commuting to factory and office jobs in cities, and, after serving as mayor for almost twenty years, Aizawa was working as a bank manager. Taking the biography of this leading villager as its central focus and incorporating intimate details of life drawn from Aizawa's diary, The Mayor of Aihara chronicles the extraordinary transformation of Hashimoto against the background of Japan's rapid industrialization. By portraying history as it was actually lived by ordinary people, the book offers a rich and compelling perspective on the modernization of Japan.
Simon Partner, Associate Professor at Duke University, is author of Toshié: A Story of Rural Life in Twentieth Century Japan and Assembled in Japan: Electrical Goods and the Making of the Japanese Consumer (both from UC Press).
"The Mayor of Aihara brings to life in a concrete and accessible way key developments and processes affecting the Japanese countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a reader might encounter in general terms in a textbook on modern Japanese history. This work provides an unusually intimate and textured view of Japanese farmers and their changing world over an extended period of time, carefully setting the narrative in the context of larger trends in the social, political, and economic history of modern Japan. The result is a rich harvest of information on multiple dimensions of rural life from the perspective of an elite villager."—Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College