Page 228 - Changing Living Spaces

Satoshi Murayama, Hiroko Nakamura, Noboru Higashi and Toru Terao

Ueda House contain 89 diaries.5 From these diaries, we were able to ex-
amine the comments of the village head, Yoshiuzu Ueda, between 1789
and 1818. Yoshiuzu served as shoya of Takahama for 30 years. As part of
our research project, these diaries, which total 1,849 pages and over one
million characters, were digitized into book form. Thanks to this digitiza-
tion, we were able to more easily evaluate Yoshiuzu’s diaries, which cover
26years. These diaries are not just memories, but serve as documentation,
a manual for the administration, and evidence of how the government
maintained the safety and peace of the village community.
By counting the records of disasters in the diaries of the village head
using 21 diaries covering 26 years between the years 1793 and 1818, we
learned that during this period there were five cases of crop failure, elev-
en earthquakes, ten fires, including three major fires, seven floods, and
eight severe wind events that were probably storms (table 1). Two spe-
cial smallpox outbreaks were recorded, as mentioned earlier, from 1807
(Bunka 4) to 1808 (Bunka 5) and in 1814 (Bunka 11).

Flooding in a Small River
Until the middle of the Meiji era (1868–1912), floods occurred almost
every year in Japan’s alluvial plains. In the delta regions, everyday drain-
age perplexed the inhabitants (Okuma 2007, 12). Since the introduction
of modern civil engineering technology in the last quarter of the nine-
teenth century, water management in Japan has changed dramatically,
with disaster prevention no longer the responsibility of individuals and
communities but of the state. Water management has been greatly im-
proved by large-scale construction projects with government capital in-
vestment and by the establishment of higher research and educational
institutions for hydrological civil engineering (Doboku Tosyo-kan and
Doboku-shi Kenkyu 2004).
In the hundred years that have passed since Western technology was
introduced for river improvement processes, habitual flooding has been
almost completely prevented under state management. Riverbanks
have been made higher and much more stable against flooding. Flood
gates, sluices, dams in upper streams, and drain pumps have been used

5 Higashi (2016, 27, 31): Buhitsu (who was a shoya from 1755 to 1789) left one di-
ary; Yoshiuzu (= Gichin) (1789–1818), left 28 diaries; Nobuchika (1819–1822),
left four diaries; Sadayuki (1823–1861), left 34 diaries; Sadauzu (1861–1872), left
nine diaries; and a son of Yoshiuze, a shoya of Imatomi (a neighbouring village of
Takahama) named Teion (1804–1818), left 13 diaries.

226