The Song period, especially the Northern Song period, was a time marked by development within the civil examination system and efforts by statesmen to improve the education system as a whole. The idea that the system should be expanded first appeared during the reign of Emperor Jingyou 景祐 (1034-1038), though a concrete project was implemented only under Emperor Qingli 慶暦 (1041-1048). It was from that time on that local government schools began to increase, and by the late Northern Song period, it was hoped that this school system would replace the civil examination system entirely and become the main source of civil appointments. This did not happen, but the issue of local government schools remained a concern of many statesmen during the latter half of the period. This article deals with the views of Wen Weng 文翁, a figure active in the Han period who had set up a local school in Chengdu. During the middle of the Northern Song period, he was suddenly heralded by officials at court as a pioneer in the creation of local schools and thus became a symbol of the movement among officials in the capital, resulting in the expansion of the prefectural government school, Chengdu Fuxue 成都府学, along with many other local government schools. Wen Weng was recognized as a symbol of Chengdu Fuxue and enshrined at the school. By the time of the Southern Song, Chengdu Fuxue had been accepted by local society and Wen Weng as a symbol in the hearts of the local elite. On the other hand, other regional figures competed with Wen Weng as symbols of the regional school movement. In Fuzhou, Chang Gun 常袞 was considered to be a pioneer of a school there and was enshrined during the early Southern Song period. This article also shows the changes in the perceptions about Wen Weng throughout the Song period, in which he went from being a symbol of the local school movement among intellectuals at court to being accepted as a symbol on the local level in Chengdu within the perception of local government schools held by the local elite.

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This article offers an hypothesis for analyzing the process by which the ideas held by civil affairs bureaucrat Kinoshita Sukeyuki (1825-1899) about local parliamentary government were formed during the early Meiji Period. In the reforms aimed at how to govern the new nation emerging during the Restoration era, Confucian ideas were employed in an attempt to make a transition to direct rule over the people via state power and authority. However, with the replacement of feudal domains (han 藩) with prefectures and the dismantling of the feudal ownership system, the old framework for civil governance collapsed, and an increase in personal freedom occurred within a mood of autonomy and liberty, to a degree beyond anyone's initial expectations. In light of such a new situation, there were those, including Confucian intellectuals, who called for the introduction of publicly elected local assemblies. It was Kinoshita Sukeyuki who offered a plan to reorganize the villages of Karatsu Domain after the transition to direct han civil governance, based on the edification of the common people and their employment in local affairs of governance. Kinoshita, who would later propose a village system incorporating a deliberative body, which he initially thought would exclude the lower classes from the electorate, was forced by widespread popular uprisings opposed to the Restoration government measures to propose that peasant representatives (hyakushodai 百姓代) be made assembly members and that the lower class villagers (komae 小前) be included, in order to eliminate the legitimacy of other rebel groups. He came to think that 1) prefectural and national assemblies should first be indirectly elected from city ward and village assemblies and 2) edification policy should be fitted to the level of social mores by raising public sentiment. In the background to this was the assumption of an unstable structure facilitating popular rebellion, due to the sudden disappearance of feudal ownership and the rapid expansion of individual freedom within the underdevelopment of a governance system to replace feudalism. For that reason it was necessary for early Meiji civil government to smooth relations between upper and lower classes, and Kinoshita thought the answer lay in publicly elected popular assemblies. In the face of such new conditions, Kinoshita himself went through a transition from a Confucian view of civil government paternally protecting the people to raising issues about how to empower a fully matured nation. This is the chaotic background on which issues about political participation by the people were formed during the early Meiji Period.

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Despite the huge body of research on the rice market of late premodern Japan, we still have not obtained a sufficient understanding of transactions involving rice warrants (komekitte 米切手), receipts issued to successful rice bidders (intermediaries) by warehouses. Given the current understanding of the instrument, it remains unclear about how cases in which receipts issued by the warehouse (dekitte 出切手) and warrants for rice not confirmed by warehouse inventory (karamai-kitte 空米切手) were differentiated and transacted in the marketplace. Without a clarification of this point, it would be impossible to ascertain the significance of the ban placed on karamai-kitte instruments by the Tokugawa Bakufu in 1761. In this article, the author uses the case study method to clarify the actual practice of rice warrant transactions to show that degitte and karamai-kitte were traded without distinction between their content. The only distinction that was made was when the warehouse refused to honor a warrant or there was anticipation that it would not. Based on this understanding, the author reexamines the Bakufu's decision to ban the use of karamai-kitte from the mid-eighteenth century until the last years of its rule, concluding that the ban paradoxically encouraged the issuance and sale of warrants for warehouse rice exceeding the actual inventories, thus strengthening the function of the Osaka rice market as a financial institution. That is to say, the ban on karamai-kitte meant a Bakufu guarantee that no warrant traded on the rice market could possibly suffer from default. In effect, even in the case of default, the ban enabled the holder of the warrant to petition the Bakufu functionary of Osaka to order that the warehouse honor the warrant with every means at its disposal.

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