Walthall, Anne. "Japanese Gimin: Peasant Martyrs in Popular Memory". The American Historical Review, Vol.91, No.5 (1986): 1076-1102.

Walthall, Anne. "Japanese Gimin: Peasant Martyrs in Popular Memory". The American Historical Review, Vol.91, No.5 (1986): 1076-1102.

• A modern protest of a new airport to service Tokyo by peasants, joined by other groups, was in part dedicated to the memory of Sogoro, a peasant martyr, or gimin 義民, in the 1600s, demonstrating these figures' cultural legacy (1076).
• These peasant heroes have been frequently repurposed by different political groups, including both the liberals and the Japanese far right (1078, 1093-1094).
• The Japanese cultural notion of honoring the souls of those who have given themselves for you, to whom a community owes a debt, or to heroes allowed for the continued veneration of the gimin despite the attempts of contemporary Japanese authorities to wipe out memory and worship of peasant heroes (1077).
• The government of the Tokugawa period attempted to enforce an absolute rejection of any worship or memory of peasant revolts or riots. The leaders of such actions were treated like other criminals and their bodies buried in unmarked mass graves. Authorities were encouraged to destroy evidence that revolts had happened, and gossip about rebels was punished if overheard by government spies, largely because local lords did not want their bosses to know that they had failed to maintain societal order (1078).
• This general practice was contradicted in certain cases when local lords, particularly in troubled and unstable regions, honored and evoked the most peaceful of the popular peasant martyrs as a way of promoting the 'proper' and respectful forms of protest in contrast to the increasing violence of revolts in their own periods (1079).
• Peasants would often come up with crafty ways to avoid official bans on the veneration of these peasant martyrs, particularly through falsifying dates so that the enemies were pre-Tokugawa rulers and by adding memorials as parts of larger works such as road markers (1080), or by pretending that gimin were actually legitimate Shinto gods (1081).
• Governmental authorities took acts of defiance through the commemoration of peasant martyrs very seriously, as the prevalence of murder and torture as responses to non-compliance demonstrate the Tokugawa authorities believed that gimin could become symbols of serious challenges to their rule (1081).
• In some ways, the policy of the Tokugawa government succeeded because gimin were largely forgotten as historical figures, where they were preserved they existed as peasant gods whose actual deeds had been forgotten. Instead of serving as direct inspiration for peasant insurrection, the gimin were worshiped as protectors of the peasantry and to guarantee good harvests (1083).
• The gimin regain a political role during times of crisis, particularly in the 1850s and 1860s, as a new generation of peasant protests and rebellions looked towards the myths and divine intervention of the gimin as sources of inspiration and moral authority (1085, 1087).
• Myths surrounding the gimin have a number of features in common, namely the narrative structure of a rapacious local lord, directly held responsible for high taxes, a self-sacrificing peasant, and the ultimate victory of the peasants through the intervention of the Emperor on their behalf (1083-1084).
• Following the Meiji Restoration in 1868, peasants were allowed to openly worship martyrs, who were pardoned for their crimes posthumously. Without the onerous Tokugawa state or the 'necessity' of preservation in the face of state oppression, the worship of gimin may have seemed less important, as the practice died out within a decade (1088).
• The popular worship of peasant martyrs was restarted in the late 1870s by political reformers and liberals in the Meiji government, who traveled to the countryside in an attempt to prove that Japan had democratic figures and to inculcate the veneration of these 'democratic' and 'liberal' peasant heroes (1089-1091).
• The support in liberal circles for peasant martyrs declined rapidly in the 1880s after the radical factions of their movement used the same figures as inspiration and justification for a violent struggle against the military government. The rest of the faction quickly rejected stopped promoting these figures because of the association (1092).
• By the late 1880s and early 1890s, the government had reclaimed the narratives of most gimin, casting them as champions of popular rights and democratic accountability, both of which the constitutional Meiji government represented itself as the champion of, by giving state support to their veneration and shrines (1093).
• The mythology and imagery of the gimin is used by a variety of groups in the 20th Century: right-wing nationalists and imperialists represented the sacrifice of the gimin as a martyrdom for community that young men should repeat through armed service, liberals represented gimin as struggling against authority and upper classes, and agrarian movement portrayed the gimin as fighting for local rights against central government (1093-1094).