Saturday, March 03, 2007

Standoff at Kisaki, Round II

The harassed tenants who persisted in defying the government and its local representative, education superintendent Majima Keijiro, removed their children from public schools. They subsequently established their own schools, further rousing the ire of the authorities. The latter employed forceful measures to counter the tenants, and many activists were detained by the constabulary. Contemporaneously, the national tenants' union underwent a period of debilitating internal dissension, further isolating the tenant farmers in Kisaki. After a protracted eight year struggle, the tenants were finally defeated in 1930. By this time, the only school remaining for tenants' children was a post-elementary institution, the others having been closed years before. The photos show the public elementary and middle schools in Kisaki.
Note: Historian Mikiso Hane's Peasants, Rebels, & Outcastes: The Underside of Modern Japan is the source of the preceding information, which I have loosely paraphrased.

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