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Where did the peasants die in the suburbs of Edo, Japan in the 18th -19th centuries?
| Many of the Japanese historians have been believed that the peasants were tied to their soil or to their home villages until the industrial revolution in the late 19th century. I intend to discuss the places where the peasants living on the outskirts of Edo, Japan died during the 18th-19th centuries.
Main source documents are the Japanese Buddhist temple death registers which are called Kako-Cho (KC) and the diaries written by the peasants. I have constructed a database system for analyzing the Japanese Buddhist temple death registers. This system is composed of three parts: the database of the KC data, the programs for outputting the statistics of mortality and the manual for the user. I have stored up over 30 thousand deaths in 10 temples. The URL of our system named DANJURO is http://kawaguchi.tezukayama-u.ac.jp.
With this system, I could find many peasants who died in many places far from their home villages. It suggests the wide range of their daily activities. I will also describe the details of funeral services if the peasants die far from their home villages. Then I will consider the reasons why they died far from their villages.
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