ABSTRACT

Throughout the classical and early medieval periods, people who lived on the Japanese archipelago territory settled—when they were sedentary—in a scattered manner on public (kōryō or kokugaryō) or private estates (shōen), wherever there was land that could be exploited. The aggregation of inhabitants of those estates into villages (mura or sonraku) is the result of a phenomenon that emerged in its earliest configurations during the second half of the thirteenth century, most often in the western part of the country, and that grew in a continuous manner during the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, until it became widespread throughout most of the land. 1