Edo period

The Edo period is presented as a turning point in the history of Japan’s family-register system. The register expanded from an instrument of governance into a means of recording personal identity and religious affiliation, a legacy that helps explain how official records can recognize, classify, or leave people unaccounted for.

The register as an instrument of control

Nakakita traces the register’s development to the late sixth-century Ritsuryo system, an imperial bureaucracy modeled on China. Initially, records served chiefly policing and tax collection. During the Edo period, the system took on a further role: authorities used it to enforce restrictions on Christianity by recording religious affiliation and checking whether people were registered with Buddhist temples.

Expanding the record of identity

As its functions grew, the register gathered a wider range of details about individuals, including birth, marriage, adoption, address, occupation, and death. It thus became more than a record of households: it helped make people legible to the state across important changes in their lives. Yet the system never captured everyone. Its assumption that people were attached to particular land left many, including vagrants, outside the records.

A legacy of recognition and exclusion

The novel places the Edo-period system within a longer history of administrative identification. In the late nineteenth century, after freedom of movement was recognized, the land-based system became obsolete and a modern register was introduced. Later discussion of people without family registers makes the stakes of that history clear: official records can determine whether a person’s existence is acknowledged by public institutions, while their absences can render lives difficult to identify or count. The Edo period’s register therefore stands at an important point in the novel’s account of how record-keeping both organizes society and leaves people beyond its reach.