This is a long one:
"In the sixteenth century, other regional communes, although smaller in scope, managed to last for several decades. One example was Oyamato. In this small region in Ise Province, in the upper Kumozu River basin, the inhabitants signed two documents in 1494. The first, signed by 350 heads of peasant families in the villages, was a five-article constitution laying out principles concerning rural life, such as 'You must not rob from others their right to cultivate the land: you must not steal.' In the second document, written a month later, forty-six jizamurai of the Oyamato region formed a collective to ensure power in the region: 'If anyone acts badly, inside or outside Oyamato, he will be judged and sentenced.' The warriors' league seized administrative and judicial control, and its authority was based on the charter signed by the 350 peasants. The two social groups had formed a united front. Although the low-ranking warriors had their own system of cooperation, they had to respect the agreement with the peasants, without which the region's autonomy could be challenged, as it had been in the Yamashiro commune several years earlier. Oyamato, once an estate, now became an autonomous society, independent of outside hierarchical control, with a double structure: the assembly of the forty-six low-ranking warriors and the general peasant assembly. The two groups had a relationship of power and domination, but without either a suzerain or absolute power.
The regional commune in Iga Province seems to have been a sort of geographic extension of Oyamato's political and social structure. Its twelve-article constitution was written around 1560. The communities of the Iga River basin had been defending themselves since around the beginning of the sixteenth century. The neighboring region of Koga in Omi, similarly organized, had no fewer than 30 fortification works. In Iga, local power was exercised by the jizamurai, sixty-six of whom had taken vows. Entrenched in their small fortresses, they collectively administered the territory and made laws. Talks were usually held in a Buddhist temple, the Heirakuji, but the basis of the regional commune was a federation of village communes, which wrote a 'constitution.' The following are some excerpts:
'In keeping with the union sworn by the members of the league, any attempt by foreign troops to invade the province will be repelled. If an alert is signaled by the watchmen who are guarding the fortified passes, the inhabitants must sound the alarm in each village and immediately go on alert. In this case, food and arms must be contributed and the fortified positions along the routes defended without a loss of strength. Men between the ages of seventeen and fifty will be mobilized. If the campaign lasts a long time, the men will work in shifts. In each place, captains will be designated among the warriors, and the people of the communes must obey them. In the temples and monasteries in the region, the older monks will pray for the prosperity of the country while the younger monks will go to fight. The text of the vows, in which the vassals of the samurai in the communes swore to obey their master and follow him to the end, whatever the fate of the ikki, will be posted in all villages....
Those mobilized peasants --- who are particularly successful and able to seize an enemy position on the border will be rewarded with the status of samurai. Anyone who is persuaded to enter into secret relations with foreign armies and to help them penetrate the province will be arrested immediately by the league. The inheritance of the traitor in question will be confiscated, his name struck from the registers, and his property consigned to the temple. Revealing the communes' situation to the enemy is considered a similar crime, and the punishment will be the same as that as that for traitors: death with public exhibition of the head....
The affairs of Iga having been well settled, we now see fit to unite our forces with those of Koga. Therefore, common assemblies between the two parties will held outside at the border between the two countries. Thus is it decreed and signed.'
The main concerns of the leaders of the league of communes in Iga were defense and war. The province was at war with the Miyoshi and with small-scale lords in neighboring Yamato Province. In Iga, the fighting had been constant, it seems, since the late thirteenth century. In the Kuroda estate, for example, studied in detail by Ishimoda Sho, banditry was endemic, and akuto attacked the Todaiji monastery in the late Kamakura period. During the civil war of the fourteenth century, local samurai formed regional alliances (gunnai ichizoku), which were transformed into organizations that in the sixteenth century assumed all local powers. The strength of the regional commune was in the military leadership of the peasants by low-ranking warriors. Although the social difference between the former and the latter was clear, it was it was not insurmountable, for the Iga commune also promoted heroic fighters.
The Iga league of communes lasted much longer than did the one in neighboring Yamashiro Province. The reason was probably the particular configuration of the area, a mountain basin relatively distant from the major routes. Oda Nobunaga finally put an end to the league by invading the province with his troops in 1581. Despite the difficulty of conquering a population that was completely mobilized for war and had very effective guerrilla fighters, Nobunaga and his artillery crushed the 'people of Iga' with cannon fire and dismantled all their small forts. The indomitable survivors kept up a sporadic guerrilla resistance for several years, but Tokugawa Ieyasu finally was victorious when he made them specialized auxiliaries in the lower echelons of his bakufu army. The structure of the regional communes in Oyamato, Iga, and Koga was apparently both horizontal and vertical. At the local level, jizamurai and peasants were organized within the community framework of the village. These communes were linked to other, similar ones to form a federation. But the jizamurai also provided hierarchical collective control of the region as a whole. These forms of organization were reminiscent of the 'valley communities' of the Swiss Waldstetten in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. The pact of 1291, considered to be the founding act of Switzerland, was a 'peace charter' among local communes to prevent outside aggression, similar to the ultimatum made by the Yamashiro rebels to the Hatakeyama armies in 1485 and the twelve-point charter of the Iga commune around 1560. Regional communes of various sizes existed for different periods of time in Kai, Omi, Settsu, Izuni, Tanba, and other provinces. The existence of these federations on the scale of a region or province kept any centralized power from controlling the provinces of central Japan."
- Pierre Francois Souyri, The World Turned Upside Down: Medieval Japanese Society
