Jōkyō uprising
Azumino, Nagano, JapanThe Jōkyō uprising was a large-scale peasant uprising that happened in 1686 (in the third year of the Jōkyō era during the Edo period) in Azumidaira, Japan. Azumidaira at that time, was a part of the Matsumoto Domain under the control of the Tokugawa shogunate. The domain was ruled by the Mizuno clan at the time.
Numerous incidents of peasant uprising have been recorded in the Edo period, and in many cases the leaders of the uprisings were executed afterward. Those executed leaders have been admired as Gimin, non-religious martyrs, with the most famous Gimin being the possibly fictitious Sakura Sōgorō. But the Jōkyō Uprising was unique in that not only the leaders of the uprising (former or incumbent village heads, who did not personally suffer from the heavy taxes), but also a sixteen-year-old girl (subject of the book Oshyun by Ohtsubo Kazuko) who had helped her father, "the deputy ringleader", were caught and executed. On top of that, the leaders of the uprising clearly recognized what was at stake. They realized that the real issue was abuse of rights within a feudal system. Because the newly raised tax level was equivalent to a 70% tax rate; an impossible rate. The Mizunos compiled Shimpu-tōki, an official record of the Matsumoto Domain about forty years after the uprising. This Shimpu-tōki is the major and credible source of information concerning the uprising.