Petition box

• Japanese: 訴状箱 (sojoubako), 目安箱 (meyasubako)

The petition box was a process employed at various times and places, notably in Edo period Tosa han, to allow members of society, regardless of their status, to have their comments and suggestions heard by the lord.

Historically

Some records indicate that a petition box system was instituted for a time in the 2nd century BCE in Han Dynasty China, where a local official sought to gather from the people accusations against corrupt officials. The first Imperial use of a petition box system in China might date to the reign of Empress Wu, whose system, implemented in 686, continued into the Song Dynasty.

The Nihon shoki indicates that a Japanese emperor may have implemented a petition box system as early as 646. Emperor Kôtoku's system, put into place in that year, did not last long, but various authorities made use of similar systems from time to time down through the medieval period. Among samurai warlords known to have employed petition boxes are Imagawa Yoshimoto and Takeda Shingen.

In Tosa

A significant number of domains, though still a minority, employed petition boxes in the Edo period. The case of Tosa han is the most well-known of these, at least in the English-language scholarship, as a result of the work of historian Luke Roberts.

From 1759 until 1873, a wooden box was located just outside Kôchi castle, in a small structure called the ôkoshikake, where people would sit while awaiting entrance to the castle on official business. The space was open and accessible to anyone, samurai, commoner, or peasant, though being right outside the castle, it was deep within the samurai district of the city, and Roberts points out it would have taken some courage for a commoner or peasant to make his way there to submit a petition. The box was a simple wooden box, with a slit in the top where petitions could be dropped in. Once a month, the chief inspector (metsuke) of the domain opened the box and delivered the petitions to the lord. In theory, the petitions were meant to fall into one of three categories: (1) offering suggestions on improving society or government, (2) offering complaints or information about current events or affairs, or (3) requesting a legal appeal for a judicial case the petitioner believes was decided unfairly or unjustly.

Though petitions were not anonymous, policy associated with the petition box protected petitioners from governmental retribution, thus enabling petitioners to be much more open and honest than they would be able to be otherwise.

While a number of these petitions survive, mostly in transcription (only two survive in the original manuscript form), the vast majority have been lost. The system does seem to have been used fairly extensively, however, at least in the early years. Nearly 150 petitions survive in transcribed form from the first twelve years of the box's operation, and a pre-war scholar noted that at that time there were thousands of petitions surviving in the archives.

References

• Luke Roberts, Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain: The Merchant Origins of Economic Nationalism in 18th-Century Tosa, Cambridge University Press (1998), 104-.