Fujii Family Documents
These documents are records kept by the Fujii family, who are thought to have moved to Shirakawa-go in the early 1700s from the village of Akao in what is now the city of Nanto in Toyama Prefecture, just north of the present-day municipality of Shirakawa. Sometime around the 1820s, the head of the family was awarded the hereditary position of village headman (nanushi) with authority over the three villages of Hatogaya, Uchigato, and Kazura. The Fujii records have enabled historians to better understand the position and duties of a village headman in the mid-to-late 1800s, when the long period of stability and peace under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate was nearing its end.