Chichibu incident

[2] The rising discontent of the farmers (農民, nōmin) led to a number of peasant revolts in various impoverished rural areas around the country.

The rebels poured out of their small mountain villages, armed not only with weapons, but with banners and slogans; declaring "New Rule of Benevolence," and labeling the seized district office as the "Headquarters of the Revolutionary Army.

The revolutionaries also dispatched smaller groups to seek out and oust individual government officials in the neighboring villages before recalling their forces and marching toward Tokyo, where the movement first met with significant resistance.

Roughly ten days after the seizure of the district office, the Chichibu uprising was finally fully quashed at the foot of the Yatsugatake Mountains.

Though the traditional view of the event reduces the peasants' motivations to being purely economic, some scholars see it as part of a suppressed peoples' rights movement in this period.

Irokawa Daikichi of Tokyo Keizai University, describes the incident in detail in his book, The Culture of the Meiji Period, and argues that it was not simply part of a yonaoshi movement, nor an ordinary uprising by poor peasants looking to absolve themselves of their debts.

The leaders of the uprising, if not the majority of their followers, were active thinkers of the Freedom and People's Rights movements, and sought no less than to challenge the Meiji government itself.

Though a monument to the fallen was erected several decades later, a great number of the ringleaders and others who escaped formal punishment have never had their names officially cleared.