ABSTRACT
The county and prefectural gazetteers published in the second half of the nineteenth century describe the highlanders as being "unvarnished to uncouth," "ill-informed to uneducated," "quarrelsome to arrogant, even violent," superstitious for their belief in heresies and heterodoxies, and, the most surprising of all, "litigious."* These characteristics were noticed by the educated elite who participated in the compilation of the gazetteers and whose yardstick represented the values and norms of the genteel city dwellers.
