Takashi Watanabe (born 1957) is a Japanese historian specializing in the history of rural communities during the Edo period. He is professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University and director of the Matsudo Municipal Museum. Drawing extensively on documents preserved in villages, he has examined how farmers managed land, governed their communities, and negotiated or came into conflict with feudal authorities. In Hyakusho-tachi no Bakumatsu Ishin, Watanabe approaches the years from the 1830s through the 1880s from the perspective of the farming population, tracing their everyday lives, agricultural practices, uprisings, and involvement in the Boshin War to present the fall of the Tokugawa order and the Meiji Restoration as changes experienced within rural society.
