At the end of the sixteenth century, the province of Omi was the scene of socio-political upheavals decisive for the later history of Japan as a whole. With the conquest of the province by Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Omi became a place of experimentation for a redefinition of the social statuses, and of the relations between the warrior authority and the rural populations, a prelude to measures which were applied throughout the archipelago after the reunification of Japan. Through the fate of a small landlord household, the Idomura, this article describes the process of separation of warrior and peasant conditions from the end of the sixteenth century to the beginning of the seventeenth century, which resulted, in the Edo period, with the withdrawal of samurai from the countryside, and the appearance of new forms of land ownership in the villages.