 Overall, the Chichibu Incident was caused by a combination of liberal, revolutionary ideologies and economic motivations.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.