Tsutsui W.M. A Companion to japanese histоry

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Kyoto and Osaka, the other two important metropolises, had much deeper histor-

ical roots. Whereas Kyoto was the pre-eminent center for the manufacture of luxury

goods, especially higher-end silks and other dyed goods, Osaka handled massive

quantities of many domains’ surplus tax rice. Osaka was also a major center for the

sale, not to mention manufacture, of cotton goods, sake, soy sauce, and vegetable

oils. William Hauser has described the important position Osaka and the surrounding

region occupied in his Economic Inst itutional Change in Tokugawa Japan.

Somewhat surprisingly, Engli sh-language scholarship on the economies of these

three cities is sparse.

The general impression, especially in textbook interpretations,

is that the cities and their merchants and manufacturers languished from the mid

eighteenth century, unable to compete with upstarts in the countryside. Thomas

C. Smith articulated this position most fo rcefully in his 1973 article ‘‘Premodern

Economic Growth: Japan and the West.’’ Japan’s towns stagnated or lost population,

he argues, because of growing competition from residents in rural areas, who increas-

ingly usurped functions once monopolized by urban merchants and manufacturers.

The evidence supporting this position is overwhelming: there is an abundance of

demographic data showing population decline or stagnation in the major cities and

many castle towns and rural towns, and countless documents from the period testify

to urban dwellers’ growing inability to compete with competitors in the countryside.

Hauser, too, has described in some detail the growing power of rural Kinai merchants

vis-a

-vis the once powerful Osaka wholesalers. Edward E. Pratt touches on the same

trend in Edo and Kyoto in his Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite.

We would be remiss, however, in ignoring Japan’s major cities. Simply put, the

merchants in the cities were more powerful than merchants elsewhere, and consumer

demand was more concentrated in the cities than anywhere else. The textile industry

is a case in point. It is true, for example, that establishe d Edo firms saw their textile

sales stagnate, beginning in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Much of

this stagnation was due to their growing inability to monopolize the purchase of rural

products and to control their prices, but there was also growing competition from

newcomers within Edo itself. Many of these new merchants became successful

because they adopted innovative business strategies, such as by selling to rural

areas, taking advantage of budding rural consumer demand.

The growing literature on samurai life in the cities places us on somewhat firmer

ground. We know that the lives of samurai changed in very profound ways as a result

of urbanization and the burgeoning consumer culture. Katsu Kokichi’s recollections,

presented in Musui’s Story, demolish many of our assumptions about samurai life and

the ideals they cherished. Quite unlike the selfless heroes of Chu

shingura, Katsu’s

world is populated by thieves, thugs, gamblers, gangs, and prostitutes. Unable and

frequently unwilling to seek official appointment, he roamed the country and the

streets of Edo in search of self-gratification. Musui’s Story bespeaks an era in which the

lines between samurai and commoner had considerably blurred, though Katsu was

not averse to pulling rank when the situation demanded it. Yamakawa Kikue’s Women

of the Mito Domain reinforces the portrayal of hapless samurai, unable to make do on

their stipends but, unlike Katsu, finding it necessary to keep up appearances as the

domain’s elites. Most such families found it necessary to supplement their incomes

through outside sources – the men teaching in private schools, for example, and the

women sewing garments.

88 EDWARD E. PRATT

Unlike the pleasure-seeking wealthy commoners traversing the pages of Ihara

Saikaku’s novels, life was much different for the laborers and underclass in the

major cities, as Gary Leupp describes in his Servants, Shop hands, and Laborers.By

the early eighteenth century, large numbers of the cities’ commoner populations

consisted of day laborers and domestic servants, replacing the hereditary servants of

the past. Much of the urban labor force had become proletarianized – owning no land

or property and selling its labor power to earn a living. Day laborers oftentimes lived

in squalid conditions and were viewed with contempt by their superiors.

The scholarship on the rural economy is extensive and owes a tremendous debt to

the works of Thomas C. Smith. In his seminal 1959 book The Agrarian Origins of

Modern Japan, Smith decisively overturns the view, common at the time in both

Japan and the United States, that rural Japan in the Tokugawa period had been

resistant to change. Indeed, he argues that rural change was oftentimes dramatic,

comparable in many ways with the agricultural revolution in Europe. A central feature

of rural change was the growth of the market. By the end of the Tokugawa, farmers

grew crops and produced handicrafts not just to meet their subsistence needs but to

profit from their sale in the market. Cash crops came to account for a larger and larger

portion of the farmers’ total product output. Cottage industries also gained in

importance, most notably in textiles and cotton spinning.

Perhaps Smith’s most important contribution was in documenting the importance

of improved technologies and the diffusion of best practices in promoting economic

change. The greater use of commercial fertilizers enabled double and triple cropping

to be carried out in more areas, for example. Farmers adopted new plant varieties,

introduced improved cultivation methods, reclai med land, and constructed irrigation

works. Improvements in such things as reeling, weaving, and sericulture also led to

greater productivity in cottage industries.

Equally important, such improvements engen dered momentous social changes in

rural society. Because improved technology necessitated a more intensive farming of

the land, many farmers found that the larger their holding, the more inefficient it

became. Largeholders increasingly worked smaller portions of land with the labor of

their nuclear family alone and released their hereditary servants, who became inde-

pendent smallholders, tenants, wage laborers, or some combination thereof. The

large cooperative farming units thus gave rise to a system of independent small-

holders. Smith never made it clear when this change came about, but most Japanese

historians date it from around the last decades of the 1600s, with sometimes

significant regional variations.

Smith further advanced our understanding of Tokugawa social and economic

history through a number of articles, later reprinted in Native Sources of Japanese

Industrialization. In ‘‘The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period,’’ Smith contends that

political authorities failed to adjust tax rates to take advantage of increased product-

ivity, enabling farmers to retain more of their surplus and providing them with an

incentive to invest either in continued agricultural improvements or in commerce and

industry. In his study of Kaminoseki country in Cho

shu

domain, published as ‘‘Farm

Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan,’’ Smith highlights the remarkable

extent to which the rural economy had diversified. Although only 18 percent of the

county’s residents were not classified as farmers, 55 percent of the income of all

country residents came from non-agricultural sources. Farmers, in other words,

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 89

earned income from sources outside agriculture, especi ally from such by-emp loy-

ments as salt production and cotton weaving. They also engaged in extensive trade,

both within the county itself and with distant regions.

In ‘‘O

kura Nagatsune and the Technologists,’’ Smith elaborates on the important

role of those responsible for the diffusion of technologies and best practices in both

agriculture and domestic industry. The author of several widely read agricultural

treatises, O

kura and many others like him devoted much of their lives to learning

these techniques and practices. They then encouraged farmers around the country to

adopt them, arguing that in so doing they could vastly improve their material well-

being. Improving their productivity would come about, they argued, not through

prayers to the gods but as a result of hard work, perseverance, and experimentation.

How have Smith’s works withstood the test of time? Recent scholarship has

elaborated on his arguments and provided a more nuanced, indeed more complex,

portrayal of rural change, but his overall contentions concerning growth in the rural

economy have held up remarkably well. Sydney Crawcour, Susan Hanley, and Kozo

Yamamura provided additional support for Smith’s contentions. In a 1974 article,

Crawcour argued that the Tokugawa economy was hardly modern in that Japan did

not possess the c haracteristics of a modern economy, but that the modern economic

growth that started in the Me iji would have been impossible had Japan not been in a

position to make the transition.

The bakufu and daimyo

increasingly moved away

from the idea of a subsistence economy, sometimes even pursuing policies that

fostered economic growth. Many domains no longer enforced bans on the alienation

of land and restrictions on farmers engaging in non-agricultural pursuits. There was

also an infrastructure in place that facilitated su bsequent modern growth: a growing

network of schools led to a remarkably high rate of literacy; commercial and legal

codes were in place that facilitated smooth and impartial business dealings; and a

network of money-changers were already well familiar with the functions of a modern

banking system. Especially important, there was significant growth in both commer-

cial agricult ure and cottage industry. Cottage industry laid the foundation for mod-

ern economic growth, at the sa me time providing an important source of capital

accumulation that could be invested in modern industry in the Meiji period.

Hanley and Yamamura argue the case for growth especially forcefully in their

Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan. Rejecting the once

dominant view that the Tokugawa economy stagnat ed from the early eighteenth

century, they contend that the economy grew in all parts of the country. Farmers

reclaimed land, used cash fertilizers, adopted improved agricultural techniques, grew

more cash crops, and engaged in numerous side industries. The profits from prod-

uctivity gains and increased production largely accrued to the farmers themselves, not

to samurai administration.

In the 1990s, Ka

ren Wigen, David Howell, and Edward E. Pratt used the proto-

industrialization rubric to examine economic growth and social change in the late

Tokugawa and Meiji periods. Whereas Smith, Crawcour, and Hanley and Yamamura

emphasized origins, especially those factors enabling Japan to modernize in the Meiji

period, the studies on Japanese protoindustrialization focused more on the local, ties

between center and periphery, the unevenness and social consequences of economic

growth, and its lack of linearity sometimes. Equally important, the protoin-

dustrialization studies crossed the Tokugawa–Meiji divide, thus affording a better

90 EDWARD E. PRATT

understanding of how much and how little changed after the resumption of foreign

trade in 1859. First coined to describe conditions in parts of Western Europe on the

eve of industrialization, ‘‘protoindustrialization’’ refers to a process whereby farmers

become increasingly involved in the production of handicrafts and other by-employ-

ments, and the goods they produced are sold to distant markets. In Japan, proto-

industrialization became pronounced from the mid eighteenth century as growing

numbers of farmers engaged in new forms of market-related activity. Unlike Western

Europe, where many of the goods were exported to other European countries,

protoindustrial markets in Tokugaw a Japan, at least before the opening of the

ports, were entirely internal.

The Shimoina valley in central Japan is the focus of Ka

ren Wigen’s The Making of a

Japanese Periphery. By the mid eighteenth century, Shimoina had become a vibrant

entrepot for packhorse transport, having usurped much of the overland trade away

from the officially designated post stations to the north. Shimoina’s farmers engaged

in protoindustrial production, making hardwood ware s, textiles, and paper crafts for

sale in both local and distant markets. The author’s particular strength lies in exam-

ining the importance of physical geography in shaping economic and social change.

We see this in the role of environmental factors in determining the loci of production.

Cocoon production flourished in the milder climate of the valley floor, for example.

Because cocoons were per ishable, reeling was limited to those areas leading from the

castle town, whose merchants handled the cocoon trade . Similarly, paper-making had

to take place in regions where there was abundant winter sun and an ample supply of

pure water.

Shimoina’s experience with proto industrialization and modern industry reflects

how bumpy the trajectory of economic growth could be. With the opening of the

ports in 1859 to international commerce, Shimoina’s economy began to change

radically. As raw silk became the country’s most important export item, farmers

across the country, including in Shimoina, tur ned to this more lucrative product.

With the growth of the sericulture and reeling industry, many traditional products,

such as lacquerware and hairdress ties, lost their markets, while sericulture and reeling

came to dominate the regional economy. Shimoina soon became a supply area for

distant markets. As other regions dominated in large-scale reeling facilities, residents

began to increasingly specialize in cocoon production, which left them particularly

vulnerable to price fluctuations, as well as increasingly reliant on outside capital. In

Wigen’s words, Shimoina became a periphery of a ‘‘Tokyo-centered national econ-

omy.’’

David Howell’s Capitalism from Within rejects in even more forceful terms the

linearity of Japan’s protoindustrial transformation. Protoin dustrialization, he argues,

was not necessarily an outgrowth of commercial agriculture, as earlier studies seemed

to assume. In regions like the Kinai, where agricultural productivity was high,

there were no strong incentives to move toward an industrial system, because local

demand for what farmers grew or produced was high. In regions where agricultural

productivity was relatively low and where there was not much of a market for the

commodities farmers produced, on the other hand, there was a stronger impetus to

move toward protoindustrial production. This was the case in Hokkaido

, which had a

very weak agricultural base and whose economy was dominated by the fishing

industry.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 91

Hokkaido

fishers engaged in a long-distance trade with many regions of Honshu

from at least the mid eighteenth century. The most important product was herring-

meal fertilizer, which they shipped to regions like the Kinai for use as a commercial

fertilizer. Initially, the organization of production was no t capitalist in nature, because

it was an appendage of Mats umae domain. Matsumae operated a contract fishery

system, by which designated merchants controlled the fishing industry. Also, it was

not capitalist in that the Ainu labor forc e so integral to the system was not free.

A confluence of factors came into pl ay in the early decades of the nineteenth

century that radically transformed the nature of the Hokkaido

fishing industry.

There was a general decline in the Ainu population, on whom the contract fishers

relied, together with the appearance of growing numbers of new fishers, many of

whom had moved to Hokkaido

from northern Honshu

. The adoption of the costly

pound net, which enabled larger catches, facilitated the emergence of more capital-

intensive enterprises, spurring the decline of the contract fishery system. The organ-

ization of production had radically changed. Fishing was now a capitalist enterprise,

centered on powerful merchants controlling proletarianized laborers, forced into

dependency on their employers as a result of the extension of the credit that they

needed to survive.

Pratt’s Japan’s Protoindustrial Elite explores the protoindustrial economy by way

of an examination of rural elite families and the world in which they lived. He finds

substantial changes taking place, beginning in the mid eighteenth century: rural elites

and domains introduced new and improved agricultural and manufacturing tech-

niques to their regions; interregional trade greatly expanded, esp ecially in such

products as textiles and their intermediate and raw materials, sake, and tea; and

urban merchant s established ties with rural elites in important production regions

in an attempt to control market share and prices. Many regions saw the rise of a class

of very wealthy farmers, known as go

. Not only did they engage in farming and

serve as landlords, but they wer e also active in interregional trade, operated manu-

facturing establishments, and served as moneylenders. Many dom ains borrowed from

them when they faced budget crises. The go

frequently exercised tremendous

control over the economic lives of people in their communities and regions. Some

of these families owned one-third or more of village arable land, and they controlled

access to markets by way of their moneylending activities.

Pratt argues, however, that the protoindustrial economy was extremely fluid and

volatile, and that fortunes were lost as easily as they were won. The diffusion of new

and improved techniques engendered intense interregional competition; as a result,

those production regions dominating production in one period were not always

dominant in the next. A few sites of protoindustrial production lost out in the

competition and deindustrialized, reverting back to an emphasis on agriculture.

Whereas earlier studies emphasized the success stories, looking at the Tokugawa

origins of those rural elites rising to positions of economic prominence in the Meiji,

Pratt presents a far more complex picture of the transition. The fortunes of many of

the country’s most powerful rural families, in fact, did not survive intact into the

Meiji era. Many families faced headship successio n problems, suffered crop failures,

fell into debt because of onerous exactions imposed by political authorities, or saw

their profits decline as a result of the machinations of city wholesalers seeking to lower

the prices of goods they purchased from the countryside.

92 EDWARD E. PRATT

Recent scholarship has also accorded a far greater role to political authorities in

stimulating economic growth, a point Smith well understood but never developed in

any systematic way. Domains found themselves besieged by enormous debts, brought

on by the excessive service demands of the bakufu, outlays associated with the

alternate attendance system, and growing immersion in the consumer economy. In

the first century of Tokugawa rule, domains increased income by raising taxes on

farmers, but this exacerbated their plight, forcing them to sometimes flee the domain

or to rebel. Beginning in the mid-Tokguawa, domain officials had to devise more

novel means to address revenue shortfalls .

Luke Roberts describes changes in economic thinking in Tosa dom ain in his

Mercantilism in a Japanese Domain. Frustrated by their inability to meet expend-

itures, domains like Tosa increasingly realized that policies aimed at economic expan-

sion could directly benefit their te rritories. Equally important, they understood that

economic gain derived from sound practices and sound economic policies. It was not

simply a product of a world in which the lord acted morally and everyone performed

their proper functions based on their position in the social hierarchy, as Confucianists

would have it.

The term Tosa officials used – kokueki , meaning ‘‘the prosperity of the country’’

but referring more specifically to the domain or province – had its origins in the

merchant class, who invoked the term to justify the important role they played in

society. By the closing decades of the century, domain officials had appropriated the

term to justify policies aimed at encouraging commercial enterprises, so that their

profits could be tapped to strengthen domain finances. Tosa encouraged relatively

new industries, such as sugar, eggs, and gunpowder, that had export potential or that

could reduce the domain’s reliance on imports. It also gave support to well-estab-

lished industries, su ch as paper, by abolishing existing monopolies and by temporarily

suspending taxes.

Mark Ravina describes similar processes at work in Yonezawa, Tokushima, and

Hirosaki domains in his Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan. There, too,

officials increasingly realized that policies based on the Confucian idea that farmers

engaged in agriculture alone and had little contact with markets no longer worked.

By the mid-Tokugaw a, farmers engaged in numerous forms of side industry and were

active market participants and as such their livelihoods were greatly influenced by

outside forces. For domain products to gain market share, and for domain cartels to

profit from their sale, officials adopted measures to better control prices, acquire the

latest techniques and technology, and to ensure the product quality demanded in

national markets.

After some disastrous initial missteps, Yonezawa domain adopted several policies,

beginning in the 1770s, to encourage greater production. Especially important were

the incentives offered to farmers to plant lacquer, mulberry, and paper mulberry trees.

With lacquer, although farmers had to sell their product to a domain monopsony, the

lacquer itself was exempt from taxes. By the 1790s some officials even questioned the

wisdom of monopso nies, because they believed that they served to stifle production

rather than promote it. They came to believe that the best remedy for domain

finances was to stimulate farmers’ ‘‘desire for profit’’ and to reduce their tax burden.

When taxes on these products were light, both sides profited: farmers earned extra

income, enabling them to pay their taxes to the domain. Yonezawa took particular

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 93

interest in its sericulture industry. Officials granted mulber ry seedlings to farmers free

of charge, offered them low-interest loans, and temporarily exempted them from

some taxes. Tokushima domain on the island of Shikoku adopted similar policies to

promote the growth of its indigo industry, beginning in the 1760s. To ensure that

indigo maintained a strong market price, it enacted various quality-control measures

and instituted mechanisms to bypass the powerful Osaka merchants who mon opol-

ized so much of its sale.

How should we assess the role of political authorities in orchestrating Tokugawa

period economic growth? The varied nature of the political landscape forces us to

eschew overly simplistic generalizations. While there were many large domains like

Tokushima, Tosa, and Yonezawa, as described by Roberts and Ravina, there were far

more small domains, non-contiguous parts of domains, bakufu territories, and the

lands of bannermen of the Tokugawa house. It proved difficult to institute economic

controls in such territories, because political oversight was oftentimes weak and

farmers would often move to nearby territories where no such controls existed.

Wigen shows that in Shimoina polit ical authorities instituted only weak controls

over production, because political jurisdictions there were highly fragmented. In-

deed, political fragmentation oftentimes facilitated economic expansion, because

authorities found it difficult to regulate comme rce or to confine production to castle

towns. The same held true on bakufu lands and on the lands of the bannermen of the

Tokugawa house.

Also, political authorities could hinder trade as often as foster it. Their incessant

requests for loans and contributions , especially in the final two or three decades of the

period, contributed to the bankruptcy of many rural elites, as Pratt shows in his case

studies of go

families. Many domains had indeed acquiesced to rural market activity,

and even championed it, but their policies toward rural commerce and manufacture

oftentimes appear schizophrenic: relaxing cont rols one decade, reinstituting them the

next, and experimenting with new cont rols in later years. It would be difficult to

argue, as well, that officials embraced the concept of free trade. We see this evidenced

in domain monopsonies, which appeared in alarming succession, even in the closing

decades of the Tokugawa. The bakufu, too, sometimes enacted countrywide price-

control policies, much to the detriment of both city and rural merchants, and its

periodic restrictions on sake brewing could be disastrous for brewers.

Although there is little debate nowadays that the Tokugawa economy changed in

quite remarkable ways, there is far less consensus on the extent to which Japan’s

population benefited from those changes. One of the more thorny questions for

historians has been, if there indeed was growth, why did the population stagnate from

the early eighteenth century? Although the population appears to have grown sig-

nificantly in the first century of rule, it languished at around 26 million people from

1721 until 1846, the last year a nationwide census was conducted. Japanese Marxist

historians once attributed this stagnation to the impoverishment of the Japanese

population, besieged by periodic famines, pernicious practices such as abortion and

infanticide, exploitative domain and bakufu officials, and rapacious rural elites.

Beginning in the 1970s, historical demographers in Japan and the United States

readdressed the question of stagnation by examining vill age population records.

In his demographic study Nakahara, Thomas Smith contends that one of the

major reasons Japan was able to industrialize was because her population consciously

94 EDWARD E. PRATT

pursued a policy of family limitation. In so doing, population growth remained below

that of economic growth, thus allowing farmers to increase their economic standing.

Nakahara villagers practiced population control primarily by means of late marriage

and sex-selective infanticide. Women married late, much later in fact than was the case

in Europe at a comparable level of development. They also tended to stop bearing

children at an early age, usually after the optimum family size had been reached and

the desired proportion of sexes obtained. Thus, infanticide was not a function of

poverty or momentary desperation, as Marxist historians once claimed, but rather a

conscious form of population control in order to maintain or increase economic well-

being.

Hanley and Yamamura make many of the same argume nts in Economic and

Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan. The rate of economic growth exceeded

the rate of population growth, thus raising the living standards of the vast majority of

the farmers throughout the period, despite a number of famin es and natural disasters.

Farmers limited family size through such practices as abortion, infanticide, and

delayed marriage in order to realize a rise in their standards of living. Hanley and

Yamamura also propose that the country’s population figures themselves might be

suspect. Although uneven, every region witnessed some population growth over the

course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

More recent scholarship, however, has considerably complicated our understand-

ing of Tokugawa-period demography. Akira Hayami, Japan’s leading historical dem-

ographer, contends that the term stagnation itself is somewhat elusive. The overall

population stagnated, it is true, but some regions witnessed respectable growth, some

remained relatively flat, while still others declined. To characterize the lack of any

appreciable popul ation increase as stagnation is misleading.

Recent scholarship also

suggests that the family planning found by Smith and by Hanley and Yamamura was

far from universal. Historical demographers in Japan could not find sufficient evi-

dence for the sex-selective infanticide found by Smith, for example, even in a village in

close proximity to Nakahara. Saito

Osamu argues that infanticide may not be not such

a major factor in explaining low levels of fertility.

Explanatory factors that work well

for one village, it appears, do not nece ssarily work well for others.

Akira Hayami

and Laurel Cornell

have further complicated our understanding of

Tokugawa era population dynamics. They contend that greater migration, by which

farmers worked for periods away from home, thus reducing coital frequency, accounts

for declining fertility rates in some areas, not deliberate family planning. If this is

indeed the case, we must question the assumptions of the earlier generation of

historical demographers. According to Saito

it is time for us to question the stance taken, explicitly or implicitly, by the second

generation of economic and population historians. They were keen to redress the ‘‘dark’’

and dismal image created by their predecessors and wanted to find ‘‘brighter’’ elements

in Tokugawa society; as a result, they tended to see every demographic event as a

reflection of changing (usually improving) economic situations.

There are equally nagging issues that historical demographers must confront . Even

those regions witnessing respectable population increases, for example, grew only

modestly, especially from the standpoint of Meiji and later periods, forcing us to

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 95

question whether economic conditions improved significantly for Tokugawa era

farmers. New opportunities created by rural industry and other forms of economic

growth would have increased the econo mic value of surplus family members and

eventually stimulated population growth. We have some tantalizing evidence that

new side industries led to population growth in some villages,

but the nationwide

data suggests that such effects were far from universal.

Yet another shortcoming of demographic studies to date is that they largely ignore

the broader context in which popul ation changes take place. Most historical demo-

graphers of Japan have examined population records alone, without reference to

oftentimes extensive other forms of documents. This has been an unfortunate omis-

sion, because we can never fully understand population trends without knowledge of

other aspects of farmers’ lives. What farmers are producing , how production is

changing, the village’s links to local and national markets, tax rates, farmers’ incomes,

levels of indebtedness, the distribution of wealth – all of these factors influe nce how

farmers make decisions about family size.

Material culture is another aspect of the broader context of farmers’ lives. If indeed

the economy grew, we would expect to find substantive changes in such things as

what people ate, what they wore, life expectancy, housing and furnishings, sanitation,

and consumption patterns in general. Susan Hanley’s Everyday Things in Tokugawa

Japan addresses these topics and offers an abundance of evidence to support her claim

that Japanese in the Tokugawa era enjoyed a ‘‘relatively high level of physical well-

being.’’

House sizes increa sed and houses were better built, fo r example. Wooden

floors and tatami mats replaced the pounded earthen floors of the past. Japanese ate

more nutritious foods, including greater quantities of rice and sweet potatoes. In the

cities, mortality rates were lower than might be expected given their size, because

residents engaged in beneficial sanitation practices, such as the carting of night soil to

the countryside to use as fertilizer. Rural areas became vibrant areas for commerce,

with many villages supporting shops selling dozens of consumer goods, including

hair ornaments, footwear, oils, pots, and paper. When viewed through the lens of life

expectancy, Japanese led surprisingly long lives, even by the standards of Western

societies around the same time.

There is no doubt that the lives of Japanese changed in very important ways over

the course of the Tokugawa, and that terms like ‘‘immiseration’’ are woefully inad-

equate in characterizing the ir lot. We are on somewhat shakier ground, however, in

accepting overly rosy assumptions about everyday life. Changing patterns of con-

sumption may indicate that people’s material lives are improving but, as we know

from our own society, the link between the two is not always so clear. It is not even

clear to economic historians of the West that economic growth, especially the process

of industrialization, necessarily leads to improvements in people’s well-being; in many

cases, there is a negative correlation.

We must also guard against generalizations concerning improvements in material

well-being that are not rooted in the local, because regional and temporal variations

were great. Farmers ’ fortunes could be highly unstable. The major famines that took

place in the 1730s, 1780s, and 1830s devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of

Japanese, but these were not simply punctuations in a seamless flow of economic

growth and material improvements. Japanese farmers were constantly at the mercy of

nature and economic downturns.

A year, even a decade, of plenty might be

96 EDWARD E. PRATT

followed by a crop failure, forcing farmers to sell off much of their land and belong-

ings. If we accept the good times, we must also accept that there were some bad times

as well, and that the bad yea rs could be very bad indeed.

Equally important, historians cannot ignore the question of who benefits from

economic growth. To take a perhaps overly simplistic example, rural commerce and

the proliferation of village shops might be an indicator of improved standards of living

in the countryside, or they might not. Some farmers made a conscious decision to

specialize in particular crops or manufactured items, for example. Whereas in the past

they had produced most of what they needed for their own consumption, specializa-

tion necessitated that they purchase more of their necessities in markets and shops.

Other farmers purchased more because they had lost some of their lands due to

indebtedness. They supplemented income from the land with the selling of their labor.

Much of the scholarship on peasant revolts emphasize the extent to which Japanese

society became stratified in the second half of the Tokugawa. In reaction to some of

the more benign early portrayals of rural society, scholars in the 1980s began to

reinsert conflict and contention back into the study of the Tokugawa period. The

starting point of the works on rural protest by Anne Walthall, Herbert Bix, Stephen

Vlastos, and James White is the acknow ledgment that conditions in rural areas had

changed. The money economy had permeated much of rural society, but the benefits

oftentimes accrued to the few at the expense of the many.

While a few families

accumulated fortunes through moneylending, commercial activities, and land

accumulation, many farmers lost the ir lands and were unable to subsist through

agriculture alone. By the second half of the Tokugawa periods, much of the rural

protest was directed against people of wealth in rural society itself, not against

political authorities, as had been common in the first half of the period.

How, then, should we evaluate the Tokugawa economy? There is no doubt that the

economy changed in fundamental ways, despite the country’s lack of significant

outside trade from the end of the seventeenth century. The major towns and cities

remained as major sites of manufacturing and commercial activity, although they

came under increa sing assault from rural competitors. The most remarkable trans-

formation took place in the countryside. Farmers produced more for the market, and

they bought more from the market. Domains and rural elites actively sought out the

best agricultural practices and manufacturing techniques, more efficient tools, and

higher yielding seed varieties from other parts of the country. There was a remarkable

expansion of interregional trade in some goods, and a growing share of this trade was

between rural areas, not only between rural and urban areas. Many bakufu and

domain officials came to realize that the y could benefit from increased rural produc-

tion, and adopted policies to encourage it.

While the economy changed in important ways, it is far more difficult to apply

generalizations about that growth’s linear trajectory. Regions with a weak agricultural

base sometimes took the lead in protoindustrialization, but there was no assurance

that they would industrialize. Regions constantly jockeyed for competitive advantage,

and there were as many losers as winners. The extent to which the population

benefited from economic change is also open to continued debate. We are far from

certain, as we once were, that farmers engaged in family planning in order to

maximize their incomes. It is also clear that some people benefited more from growth

than others, and that some people fared very poorly indeed.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC CHANGE IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 97