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Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868
By Susan B. Hanley, Kozo Yamamura PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-10055-5
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Our knowledge of economic growth and demographic change in Tokugawa Japan is so limited that scholars specializing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only have not arrived at a consensus but also disagree fundamentally even on basic questions such as: Was the economy growing during the second half of the Tokugawa period? Did the population increase after the beginning of the eighteenth century? Was the living standard of the peasant rising? Most Japanese scholars answer these questions in the negative, arguing that during the last century and a half of the Tokugawa period the economy failed to grow — teitai (stagnation) is the term most frequently used. Neither did the population increase; in the traditional view this was both because of the ravages of severe famines and because of a deterioration in the living standard of the peasants resulting from "exploitation" by a few large landholders in each village and by the ruling samurai class.
Several quotations from the works of Japanese and Western scholars illustrate their gloomy view. Nomura Kanetaró, a well-known economic historian, wrote in 1953:
Thus during the second half of the Edo period, life in the villages became increasingly distressing. Small peasants as a rule could not balance their household budgets and were barely able to maintain a subsistence level of life only because of the communal cooperative organization of the extended household [lie.
Kodama Kota, an acknowledged doyen of Tokugawa economic history, said in 1957:
[Tokugawa peasants] had little to spare. We can assume that medical and entertainment expenditures were out of the question. Therefore, no savings were made and this meant that neither technological improvements nor capital accumulation was possible. Such peasants suffered starvation no sooner than a drought or a flood fell upon them.
A widely used Japanese college textbook informed students during the 1960s that:
The Temmei famine [of the 1780s] is said to have claimed the lives of one million peasants. The population failed to increase because of the frequent famines and stagnation in the productive capacity of the economy.
An essay contained in a book published in 1971, edited jointly by two study groups of Japanese historians, concluded:
In the Kanto and Tohoku regions especially, the peasants' ability to bear the burden of taxes declined. With the excessively burdensome taxes imposed after the Kyoho period [1716-1736] as the cause, a pervasive trend emerged: peasants sold their land out of desperate poverty and left agriculture. Frequent harvest failures and famines also were important contributing causes of the general impoverishment and reductions in the number of peasants.
These views reappear in some college textbooks used in the United States. George Sansom's widely used three-volume text states:
The Bakufu did not interfere when merchant capital was invested in agriculture, but here they were on unsafe ground, for the commercial methods applied to purchasing the produce of the farms were obnoxious to the villages. The merchants fixed the price they were willing to pay at such a low level that the peasants for the most part found that the more they produced, the less they earned in terms of cash. ... There is no doubt that ... the rapid growth in an agrarian society of a commercial economy ... weighed heavily upon the peasants.
And in another American textbook, published in 1972, we read that:
The peasantry was the segment of the society that supported the national economy and endured hardships and miseries in silence. The expanding money economy was affecting them most adversely and, after the Genroku era [1688-1704], as the Bakufu and the daimyo faced growing financial difficulties, the plight of the peasants appeared to worsen as they were taxed even more heavily.
In contrast to the dominant view expressed in these quotations, however, an ever growing number of Japanese specialists and some Western scholars are presenting evidence and interpretations that are clearly in conflict with the majority view. Among the Japanese scholars, Ando Seiichi has gone so far as to state rather bluntly that:
Ordinarily, it is assumed that the peasants suffered increasing poverty because of an increasing tax burden levied upon them by their masters who were in deteriorating financial circumstances. But if the rulers had had sufficient power to transfer their financial difficulties to the peasants, they would not have suffered the difficulties which they experienced.
According to Ito and Kawana, the life of the peasant, from whom the ruling class was unable to extract more taxes, was steadily improving:
By the end of the eighteenth century ... even the [peasants living in] mountainous villages were beginning to eat mochi [rice cakes] with sugar in them ... the life of the commoners was visibly improving. What brought about such an improvement? Even for the smallest peasants, it had become impossible to live by just paying the rice tax and providing all they needed by themselves. They had to produce what they could sell for cash. ... The need for cash was no longer limited to the upper-class peasants. And, once cash came into the villages, it became the motive force for improving the living standard of all.
But by far the most open challenge to the traditional view has been issued by Hayami Akira, the unquestioned leading scholar in the study of Tokugawa population:
[In Tokugawa Japan] both the output per acre and per man rose. The economy did not merely expand, retaining the same productive structure; it grew accompanied by qualitative changes — it developed. ... The economic development of the Tokugawa period was not slow by the standards of preindustrial societies. ... A vicious circle of poverty was cut, and a new chain of growth was formed: increases in productivity, the formation of a surplus, a rise in the living standard, the accumulation of capital, and then back to increases in productivity.
Among the Western scholars, Thomas C. Smith, author of a number of studies on the Tokugawa economy, stated after analyzing records from villages in Kaga han and other domains:
Add to urban growth an increase throughout the population in per capita consumption of food and fibers such as unquestionably took place, and one is forced to conclude that there was a very sizable increase in the productivity of agricultural labor. There was also an increase in crop yields; on individual fields for which we have production data it ran as high as 112 per cent in fifty years."
And, in his well-known essay on the growth of Tokugawa commerce, E. Sydney Crawcour made it amply clear that his description of commerce reflected "rising agricultural productivity," which met the needs of the "free-spending citizens."
While the number of scholars who question the dominant view has clearly been growing, especially during the past fifteen years, they have not succeeded in changing, let alone deposing, the majority view. The reason is that while the predominant view is based either explicitly or implicitly on the Marxist framework of analysis, scholars questioning the well-established interpretation of the majority do not yet possess an overall, unifying analytical framework of their own with which to replace the Marxist framework of analysis. The results, therefore, have provided only a partial critique of the long-standing majority view, the presentation of a series of disjointed pieces of evidence questioning the orthodox interpretation or, even worse, attempts to include contradictory facts and interpretations in studies that are still basically dependent on the Marxist view of Tokugawa economic and demographic change.
Given the state of the frontiers of research in this area, Fairbank, Reischauer, and Craig, the authors of a respected textbook, trod very carefully when answering the questions of what happened to the economy and the peasants in the second half of the Tokugawa period. They indicated their knowledge of the latest research findings:
The Japanese population grew with the economy but not as rapidly. It stood at about 30 million at the time of the first census in 1721, which is thought to have been a 50 per cent increase over the estimated 20 million for 1600 and was well above the population of any European country at that time. In the second half of the Tokugawa period the population grew hardly at all, despite a continued, even if slower, growth of the economy. As a consequence, there was a clear rise in living standards throughout the Tokugawa period, even for the peasantry. What had once been luxurious city ways became commonplace in the countryside too. Thus during these centuries, the Japanese economy outpaced the population.
But the authors were also aware that the orthodox view still prevails, and thus very skillfully wove this into their discussion:
Despite generally improving economic conditions, however, the economic position of large parts of the peasantry seems to have deteriorated during the second half of the Tokugawa period. This was reflected in the rising number of famines and also of "peasant uprisings," which usually were peaceful demonstrations against increased taxes or misgovernment and turned to violence only late in the period. The root cause of this situation seems to have been a growing imbalance in the distribution of rural wealth.
John W. Hall, an eminent Tokugawa specialist, clearly believes that life was getting better in Tokugawa Japan:
During the last century of the Tokugawa period it was not population that outstripped production, but the reverse. ... Signs of affluence were plentiful. ... One of the most obvious signs of economic growth in Tokugawa Japan was to be seen in the general improvement of the standard of living of the four classes. Evidence of better housing, clothing, food, and more entertainment and leisure was everywhere apparent after the middle of the seventeenth century.
On the other hand, Hall dealt with the evidence on peasant unrest and rural poverty by relying on the esssentially Marxist explanation of intraclass economic polarization in the villages:
The "economic problem" of the late Tokugawa period was more a matter of differentials in regional development and of the unequal distribution of wealth. At the village level it was as much as anything the spread of landlordism and commercial activity which led to the breakup of the traditional village economy and to many of the social dislocations which troubled the authorities. ... Village society began to separate out at two levels, at the top a small group of wealthy, partially commercialized, families and at the bottom the general run of tenant and part-time cultivators and laborers. The differential development of Tokugawa economy, in which the economically underprivileged may well have found conditions unbearable may help explain why evidence of agricultural commercialization and signs of affluence could coexist with a heavy incidence of peasant uprisings.
But if the number of those who found life unbearable was significantly large (enough to have been the cause of the lack of population growth), who was purchasing the increasing variety of goods made available in the villages? ("Economic surplus made possible numerous secondary activities such as moneylending or the manufacture of sake, shoyu (soy sauce) or textiles.") And Hall leaves the question of Tokugawa population growth unanswered: "This leveling off of Japanese population has never been adequately explained," but one cannot fault him for this statement, as it is a fair assessment of the scholarship to date.
Clearly, the problem faced by both Reischauer and Hall in the textbooks quoted above was how to integrate the large amount of contradictory evidence into a comprehensive explanation of economic, demographic, and social change in the Tokugawa period when the only model available — explicit or implicit — was the essentially Marxist framework used by Japanese scholars. But a better understanding of economic and demographic change during the Tokugawa period is more important than simply clearing up the remaining puzzles over contradictory evidence. Greater knowledge of these subjects will assist and enhance our understanding of the rapid industrialization that followed the Meiji Restoration. It will provide important non-Western input useful in the continuing search for answers to the relationship existing between economic and demographic changes in premodern societies, and will add knowledge crucial for the better understanding of political, social and other aspects of Tokugawa history.
Thus, the purpose of this book is to reexamine the Tokugawa economy with the aid of an analytical framework based on modern, as opposed to Marxist, economic theory, and to investigate demographic changes and their relationship to economic change. Three basic hypotheses are tested in this book: The first is that the economy grew throughout the entire Tokugawa period, though slowly by modern standards, and unevenly. The second is that the rate of economic growth tended to exceed the rate of population growth even in the poorer regions, thus raising the living standard of the large majority of the population throughout the Tokugawa period despite major famines. The third is that population growth was controlled by a variety of methods, ranging from deliberate individual control to pressures arising from tradition or social custom, and that the major reason for such control was to enjoy a rising standard of living, even in those areas that lagged in economic growth. That is, population control for the purpose of maintaining a subsistence standard of living was rare and mostly limited to brief periods during severe famines.
In testing these three hypotheses, we will also attempt to answer the following questions:
1. To what extent are the Tokugawa statistics on population and grain output reliable? Can they be considered at the very least indicative of relative growth rates to be used for comparative purposes?
2. Was the effective tax rate on the peasants rising or falling?
3. How much evidence is there on productivity changes in agriculture and in manufacturing? What effect, if any, did productivity changes have on wages and on the tax base?
4. Why did the centers of commerce and manufacturing shift from the largest urban centers to the rural areas? Which groups created the demand for the products produced in the rural areas?
5. What patterns of demographic behavior resulted in the population trends of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Were the seemingly low rates of population growth due to high mortality or low fertility or to a combination of the two?
6. To what extent are the seemingly stationary population trends in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries due to the effects of famine? How significant were the famines?
7. How much deliberate population control took place? What were the primary methods used? Were abortion and infanticide the primary methods, or were social controls such as late marriage perhaps more important?
8. Was there a labor shortage in Tokugawa Japan or was labor in excess supply? Why did people move? How much did migration to the economically prospering areas affect population trends?
To ensure that our analyses of economic and demographic trends are consistent with our answers to the above questions and many others that will arise in the course of our discussion, we have constructed an analytical framework of economic and demographic change in Tokugawa Japan. In testing our hypotheses on the economy, and thus our framework, we shall rely primarily on evidence provided by Japanese and Western scholars, by scholars who support as well as those who oppose the traditional view. Given the scope of the subject and the nature of the evidence, our testing of the economic aspects had to be limited. Our selection was the Kinai region and the domains of Morioka and Okayama. We believe that one of the major goals of our study will be accomplished if others interested in Tokugawa Japan are persuaded to add their studies on a domain or a region to support or reject the hypotheses we offer.
In defending the demographic aspects of our hypotheses and several propositions that are derived from them, we go a step further than in the testing of the economic aspects. Within the limits imposed by the time-consuming nature of the research and by the availability of the data sources, we present a considerable amount of new quantitative evidence generated from heretofore unused original village sources. Though we must acknowledge the pioneering research of several Japanese scholars, especially Nomura Kanetaro and Hayami Akira, we believe that our evaluation of various patterns of fertility, mortality, nuptiality, family size, population composition, life expectancy, birth intervals, and migration add revealing insights to those already provided by Hayami and others. More importantly, we believe these insights provide support for the hypotheses advanced in our reexamination of the Tokugawa economy and are useful in further studies of elusive causal relationships between economic and demographic change in preindustrial societies.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 by Susan B. Hanley, Kozo Yamamura. Copyright © 1977 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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