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Bringing the Covert Structure of the Past to Light

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Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750–1920. By SmithThomas C.. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. ix, 278. $32.50.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Osamu Saito
Osamu Saito
Affiliation:
Hitotsubashi University
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Type
Review Article
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The Journal of Economic History , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 992 - 999
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1989

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References

1 Japan under the Tokugawa Shogunate (or bakufu, founded in 1603)—up to the Meiji Restoration of 1868—is often called the baku-han society since the whole country was not only governed by the bakufu, but much of the land was allocated to as many as 300 han (domains), each of which was administered by its daimyō (lord). In this respect, and in the fact that the country was virtually closed to foreigners, the Tokugawa period differed from the following era, the Meiji period. (The Meiji emperor died in 1912, but economic and social historians find it convenient to treat the period from the restoration of 1868 to 1920, after which the country was hit by a series of depressions and crises, as a unit.) During the Meiji Restoration a nation state was created, and the country was opened up to foreign trade. New commodities came in, as did Western ideas and institutions. Thus it is commonplace to term the period after the Meiji Restoration “modern” and the Tokugawa period “pre-modern” or “early modern.” This dichotomy is often used interchangeably with the “industrial/preindustrial” one. Smith sometimes puts these labels on the Tokugawa and Meiji periods, but he does not accept the dichotomy uncritically. Quite the contrary: throughout the book he questions such chronological divisions.Google Scholar

2 The data are summarized in my Shōka no sekai, uradana no sekai: Edo to Osaka no hikaku toshishi [Men in merchant houses, men in back streets: Edo and Osaka. A comparative urban history ] (Tokyo, 1987), P. 23.Google Scholar

3 Smith notes that one factor which accounted for the difference between Japan and the West was the absence of foreign trade in Tokugawa Japan: it deterred the growth of large cities based on long-distance trade (pp. 34–35). True as it is, this statement should not be taken to imply that “pexport” to wider markets was not important in the Tokugawa economy. From the beginning of the Tokugawa period, interregional trade was far from negligible, and as it grew, so did mercantile competition among the various domains.Google Scholar

4 Nishikawa's, work is summarized in his “The economy of Chōshū on the eve of industrialization,” The Economic Studies Quarterly, 38, (12. 1987), pp. 323–37. See especially table 1, p. 325.Google Scholar

5 According to Nishikawa's table (Ibid.), the overall tax rate (proportion of taxes to the total value added) in Chōshū's nonagricultural sector was as low as 3 percent as against 52 percent on agricultural products.

6 For theories and evidence regarding the changing size distribution of farms in the Asian context, see Booth, Anne and Sundrum, R. M., Labour Absorption in Agriculture (Oxford, 1985), chap. 6. They contend that Japan exemplifies the case in which differentiation and increasing tenancy were compatible with the nonemergence of landlessness.Google Scholar

7 I have tried elsewhere to go some way towards a better understanding of the demographic and economic workings of the Tokugawa peasant economy. See “Population and the peasant family economy in proto-industrial Japan,” Journal of Family History, 8 (Spring 1983), pp. 30–54;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand “The rural economy: commercial agriculture, by-employment and wage work.” in Jansen, M. B. and Rozman, G., eds., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, 1986), pp. 400–20.Google Scholar

8 More precisely, the bakufu surveys document only the stagnation after the 1720s. Akira Hayami speculates there was a countrywide rapid population growth in an earlier period; see his “The population at the beginning of the Tokugawa period: an introduction to the historical demography of pre-industrial Japan,” Keio Economic Studies, 4 (1966–1967), pp. 1–28.Google Scholar

9 See, for example, Hayami, Akira, “Aspects démographiques d'un village japonais, 1671– 1871,” Annales: E.S.C., 24 (mai-juin 1969), Pp. 617–39;Google Scholarand Hanley, S. B. and Yamamura, Kozo, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600–1868 (Princeton, 1977). There are additional Japanese-language publications of village studies.Google Scholar

10 The first attempt in this direction is probably Mosk's, Carl work: Patriarchy and Fertility: Japan and Sweden, 1880–1960 (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

11 In this respect it is a pity that the author did not include a paper he wrote with Dana Morris on the demography of an outcast village. It was a nonpeasant community, most of whose inhabitants were engaged in unskilled paid jobs. Morris and Smith found they exhibited very different patterns of demographic behavior than the Nakahara people who worked on family farms. Having a nonpeasant mode of production and reproduction to compare with the other chapters in this book might have highlighted the ways in which the Tokugawa peasant society worked. See “Fertility and mortality in an outcast village in Japan, 1750–1869,” in Hanley, S. B. and Wolf, A. P., eds., Family and Population in East-Asian History (Stanford, 1985), pp. 229–46.Google Scholar

12 Thompson, E. P., “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism,” Past and Present, 38 (12. 1967), pp. 56–97;CrossRefGoogle Scholarand “The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century,” Past and Present, 50 (02. 1971), pp. 76–136.CrossRefGoogle ScholarFor an application of the “moral-economy” concept to rice-growing Asian communities and a criticism of it, see Scott, James C., The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, 1976);Google Scholarand Popkin, Samuel L., The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam (Berkeley, 1979).Google Scholar

13 Scheiner, Irwin, “Benevolent lords and honorable peasants: rebellion and peasant consciousness in Tokugawa Japan,” in Najita, Tetsuo and Scheiner, Irwin, eds., Japanese Thought in the Tokugawa Period, 1600–1868 (Chicago, 1978), pp. 39–62.Google Scholar

14 Even in English, there are now a considerable number of publications on Japan's peasant uprisings and tenant disputes. Vlastos's, StephenPeasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley, 1986), to name but one, examines Scheiner's argument and the relevance of the Scott version of the moral-economy model, and concludes that “[t]he lesson to be learned from the study of Tokugawa peasant movements is that ‘moral economy’ political behavior, that is, protests and demands made in the name of the right to subsistence, do not necessarily, or even probably, imply a desire to return to earlier [pre-market] modes of production. The peasants understandably wanted protection within the new relationships” (p. 157).Google Scholar

Having taken a cursory look at labor movements in early industrialism in both Britain and Japan, I am struck by a sharp contrast with respect to the skilled artisans ‘attitude toward apprenticeship and the employers’ use of unapprenticed workers. Just as was true regarding the conflict over time, worker-management disputes over the right to train apprentices do not appear to have been acute or frequent in Meiji factories.

15 See also chap. 7 of Nakahara, where he clearly states that “[h]istorians and anthropologists have emphasized the solidarity of the traditional Japanese farming village …. But there was an equally important competitive side to village life that has been largely ignored: a competition between families rather than individuals, covert rather than open, but fierce and unrelenting nevertheless” (pp. 114–15).Google Scholar