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‘Pre-Modern’ Merchants and Modernization in Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Charles D. Sheldon
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Extract

The problem of the degree of economic development which took place in the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) and its effects on the modernization of Japan has given rise to considerable controversy. This is in part due to Marxist efforts to fit this development into Marxian categories, and to see in it elements of class struggle. These efforts have met stiff opposition from historians who have shown fairly persuasively how inapplicable these concepts are to the period. The trouble goes much further than this, however. Any kind of statistical measurement of the degree of economic development before 1868 is vastly complicated by the scarcity and by the notorious inaccuracy of Tokugawa statistical records, both public and private.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 3 , May 1971 , pp. 193 - 206
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1971

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References

1 The Rise of the Merchant Class in Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1868, an Introductory Survey (Assoc. for Asian Studies, New York: 1958). A monograph based chiefly on Japanese sources.Google Scholar

2 ‘Tokugawa and Modern Japan’ in Jansen, and Hall, , eds., Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan (Princeton: 1968), 318–19.Google Scholar Also in this collection, Crawcour, E. S., in ‘Changes in Japanese Commerce in the Tokugawa Period’, 189–212, ably and rightly stresses the regional, functional, and chronological diversity of the Tokugawa merchants, but in presenting the study as a revision of previous work, criticizes it in a somewhat uncharitable and inaccurate manner.Google Scholar (See my review in Pacific Affairs, Winter 1969–1970, 528–9.)Google Scholar

3 It should be remembered that in the agrarian society of the late sixteenth century, these functions were still not very important.Google Scholar

4 Hibbett, Howard S., ‘Saikaku as a Realist’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 15, 3–4 (12 1952), 411.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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6 The Western World and Japan (New York: 1950), 197.Google ScholarPubMed

7 See Smith, Thomas C., The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford: 1959). In the Tokugawa period, people can be classified either by actual function or by social class, and this can cause some confusion. Smith's peasant usurers, traders and capitalists and my ‘provincial merchants’ are roughly identical.Google Scholar

8 Quoted in Masao, Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: 1963), 7.Google Scholar The effort to create a respectable image for the entrepreneur is most interestingly treated in Hirschmeier, Johannes, The Origins of Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan (Harvard: 1964), 162–75.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Also see Marshall, B. K., Capitalism and Nationalism in Prewar Japan, The Ideology of the Business Elite, 1868–1941 (Stanford: 1967).Google Scholar

9 See Ranis, G., ‘The Community-centered Entrepreneur in Japanese Development’, Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 2 (12 1955), 80–97.Google Scholar

10 The Origins of Entrepreneurship…, 244.Google Scholar See also, in Lockwood, W. W., ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton: 1965), two important contributions which pursue this general line:CrossRefGoogle Scholar Yasuzō, Horie, ‘Modern Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan’, 183–208,Google Scholar and Hirschmeier, , ‘Shibusawa Eiichi: Industrial Pioneer’, 209–47, a somewhat laudatory account of perhaps the outstanding Meiji entrepreneur.Google Scholar

11 ‘A Re-examination of Entrepreneurship in Meiji Japan (1868–1912)’, Economic History Review, 2nd Ser. 21 (April 1968), 144–58.Google Scholar

12 ‘The Role of the Samurai in the Development of Modern Banking in Japan’, Journal of Economic History XXVII (1967), 198–220.Google Scholar Patrick, Hugh T., in Cameron, R., ed., Banking in the Early Stages of Industrialization (New York: 1967), ‘Japan, 1868–1914’, 239–89, gives support to Yamamura's interpretation of the profit motive in banking, which played such a crucial role in Japan's industrialization.Google Scholar

13 ‘The founding of Mitsubishi: A Case Study in Japanese Business History’, Business History Review XLI (1967), 141–60.Google Scholar