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Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920

University of California Press

Any fair-minded reader will discover two or three consistent biases running through this book. In one way or another all the essays concern how Japan became a modern society and were written with a generalized notion drawn from Western history of how such transformations occur. This perspective is often held to be the source of bias because historians who apply it—whatever their persuasion and nationality—tend to look for the confirmation of Western models and to see departures from them as backwardness and weakness. In my case the model gave rise to a rather different bias: I tend to pass over Japanese similarities with the West as possibly important but uninteresting and concentrate on the positive aspects of differences. These essays are therefore a bit like a trip abroad undertaken in the hope of extending rather than repeating experience and in the hope that the experience will be edifying, not merely new. Put differently, I have paid particular attention to factors that contributed to making modern Japanese society similar to but profoundly different from Western counterparts.

One essay tries to explain how a modern revolution was made by elements of an aristocracy; another how and with what consequences workers' criticism of the early factory called for status justice rather than the fulfillment of rights; yet another how time discipline in modern industry came to be based on a principle rather different from "time is money." Thus the cumulative sense of these essays, as well as other things I have written, goes against the widely accepted notion

that the constraints of a common technology make industrial societies ever more alike (which usually means others are becoming more like us). I can see little in what I have studied to justify that belief, but admittedly my subjects of study have not been random choices.

If the emphasis on divergences from the model may be called intellectual—and I doubt that is the right word—a less obtrusive bias is aesthetic. I have been drawn, as many others have, to what is old in Japan rather than to what is new, preferring, as Tanizaki Jun'ichiro*

The third bias is perhaps a corollary of the other two. In slighting much about the Japanese past that did not prove useful to the present, I have no doubt also slighted the cost of what occurred. There is little in what I have written about such subjects as the Temmei famine; or the condition of tenant farmers; or the vastly increased number of wanderers, scavengers, peddlers, and street entertainers that early industrialization produced. Nor have I paid much attention to the daughter and only child in Nakahara who served her aged and widowed father until his death, probably doing most of the work on their tiny farm; only then, at the age of forty-three, did she marry for the first of three times to young men.

I have not thought such subjects less legitimate or inherently less interesting than those I wrote about. But when I began studying Japanese history immediately after World War II, the dark side of the Japanese past needed no elaboration and had many distinguished analysts. What seemed to me to need study was how, in such darkness, so much

that was admirable about Japanese life, even under the most trying postwar conditions, had flourished. No question in that connection intrigued me more than whether modern Japanese industry had strong indigenous roots or was merely a cunning transplant made possible by the combination of a talent for imitation and an absolutist government able to mobilize popular energies on behalf of national expansion. In the one case there was great hope for revival; in the other, decidedly less, since at least one of the conditions of earlier success was not likely to be repeated.

After writing a doctoral thesis in the late 1940s on early factory industry in Japan, I turned to the study of Tokugawa agrarian history, looking for economic and social change among the people who farmed that might help explain subsequent industrialization. The search was in part prompted by reading in Western economic history, but the major stimulus was the role rural people played in the development of the silk industry in the Meiji period. Behind that impressive display of enterprise, I thought, must lie some recent cultural preparation worth understanding.

I soon discovered profoundly contradictory evidence. On the one hand, countrywide indices of the economy were decidedly negative. About 1700, after a century of extraordinary economic expansion in which arable had greatly increased, castle-towns in all parts of the country grown rapidly, and national population more than doubled, the economy seemingly settled into long-term stagnation. From the first Tokugawa census in 1721 to the last in 1846, national population hovered around 26 million commoners. Castle-towns and other major urban centers, with some notable exceptions, suffered severe losses of population. Famine occurred on an unprecedented scale, the land tax relative to assessed yields reached startling levels, and peasant uprisings grew in frequency and scale.

On the other hand, I discovered that the evidence accumulating from local studies by Japanese scholars, often of single villages, occasionally of the records of individual farmers or merchants, gave a distinctly more optimistic impression. These studies suggested that agricultural technology was advancing, trade and industry growing in the countryside, village schools being founded, literacy spreading, and

peasant families in some number moving up as well as down the economic and social scale by the purchase and mortgage of rights to land.

There seemed no way to reconcile the conflicting sets of impressions. On the whole the gloomier view prevailed, partly because immediately after the war Japanese scholars found little that was helpful in their past and partly because the optimistic evidence seemed scarcely more than scattered local instances.

One major Tokugawa transformation affecting agriculture and most people who farmed was difficult to classify. Although it began earlier and proceeded more rapidly in some regions than others, it appeared to be under way in all but the most remote and economically backward places. This was a transition on large holdings from holder to tenant cultivation (from tezukuri to kosaku ). At the beginning of the process, most villages...