------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Classic Reviews in Economic History
Thomas C. Smith, _The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan_. Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1959. xi + 250 pp.
Review Essay by Osamu Saito, Institute of Economic Research,
Hitotsubashi University.
A Peasant Economy and the Growth of the Market
In the 1950s, when the late Professor Thomas Smith wrote this book,
peasant farming was portrayed as a mode of production and livelihood
incompatible with the market economy. Japan before Meiji was regarded
as a typical example of such peasant economies. As Smith notes in the
opening sentence of the book, this was to some extent true because
"In the course of its long history, Japanese agriculture has in some
respects changed remarkably little": farming was a family enterprise,
holdings tiny and fragmented, and cultivation methods simple -- all
features of a typical peasant society. Of course, there were some
changes but they were never as dramatic as the agrarian changes the
West experienced, so that for many scholars "it is tempting to
dismiss as unimportant such changes as in fact have taken place."
Against this historiographical background, Smith argues in the book
that the changes that actually took place in Japanese history,
especially in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), were in fact of great
importance. His argument is that "their central feature was a shift
from cooperative to individual farming" and that "if one of its
causes may be singled out as especially important, it must be the
_growth of the market_" (pp. ix-x; emphasis added).
The book is about these changes and, based largely on a body of
evidence uncovered by Japanese historians, traces their social and
economic consequences. It begins with a model of the traditional
village society in the seventeenth century, which is set out in Part
I. At the core of village society, according to that model, was a
large landholder's domestic group. It was composed of three
concentric circles with the inner one being the family of the holder,
the main household. The second circle consisted of a group of
relatives outside the direct line of descent, and the third circle of
hereditary servants and similar subordinate persons who were related
to the holder by neither blood nor marriage but were nonetheless
registered as part of his family group. In every village such large
holder households were not many; only a few took this form of
"extended family." Other villagers were all small holders whose
family form was, according to Smith, in most cases "nuclear"; and
they were in all likelihood households created by partitioning. Since
the partition of family land, even when practiced, was never made on
an equal footing, those "new" groups of branch-family households were
bound to be small holders who had to rely on resources provided by
the main household as well as the village itself. Thus the structure
of the traditional village was both cooperative and hierarchical,
with "clusters of interdependent interests that clung together with
great force and were broken up only when competitive inducements of
trade began, much later, to dissolve the internal ties" (p. 54).
Such "competitive inducements" came from market growth in the
countryside, which, it is suggested, was concomitant with urban
growth. Thus, Smith begins Part II with a survey of the extent of
commercial farming (cultivation of cotton, indigo, mulberries,
oilseeds, tobacco, and other cash crops) and farm family
by-employment (spinning, reeling, weaving, straw plaiting, etc.),
both of which are supposed to have spread in the rural provinces
during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Then in the
subsequent chapters Smith traces the consequent changes: how
agricultural technology changed, how labor was transformed, how
wealthy landlords emerged within the village society, and how the
traditional ties between households dissolved. The underlying
tendency in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was for some
branch families and hereditary servants to become separate from the
main household. They formed their own households. Their landholding
was sometimes too small to feed themselves on the farm, but thanks to
the expanding market economy, they were in all likelihood able to
find either by-employment opportunities or wage jobs, or both, as
former labor service was increasingly replaced by live-in servants on
yearly contract, who were eventually substituted by workers employed
by the day. Sometimes, especially in crisis years, they had to borrow
money from large holders in the village with a parcel of land placed
in pawn, which in many cases ended up with the loss of its holding
right: they became tenants of the large holders. The latter half of
the Tokugawa period saw their numbers increasing, but at the same
time it is not unlikely that increased tenancy in turn allowed them
to stay on the land. With these significant, if not revolutionary,
tendencies established, Smith devotes the final chapter to relating
them to the making of modern Japan, placing particular emphasis on
what commercial farming and expanding labor markets taught peasants
in relation to the forthcoming age of the factory.
The book's major points, such as the supposition that the weight of
non-agricultural income in the rural economy had become substantial
by the early nineteenth century, have subsequently been confirmed by
his own and other historians' works (Smith 1969/88, Nishikawa 1987,
Shimbo and Saito 2004). From an early twenty-first century vantage
point, however, it is not surprising that the progress of research
since then has made some of the other propositions no longer tenable.
One such example is his description of a shift from "extended" to
"nuclear" family. Each of the cooperative groups in
seventeenth-century documents that he regarded as one large and
complex family household was probably nothing but an estate
organization accommodating several separate domestic groups together,
most of which were family households in a much simpler form and
possessed their own hearth and living space. As a unit of production,
however, the structure of the seventeenth-century estate organization
may have been not much different from what he described in the book:
it was hierarchical and there were extra-economic ties between those
households. On the other hand, the family form that he considered
"nuclear" should now be taken to mean "stem family," since by the
term "nuclear" Smith meant a small family that had no lateral
extension but tended to extend vertically. As far as the family
system is concerned, therefore, there seems to have been little
change throughout the Tokugawa period. What actually changed was the
way in which farming was organized and its tasks carried out, which
was _not_ associated with a transformation in the system of family
formation. Another point I have to make concerns the extent of
urbanization and the role given to it as an engine of market growth.
In the chapter on "The Growth of the Market," Smith noted that "in
the two centuries after 1600, urban population grew with astonishing
speed" (p. 67). Probably it did as far as the seventeenth century is
concerned, but we now know, from Smith's own research work published
later, that urban population did not grow in the one and a half
centuries after 1700: Edo, Osaka and some of the castle towns even
recorded a population decline. Market-led output growth -- "Smithian
growth" in recent terminology (named after Adam Smith) -- that took
place in the latter half of the Tokugawa period should now be
considered "rural-centered" (Smith 1973/88; see also Shimbo and Saito
2004).
Such necessary revisions notwithstanding, _The Agrarian Origins of
Modern Japan_ remains a landmark achievement in Tokugawa economic
history. It is not just because the book is still very informative
and makes lucid reading, but chiefly because what Smith delineated
with respect to "what changed" and "what remained unchanged" is
largely accurate. Given the intellectual milieu of the 1950s and the
60s, however, this publication may have been considered a book about
"what changed" only -- a work fitting very nicely in the framework of
modernization theses such as the rise of individualism and the
transition from status to contract, since the "growth of the market,"
the guiding concept of the book, has long been regarded as an
important component of the modernization process.
However, Smith makes several important points that do not necessarily
fit with the modernization scenarios. First, he makes it clear that
Tokugawa Japan's path of agricultural progress was distinctly
different from the Western one, suggesting that they would never
converge on a single model. As he describes in the chapter on
"Agricultural Technology," farm output rose with the expansion of
commercial farming, which was closely associated with the more
intensive use of fertilizers, widening plant varieties, proliferation
of farming tools, and the extension of irrigation. The irrigation
work, i.e. construction of dikes, ponds, ditches, devices for lifting
water into paddy fields and for other purposes, required a
substantial amount of capital, much of which was provided by
overlords and wealthy merchants. At the same time, however, the
construction work itself required a substantial input of labor. And
all the other improvements in farming methods were also labor
intensive. Some individual innovations may have reduced labor
requirements per unit of cultivated land, but the overall effect was
to intensify the use of labor. All this made farming even more labor
intensive and the unit of farming even smaller, the characteristics
that remained unchanged throughout the period from Tokugawa to Meiji.
To put it differently, "the character of agrarian change [in Tokugawa
and Meiji Japan] ... was determined as much by what did _not_ change
about farming as by what did" (p. 208; see also Ishikawa 1978,
Francks 1983).
Secondly, while Smith examines in detail the rise of landlord-tenant
relations and its accompanying phenomenon of increasing
differentiation of landholdings within the agrarian society, and also
the processes of hereditary subordinates evolving into servants for
yearly wages and of service agreements becoming from long-term to
short-term contracts, thus describing a long-run transition to wage
labor, he never speaks of the emergence of a wage earning class of
landless agricultural labors. This may be interpreted as suggesting
that those tendencies, together with the above-mentioned move towards
the intensification in farming and the spread of non-agricultural
by-employments in the rural districts, resulted in keeping the
peasantry from disintegrating itself (Saito 1986).
Thirdly, therefore, all this "kept the agricultural population a
relatively homogeneous class of small peasant farmers despite the
presence of landlords and obvious differences in wealth; [and] it
preserved the organic unity of the village community despite the
growth of a nonfarming population within it" (p. 107). In other
words, the coming of commercial farming and the associated growth of
labor markets in the Tokugawa period did not signal the end of a
peasant economy. Rather, in the Japanese past peasant farming evolved
towards more uniformity as the market grew.
Thus, this 1959 book suggested that the Tokugawa peasant household,
as an integral unit of production and reproduction, had a modus
operandi distinctly different from those found for other early modern
agricultural populations, and also that it emerged in the process of
interactions with the growth of the market. Smith addressed this
research question later when he worked on demography and on the
history of time discipline (Smith 1977, 1986/88). In the first, he
demonstrated how the Tokugawa peasant families tried, with a dim idea
of family planning, to adjust their size and composition to
alternating life-cycle stages and also changing economic
circumstances, and in the second, how they developed a stringent
sense of time discipline within the household in order to cope with
the increased intensity of labor in farming and by-employment
activities and, hence, an increased need for planning over the whole
farming year. This latter point implies that Meiji Japanese workers
did not need to be taught time discipline in the factory, which
strongly suggests that there was _continuity_ from Tokugawa to Meiji.
In the former demographic study, Smith made a strong argument that
Tokugawa peasants adjusted their family size and composition by means
of sex selective infanticide. This provoked a debate, but as I have
commented elsewhere (Saito 1989), the gist of his entire argument was
that the Tokugawa peasant family household tried hard to balance its
numbers with farm size and to secure the right composition in the
family workforce, for which purpose infanticide was only one of the
options accessible to the family. There were some other means of
demographic adjustments such as abortion and the timing of
marriage-out of non-inheriting children, as well as economic ones
such as sending children, both male and female, into service in the
village and in cities and towns, or getting them to take up an
industrial by-employment at home. Those economic opportunities
increased with the growth of the market, and with changes that
accelerated after the Meiji reforms. This consideration, therefore,
points to another element of _continuity_ from the early modern to
the modern period, the theme already explicit in the writing of _The
Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan_.
Smith noted, retrospectively in the preface to a collection of essays
he had published since the 1950s, that while writing on "how Japan
became a modern society ... with a generalized notion drawn from
Western history of how much transformations occur," he had "paid
particular attention to factors that contributed to making modern
Japanese society similar to but _profoundly different_ from Western
counterparts" (Smith 1988, p. 1; emphasis added). As such, therefore,
his work collectively made a pioneering contribution to the on-going
debates in global economic history.
References:
Francks, P. (1983), _Technology and Agricultural Development in
Pre-war Japan_, New Haven: Yale University Press.
Ishikawa, S. (1978), _Labour Absorption in Asian Agriculture: An
Issues Paper_, Bangkok: Asian Regional Programme for Employment
Promotion of the International Labour Office; reprinted in S.
Ishikawa (1981), _Essays on Technology, Employment and Institutions
in Economic Development_, Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1-149.
Nishikawa, S. (1987), "The Economy of Ch�sh� on the Eve of
Industrialization," _Economics Studies Quarterly_ 38 (December),
323-37.
Saito, O. (1986), "The Rural Economy: Commercial Agriculture,
By-employment and Wage Work," in M.B. Jansen and G. Rozman, eds.,
_Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji_, Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 400-420.
Saito, O. (1989), "Bringing the Covert Structure of the Past to
Light: Review Article of T.C. Smith, _Native Sources of Japanese
Industrialization, 1750-1920_," _Journal of Economic History_ 49
(December), 992-999.
Shimbo, H. and O. Saito (2004), "The Economy on the Eve of
Industrialization," in A. Hayami, O. Saito and R.P. Toby, eds., _The
Economic History of Japan, 1600-1990_. I: _Emergence of Economic
Society in Japan, 1600-1859_, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 337-68.
Smith, T.C. (1969), "Farm Family By-employments in Preindustrial
Japan," _Journal of Economic History_ 29 (December), 687-715;
reprinted in Smith (1988), 71-102.
Smith, T.C. (1973), "Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the West,"
_Past and Present_ 60 (August), 127-160; reprinted in Smith (1988),
15-49.
Smith, T.C. (1977), _Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a
Japanese Village, 1717-1830_, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Smith, T.C. (1986), "Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan," _Past
and Present_ 111 (May), 165-197; reprinted in Smith (1988), 199-235.
Smith, T.C. (1988), _Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization,
1750-1920_, Berkeley: University of California Press.
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