------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ------
Title: Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan

Published by EH.NET (November 2011)

Bettina Gramlich-Oka and Gregory Smits, editors,/ Economic Thought in Early
Modern Japan/. Boston: Brill, 2010. xxii + 298 pp. $154 (hardcover), ISBN:
978-90-04-18383-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert Hellyer, Department of History, Wake Forest
University.

While recent scholarship has shed new light on many facets of early modern
Japan, less has been written about economic issues, making this a welcome
volume.  Emerging from international conferences held in Germany and the
United States, this book is the first installment in a Brill series,
“Monies, Markets and Finance in East Asia, 1600-1900.”  At the broadest
level, Gramlich-Oka and Smits seek to “deepen and revise our understanding
of early modern Japan,” and also “enlarge and refine the analytical
vocabulary for describing early modern economic thought and policy” (back
cover) -- goals they have certainly achieved.

In the introduction, Smits and Mark Metzler note perceptions of early modern
Japan, still found in some survey histories, that the volume seeks to
contest: a Confucian disdain for commerce that stifled economic growth,
commercial and intellectual networks defined primarily by a rigid
Confucian-style class structure (samurai-agriculturalist-artisan-merchant),
and a politico-economic order of “collective feudalism” (the /bakuhan/
system).  Following recent studies (such as Ravina 1999 and Howell 2005),
this volume successfully challenges those perceptions and adds much to our
knowledge of early modern Japan by presenting fresh insights on economic
theories, commercial ideologies, as well as case studies of individual
merchants and intellectuals, domains, and the Ryukyu Kingdom (present-day
Okinawa prefecture).

In the first chapter, Ethan Segal offers useful avenues to consider the
economic transition from medieval to early modern, highlighting the
monetization that began in the thirteenth century and despite the political
dislocation of the Warring States period (1467-1573), continued into the
seventeenth century. Kawaguchi Hiroshi’s subsequent chapter, “Economic
Thought Concerning Freedom and Control,” is less engaging but does offer
some intriguing conclusions, such as the fact that during the Edo period
(1603-1868), the word jiyū, which commonly connotes “freedom” in modern
Japanese, “indicated a state without stagnation, not autonomous agency
implied by the modern sense of ‘freedom’” (p. 50).  Smits’
examination of the Ryukyuan official, Sai On, presents a portrait of a
Confucian-educated leader trying to develop state infrastructure, such as a
network of harbors, and pushing to “tweak laws and regulations so that
individual profit-seeking ended up contributing to the common good” (p.
88). Ochiai Kō describes the development of a domestic sugar industry in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stressing how Tokugawa leaders
encouraged production to reduce the outflow of bullion used to obtain brown,
white, and rock candy sugar from Dutch and Chinese merchants.  Nonetheless
the leaders of the shogunate also feared that as farmers cultivated sugar and
other valuable cash crops, they would neglect essential grains, most notably
rice, central to the feudal tax structure.  In her chapter, Gramlich-Oka
delivers an informative and valuable discussion of Kudō Heisuke, a physician
from a domain in northern Honshu, who operating in late eighteenth-century
social networks of high-ranking officials, daimyo (lords), doctors, and
scholars, offered informed critiques and policy proposals concerning foreign
trade and colonization of Ezo (present-day Hokkaido). Jan Sýkora also
focuses on the role of non-governmental actors and social networks with an
examination of Shōji Kōki, a merchant and self-made intellectual, whom
Sýkora asserts “played a part in preparing the intellectual background for
the profound economic and political changes” that unfolded in the Saga
domain (today’s Saga prefecture on the island of Kyushu) in the mid
nineteenth century (p. 176).  In the subsequent two chapters, Mark Ravina
presents a fascinating look at the community granary (/shasō/) as a
legitimized lending and credit agency within the Confucian inspired,
state-sponsored orthodoxy; Ishii Sumiyo details the life of Itō Yōzō, an
entrepreneur who more than adeptly navigated the political and social
upheavals that marked the transition from Tokugawa to Meiji in the late
nineteenth century.  While maintaining his family business, Itō not only
founded a silk promotion institute, a railway company, and a commercial bank
but also found time to establish two schools and to run for the Diet. In the
concluding chapter, Metzler slices the Edo period into novel units defined by
ebbs and flows in land and non-land tax revenues, monetary expansion and
restraint, domestic exchange rates as well as price movements.  His use of
modern terminology and points of analysis, such as the notion of “big
government” and comparisons to the Japanese experience in the twentieth
century, are fruitful and provocative.

All told, this volume provides many valuable takeaways including: an
increased understanding of the complex and varied networks of people, ideas
and, of course, goods, that defined early modern Japan; the energy with which
state and non-state actors brought to formulating and implementing pragmatic
solutions to pressing economic problems; and perhaps most of all, the broad
influence of economic thought centered on the “benefit of the
country/national interest” (/kokueki/), a term used, apparently quite
frequently, by intellectuals and domain and shogunal officials alike.
Nonetheless this reader was concerned that at times, the volume presents too
rosy of a picture of samurai-commoner relations in the early modern Japanese
polity.  To this point, I was reminded of another eighteenth-century
physician/economic theorist not noted in the book: Andō Shōeki, who
bitterly criticized the warrior class as socially useless consumers,
benefiting from an economy that exploited peasants (Norman 1949).

This caution aside, in multiple ways this book enhances our understanding of
the early modern Japanese economy and should be read by both scholars and
students of Japanese history.  As the editors aim, it will also interest
scholars of economic thought outside of Japan and East Asia (although the
decision, in some chapters, to provide the translation for every Japanese
term may distract the non-specialist reader). One also hopes that a more
affordable paperback edition will be published to allow it to be assigned in
undergraduate courses on early modern Japan.

References:

David L. Howell (2005). /Geographies of Identity in Nineteenth-Century
Japan/. Berkeley: University of California Press.

E. Herbert Norman (1949). “Andō Shōeki and the Anatomy of Japanese
Feudalism,” /Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan/, Third Series,
Vol. 2 (December 1949): 1-340.

Mark Ravina (1999). /Land and Lordship in Early Modern Japan/. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.

Robert Hellyer is Associate Professor of History at Wake Forest University.
His recent publications include /Defining Engagement: Japan and Global
Contexts, 1640-1868/ (Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).
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Geographic Location: Asia
Subject: Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History, History of
Economic Thought; Methodology
Time: 16th Century, 17th Century, 18th Century, 19th Century