Our knowledge of economic growth and demographic change in Tokugawa Japan is so limited that scholars specializing on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries not only have not arrived at a consensus but also disagree fundamentally even on basic questions such as: Was the economy growing during the second half of the Tokugawa period? Did the population increase after the beginning of the eighteenth century? Was the living standard of the peasant rising? Most Japanese scholars answer these questions in the negative, arguing that during the last century and a half of the Tokugawa period the economy failed to grow—teitai...

The traditional interpretation of Tokugawa economic history leaves the non-Marxist with many questions unanswered. It is in an attempt to resolve seemingly contradictory evidence and create a coherent picture of the economic and demographic changes in Tokugawa Japan that we offer here a new framework as an alternative to the Marxist interpretation. But first we will present what we believe to be the essential aspects of the basically Marxist framework adopted, often implicitly, by the majority of Japanese scholars. We do this in order to illustrate the reasons for the pessimistic tone that pervades much of the Japanese literature, the...

In some respects Japan has better data on its premodern population than any other country in the world. With an awareness of the importance of statistics and a degree of bureaucratic control unusual in a premodern government, the Tokugawa Bakufu carried out at various times surveys of the national population by province. The legacy of these surveys is ten extant sets of population figures for the commoner population dating from 1721 to 1846 and a large number of the yearly village population registers that formed the basis for the nationwide count. In this chapter we will present an analysis of...

Before presenting case studies of three regions, let us summarize here various indications on a nationwide level of increasing economic activities, a rising living standard, and other changes hypothesized in our analytical framework presented in Chapter Two. Since by far the most important contributor to total output was agriculture and the largest total output of this sector was rice, we will begin with an examination of the increase in the output of rice and other grains (measured in rice equivalent) and with a comparison of the rates of growth of these major grains with the population growth rates examined in...

The Kinai refers to the region composed of the fivekunior provinces of Izumi, Kawachi, Settsu, Yamashiro, and Yamato. It is not large; a circle twenty-five miles in diameter drawn around Osaka encompasses 85 to 90 percent of four of the fivekuniand about 40 percent of Yamato, the more developed and urbanized part. Here, we will limit our discussion to this small circle, which includes the ancient capitals of Nara and Kyoto and excludes the mountainous part of Yamato.

Despite its size, the economic importance of the Kinai in Tokugawa Japan is beyond dispute. Because the region...

Moriokahan,which presents in many ways a strong contrast to the Kinai region, was selected to represent a less rapidly growing domain for three important reasons. The first is that Morioka, long known for its economic backwardness, has been one of the examples most frequently enlisted to show the harshness of life in Tokugawa Japan. Historians following the traditional pessimistic view of the Tokugawa economy often cite the domain's detailed official population data to show that stagnation in the growth of the population took place as a result of severe famines that occurred periodically in the region.¹ The second...

The domain of Okayama was selected for inclusion as one of the samples studied here for several reasons, the most important being the rich records available at both the domain and the village levels.¹ Because of the reliability of the local records, three of the four villages whose population trends are analyzed in Chapters Eight through Ten are Okayama villages.

The economically advanced domain of Okayama as a whole belongs to Region I but, inasmuch as it contained a mountainous area in the north that did not share equally in its economic development, it can also be considered a microcosm...

In order to examine demographic behavior, to determine what fertility and mortality patterns were, to analyze population trends, and to estimate life expectancy, we must resort to data at the village level that offer the necessary long-term, detailed information. In this chapter, we will examine population growth rates, fertility, mortality, the composition of the population, and life expectancy in four villages in Tokugawa Japan. This small group of villages cannot be considered representative of the thousands of villages in Tokugawa Japan, but they will present some of the trends and patterns that did exist. And trends and patterns that can...

Analysis of fertility, mortality, and life expectancy in Tokugawa villages indicates an average completed family size of about three children, one which cannot be explained by high death rates. Although the traditional explanation for the slow growth of population in the second half of the Tokugawa period has been the recurrent and widespread famines and the resulting practices of abortion and infanticide resorted to by desperate, poverty-stricken peasants, our earlier analysis of the economy and the growing body of evidence that there were improvements in the standard of living in most of the country makes it difficult to explain the...

The existence of a variety of sources, in addition toshūmon-ara-tame-chōin time series sufficient for tracing families and individuals over time, permits a study in greater depth and a closer analysis of economic, social, and demographic variables for the village of Fujito than are possible for the other three villages included in this study. The study of individual families brings to life population patterns, which are after all the result of individual behavior, and it makes it easier to understand possible motivations for demographic behavior when we can see the results of each action and when we know the...

In our study of four villages we analyzed fertility and mortality, and patterns of demographic behavior, especially methods of population control, but our sample included only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of Tokugawa villages, and three of these were located in the same domain, Okayama. Consequently, the question arises as to how applicable the findings for these four villages are to the entire rural population of Tokugawa Japan. And how similar or different were population trends in Tokugawa Japan from trends in other preindustrial societies? In this chapter we will briefly look at population trends in other...

There is little doubt that the Japanese economy grew between the early sixteenth and the mid-nineteenth century, but what we set out to demonstrate in this book is that the economy grew throughout these two and a half centuries, though at differing rates, rather than stagnating during the latter half of the period as traditional Japanese economic historians would have us believe. However, while the economy continued to grow during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the rate of population growth slowed, thus creating throughout the country a rise in the standard of living of most Japanese and the accumulation of...