Consumption and the Industrious Revolution

Abstract

Japanese people have typically been regarded as historically too poor and too embedded in a subsistence economy to have engaged in a ‘consumer revolution’ such as preceded and accompanied the Industrial Revolution in Europe. However, while household subsistence production certainly continued, output of manufactured and processed consumer products was clearly increasing and there is definite evidence of a growing market for ‘luxuries’ such as sugar, tea, and soy sauce, as well as of the diffusion of fashion, especially in commercially produced silk and cotton textiles. As a result, whatever its limitations, the domestic consumer market represented the main source of demand for the output of Japanese producers, while households continued to find ways to intensify the use of their labour so as to increase their consumption, in their version of the industrious revolution.