Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization

Abstract

The opening of the silk trade with the West is one of the best known of all episodes in Japanese economic history. The story, as told in countless school histories and academic texts, goes something like this. At the very time when Matthew Perry and his black ships were breaching Japan's isolation from the rest of the world, the European silk industry was falling victim to a devastating silkworm plague-the pebrine. During the 1850s and early 1860s this disease reduced Italian silk production to little more than half its previous level and French production to a mere fifth of the peak attained in the early 1850s. As a result, Japan was fortuitously presented with ideal conditions for its entry into world trade. Exports of silk and silkworm eggs grew rapidly and provided Japan with its principal source of foreign exchange earnings during the final decade of the Tokugawa period and early part of the Meiji era. This accident of nature, as one historian has called it, therefore played a vital role in helping Japan to take its first faltering steps on the road to industrialization.' Historical accidents, however, are rarely as accidental as they seem, for it is the best-prepared individuals or societies that are best able to take advantage of chance. As Claudio Zanier has pointed out, there were several reasons why European silk producers looked to Japan as their salvation from the consequences of the p6brine.2 For one thing, there was a long-standing attitude of respect for East Asian agricultural and silk-raising techniques, which can be traced back to the Chinese influence on the French Physiocrats of the 18th century. China itself was caught up in the political turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion, so European merchants in the 1850s tended to turn instead to the newly accessible and more politically stable trade ports of Japan.