Some Misconceptions about the Economic History of Tokugawa Japan

Abstract

TRADITIONAL INTERPRETATIONS of Tokugawa Japan (16031867) tend to suggest that it was a static, repressive society with little evidence of social or economic change. The period is characterized as having subsistence agriculture, severely controlled commerce, and a rigidly enforced system of Confucian-based social and functional distinctions. Modem scholarship questions all of these assumptions. Urbanization and commerial expansion, the diffusion of processing and trade to the countryside, labor migrations, technological change in agriculture, and increased specialization in trade and handicraft industrial production all reflect the dynamics of a society in transition. There were boundaries on economic activity and social change, but they were far less rigid and less effectively enforced than most traditional analyses suggest. One of the first English language discussions of the quiet Transformation in Tokugawa Economic appeared in a 1971 article by Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura. (See the bibliography section for this and the following works discussed.) The dialogue was continued in Yamamura's Toward a Reexamination of the Economic History of Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1867, (1973), Yamamura (1974), and his sections of Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868