Standard of Living in Japan Before Industrialization: From What Level Did Japan Begin? A Comment

Abstract

Until recently, Japan was assumed to have started its industrialization from a very low economic level, yet to have achieved modern economic growth in the succeeding one hundred years. ' Of course, it is true that the cultural and educational level in Japan was higher than that in other less-developed countries. Technological transfer in the Meiji Period was facilitated by this high degree of cultural, social, and technical expertise. Yet the economic level itself is supposed to have been near subsistence, resulting in frequent famines and harsh methods of family control such as infanticide and abortion. In the last ten or twenty years this view has been increasingly challenged by historians in Japan and abroad. First, a number of historians found that there was substantial economic development during the Tokugawa Period, which raised the standard of living above the subsistence level. Some have gone even further, insisting that in the nineteenth century the standard of living was higher in Japan than in England. This paper surveys these writings and puts them into historical and international perspective. There is little doubt that there was development in agriculture in the latter half of the Tokugawa Period. Table 1 shows that there were substantial increases in the yield of rice in the period. In the advanced central region of Kinai (cols. 1-3), there appear to have been increases in yield up to the 1830s and stagnation in the succeeding decades. In the more backward peripheral regions (cols. 4 and 5), the increases appear to have continued into the last decades of the Tokugawa Period. Descriptive evidence on technical change supports the hypothesis of increasing yield. Deeper plowing spread; the input of fertilizer, particularly purchased fertilizer, became more common; and insecticide oil started to be used. While some of the data mentioned in Table 1 (cols. 1, 2, and 3) refer to rich farmers whose yields were undoubtedly higher than the average yield, the average yield must also have increased in a parallel way. Moreover, in this period there was a great increase in the production of cash crops such as cotton, rape seeds, indigo, and silk in various parts of Japan. Since there is little evidence to show that feudal dues increased after the middle of the Tokugawa Period, and considering that the population was more or less constant, the average net income of the peasants must have increased over time. A similar conclusion can be drawn from the trend of real wages of workers. Table 2 shows the real wages of various kinds of workers (in terms of rice). On the one hand, real wages in the central regions (cols. 1, 2, and 4) increased until 1800-1830 and stagnated or decreased somewhat thereafter. On the other hand, real wages in the periphery (cols. 3 and 5) continued to increase even after 1830, catching up to the higher levels in the center.