Preindustrial Japan Research Articles

Adoption, Inheritance, and Wealth Inequality in Pre-industrial Japan and Western Europe

This paper uses Japanese village censuses, 1637–1872, to measure inequality in landownership. Surprisingly, inequality was low and stable, unlike in Europe, where it was high and increasing. To explain this, I study inter-generational land transmissions. I find that Japanese households without sons adopted male heirs, thereby keeping lands in the family. In contrast, elite English male lines failed 20–30 percent of the time as adoptions were uncommon, leading to a highly unequal redistribution of their lands. Finally, the institutional differences in adoption had roots in fourth-century church policy, and this may partially explain why Europe was more unequal by 1800.

Women’s Wages and Empowerment: Pre-industrial Japan, 1600-1890

Women’s Wages and Empowerment: Pre-industrial Japan, 1600-1890

近世後期海村における初婚・離死別・再婚:—肥前国野母村を事例として—

近世後期海村における初婚・離死別・再婚:—肥前国野母村を事例として—

Social class and migration in two northeastern Japanese villages, 1716–1870

This paper examines the effects of household social class called ‘mibun’ on the likelihood of migration among peasant men and women from their residing communities, focusing on two farming villages in preindustrial northeastern Japan. Using the local population registers called ‘ninbetsu-aratame-cho’ from 1716–1870, we analyze the relationship between social class of peasant household and different types of out-migration for individual men and women in agricultural communities.We found large differences in landholding between households of titled peasants (honbyakusho) who owned land and those of mizunomi peasants who were in principle landless, suggesting that social class indexed the amount of wealth that a household possessed although considerable economic differences existed among households of titled peasants. These differences in household social class influenced the likelihoods of different types of out-migration of residents in the two farming villages. Regardless of reasons, mizunomi peasants were more likely to migrate out of their village of residence than titled peasants for both sexes. Further, the higher likelihood of out-migration among the mizunomi class was especially notable for male labor migration at the time of local economic hardships.

Divorce in Early Modern Rural Japan: Household and Individual Life Course in Northeastern Villages, 1716-1870

Drawing data from the local population registers in two northeastern agricultural villages, this study examines the patterns and factors associated with divorce in preindustrial Japan. Divorce was easy and common during this period. More than two thirds of first marriages dissolved in divorce before individuals reached age fifty. Discrete-time event history analysis is applied to demonstrate how economic condition and household context influenced the likelihood of divorce for females. Risk of divorce was extremely high in the first three years and among uxorilocal marriages. Propensity of divorce increased upon economic stress in the community and among households of lower social status. Presence of parents, siblings, and children had strong bearings on marriage to continue.

Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective (review)

Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in Environmental Perspective (review)

Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in environmental perspective

Pre-industrial Korea and Japan in environmental perspective

コンラッド・タットマン著 熊崎実訳『日本人はどのように森をつくってきたのか』（書評）

コンラッド・タットマン著 熊崎実訳『日本人はどのように森をつくってきたのか』（書評）

Health and Disease in Human History: A Journal of Interdisciplinary History Reader

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book Forum: Diagnosis and TreatmentFull AccessHealth and Disease in Human History: A Journal of Interdisciplinary History ReaderANDRÉS MARTIN, M.D., ANDRÉS MARTINSearch for more papers by this author, M.D., New Haven, Conn.Published Online:1 Jun 2002https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.159.6.1069AboutSectionsView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Medicine has long had a love affair with history. Psychiatrists, relying almost exclusively as we do on the personal histories of our patients, may be the physicians most vulnerable to this romantic affliction. It is hard for even the strongest willed of us to resist the temptation of revisiting the past, of diagnosing away and fancying on the possible outcomes that the tools of our day would have allowed. As a telling example, I learned as an impressionable young medical student that Beethoven had been afflicted with otosclerosis. Fair enough. His disease, alas, progressed to osteopetroses by the time of my internship and aggressively morphed into chronic lead toxicity and then into late-onset paranoid psychosis by the time I became a card-carrying psychiatrist. As armchair historians, psychiatrists have tended to be long in theory but short in (or oblivious to) actual data.Health and Disease in Human History is an edited volume that brings together the best papers published in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History over the last 20 years. The book is a demanding read that covers a wide range of medical topics. Even if none of its 13 chapters deals directly with a psychiatric disorder, its overall tone and full-immersion approach to history make this book relevant. Whether the topic be fertility and pellagra in turn-of-the-century rural Italy or the tracking of an isolated community afflicted with intermittent porphyria in 19th-century Oregon, the bottom line is clear: a return to the original sources is inevitable, indeed mandatory, in order to do justice to the past.In their detective work, the chapter authors go to sources as detailed as they are geographically spread out. Daily prices of bread between 1550 and 1750 are meticulously recorded in order to reexamine whether adulterated bread could have contributed to excess infant mortality in London—plausibly so, we learn. Mountains of newly available sources in both Spanish and Nahuatl are translated in painstaking detail by one author to revisit the decimation of Meso-America through the introduction of smallpox from Europe—corroborating the long-suspected importance of this disease.Medical history is sobering and serious at times, as in a chapter on the mortality associated with the slave trade, but, as the volume reflects, it can be amusing as well. In “Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan” we learn that the rights to human fecal matter and waste (top-line fertilizers of the day) were so important as to lead to outright battles and aggressive legislation. More importantly, the value placed on fecal matter contributed to cities in Japan becoming more hygienic than their American and European counterparts, such as 1850s Paris and the “shockingly direct connection” between its sewage disposal and water supply).Psychiatrists have not always been at fault when venturing into history; nor have they always failed to follow the rigors exemplified in this volume. In a recent essay on Emily Dickinson’s work, for example, John McDermott (1) rolled up his sleeves by returning to the source—to the exact text and dating of each of her poems—in order to draw conclusions regarding the cycling of Dickinson’s creativity and her possible underlying psychopathology. Health and Disease in Human History provides a useful guide to those who venture to revisit the past and epitomizes what can be accomplished by applying responsible and accurate historical methods. “Spare my past,” pleads Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. The nature of our calling makes us unlikely to spare any past. On that same account, we should show utmost diligence and respect when proceeding along.Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 2000, 345 pp., $60.00; $25.00 (paper).Reference1. McDermott JF: Emily Dickinson revisited: a study of periodicity in her work. Am J Psychiatry 2001; 158:686-690; correction, 158:1179Link, Google Scholar FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 159Issue 6 June 2002Pages 1069-1070 Metrics History Published online 1 June 2002 Published in print 1 June 2002

Regional standardization in the age at marriage: A comparative study of preindustrial Germany and Japan

Age at marriage is an important issue in family, population, and socioeconomic history as well as in cultural anthropology. In preindustrial Japan, regional differences in inheritance customs determined the regional diversity of marriage patterns. The age at marriage in preindustrial Germany also showed a regional diversity, but compared to Japan, it was standardized within the European marriage pattern. The author contends that there were two different patterns of standardization in marriage behavior in Germany, one being the historical consequence of official institutionalization and the other occurring as a process on a macroeconomic level and resulting in a concentration of age at marriage around a mean age. The distribution of the ages at marriage and its historical change in this context is an important variable for the analysis of marriage behavior.

Regional Diversity in Demographic and Family Patterns in Preindustrial Japan

Regional Diversity in Demographic and Family Patterns in Preindustrial Japan

Leaving home in a stem family system: Departures of heirs and non-heirs in pre-industrial Japan

To clarify the rules in a stem family, this study investigates the patterns of childrens' departures from home, using the 1870 household register of South-Tama, Musashi Province (4,787 individuals). Sons and daughters followed a schedule for home departures in their life course related to their sex and to sibling composition. Life-table analysis revealed that the ‘stayers’ were children without siblings, eldest sons, and eldest daughters with only sister; while the ‘leavers’ were younger sons with elder brothers and younger daughters. This pattern was present regardless of economic status, with some variation in the speed of leaving home among sons. The leavers in general left for various destinations via marriage, adoption, service, and work migration. Larger proportions of sons than daughters remained in the home village. Examination of the exceptions to the rule showed that they tended to be incapable of following the main pattern. Analysis of the timing of a child's departure in relation to the heir's marriage or to the birth of the heir's first child revealed that within the standard schedule, sons and daughters were retained or released for the advantage of the family. Sisters were replaced by in-marrying brides. Brothers were kept in the home until the next generation was secured. The departure of children, or heirs and non-heirs, can be a good variable for comparing the rules of family systems.

Business Systems in East Asia: Firms, Markets, and Societies.

The Comparative Analysis of Business Systems East Asian Business Systems Differences Between East Asian Business Systems Institutional Influences on East Asian Business Systems I Pre-Industrial Japan, Korea and China Institutional Influences on East Asian Business Systems II Industrialization and Institutional Development The Effects of Institutional Environments on East Asian Business Systems East Asian and Western Business Systems Variety, Change and Internationalization of Business Systems

Business systems in East Asia: firms, markets and societies

The Comparative Analysis of Business Systems East Asian Business Systems Differences Between East Asian Business Systems Institutional Influences on East Asian Business Systems I Pre-Industrial Japan, Korea and China Institutional Influences on East Asian Business Systems II Industrialization and Institutional Development The Effects of Institutional Environments on East Asian Business Systems East Asian and Western Business Systems Variety, Change and Internationalization of Business Systems

A Map-Transformation Approach to the Location of Central Places: The Case of the Central Kanto Region in Preindustrial Japan

The distribution of central places is theoretically investigated by using Rushton's map transformation algorithm, MAPTRANS, for the case of the Kanto region in preindustrial Japan. The recovered hierarchical spacing reveals that central places were located according to the marketing principle to some extent, as well as being influenced by population density. Their locations were also locally distorted by traffic, administrative, and topographical conditions. These results suggest that Christaller's three principles did generally determine the distribution of central places. Application of the general hierarchical model to the actual frequency distribution of centers further confirms that the hierarchical structure is well approximated by a variable k-system rather than by the Christallerian k-system, which implies that a structural change in the hierarchy had taken place in the course of modernization.

Depletion and Conservation of Japan's Forests

Conservation BiologyVolume 4, Issue 1 p. 104-111 Free Access Depletion and Conservation of Japan's Forests First published: March 1990 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.1990.tb00274.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan. Totman, C. Conservation Biology: Outlook for the Future Conservation for the Twentyfirst Century. Western, D., and Pearl, M., editors. Conservation Biology: Hawai'I Conservation Biology in Hawai'i. Stone, C. P., and Stone, D. B. Important Recent Developments in Valuing Environmental Goods Using Surveys to Value Public Goods: The Contingent Valuation Method. Mitchell, R. C., and Carson, R. T. Tropical Forest Conservation: Getting the Act Together The Future of the Tropical Rain Forest. Proceedings of an international conference organized by the Oxford Forestry Institute. McDermott, M. J., editor. Saving the Tropical Forests. Gradwohl, J., and Greenberg, R. Crop Breeders' Use of Gene Bank Collections The Use of Plant Genetic Resources. Brown, A. H. D., Frankel, O.H., Marshall, D.R., and Williams, J. T., editors. Volume4, Issue1March 1990Pages 104-111 RelatedInformation

Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920.

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Premodern Economic Growth: Japan and the West 2 The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period 3 Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan 4 Peasant Families and Population Control in Eighteenth-Century Japan 5 Japan's Aristocratic Revolution 6 The Discontented 7 Merit as Ideology in the Tokugawa Period 8 Okura Nagatsune and the Technologists 9 Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan 10 The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers, 1890-1920 Index

Hajnal and the Household in Asia: a Comparativist History of the Family in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1870

When Hajnal (1982) argued that different types of household forma tion rules determine whether fertility is adjusted to economic conditions in traditional peasant societies, he deliberately ignored societies with stem family formation rules. This study examines the relationship between household formation, fertility, and family relations in such a society—eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan. It sum marizes previous work on the history of the family in Japan and discusses the role life-cycle service played in adjustingfertility to economic conditions.

Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan

Urban Sanitation in Preindustrial Japan The sudden increase in Japan's urban population in the century and a half from the i58os to the mid-700os may well have had no parallel in world history prior to industrialization. Edo, renamed Tokyo in I868, was a cluster of fishing villages around a castle in I590, but, during the eighteenth century, it is readily acknowledged to have been one of the largest, if not the largest, city in the world. Even by I700, Edo was certainly larger than any European city, including London at 575,000, and rivaled or exceeded in population the largest of the Chinese cities at the time, Peking. But urban growth was not limited to Edo; cities sprang up throughout the country from the late sixteenth century on and both Kyoto and Osaka had populations in the hundreds of thousands. By the late eighteenth century, Japan had about 3 percent of the world's population, but it is estimated to have had more than 8 percent of the people in the world who lived in cities of more than I0,000. By this standard, about io percent of the total population of Japan was urban in i8oo.1 To support a metropolitan population, food and other daily necessities must be adequately supplied, and demands for housing, water, transportation, a monetary system, and numerous other requirements must be met. Even if all other requirements are

Cultural Persistence in Migrant Settlements of Rural Japan

Migrations in preindustrial Japan caused the formation of cultural island: in the rural areas of North Kanto. Although migrants have accepted many cultural traits of North Kanto, they still retain the original religion of their homeland, Hokuriku. Some of the migrant settlements exhibit distinctive economic activities, although present economic activities differ from those brought from home villages in Hokuriku. The historical examination of Tega-Shinden, a migrant community in North Kanto, revealea that the present commercially-oriented farming practices are derived from the economic behavior that the migrants brought from their homeland. This behavior has been maintained by group endogamy and community cohesiveness fostered by lemple-orientea activities. The applicability of a cultural island approach to subcultural levels in Japan became evident.