INTRODUCTION

FOR ECONOMIC HISTORIANS of early modern Japan, the second half of the Tokugawa era is marked by a rapid growth in commercial production in rural areas. In the seventeenth century, it was already not uncommon for farmers to engage in production activities in addition to the (mandatory) cultivation of rice. However, their products were mainly intended for domestic consumption and were not marketed. In the central region around Ōsaka and Kyōto, commercial activities took off in the rural areas which supplied these cities with the raw materials they needed for their quality craftsmanship. To meet everincreasing demand, production techniques were improved and rationalized. It became the norm to specialize in a few specific products and, from the mid-eighteenth century, this became the case across the entire country. Most provinces were involved in some sort of specialized production involving significant numbers of workers. Fresh foods such as fish or vegetables, processed foods such as oil, soy sauce, sake, and dried fish, or raw materials for textile production such as cotton or raw silk were produced in great quantities in rural areas and marketed locally or nationwide. By the end of the century, there was no longer any province that did not have its own ‘famous products’ (meisan or meibutsu).

Nippon sankai meisan zue(‘Famous Products of Japan from Mountain and Sea, Illustrated’), hereafter Meisan zue, first printed in 1799 in Ōsaka, sheds light on the scale and complexity of production techniques that had been achieved by the end of the eighteenth century. Through its detailed illustrations, Meisan zue shows the new face of the Japanese countryside. The population of Ōsaka, who were familiar with these ‘famous products’, could for the first time have an insight into the production environment. The book was evidently a great success. It was reprinted several times before the Meiji era, as shown by the large number of copies held today in Japanese, as well as in European, libraries. More surprisingly, many pictures from the book appear, with only minor changes, in the Dai Nippon bussan zue, a catalogue of a hundred multi-coloured prints representing scenes of production for the first Exhibition for the Promotion of National Industries (Naikoku kangyō hakurankai) held in 1877.