1 In 1869, soon after the Meiji Restoration, the new government demolished local check points and other physical barriers to communications. In 1872 the status system was abolished and the ban on the permanent sale of land was lifted, while from 1873 on a full-scale reform of the land tax was carried out, thereby granting formally private ownership to the peasant farmers.

2 Thomas Smith characterized this pattern of pre-modern economic growth as ‘rural-centred’. See Smith, T. C., ‘Pre-modern economic growth: Japan and the West’, Past and Present 60 (1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in T. C. Smith, Native sources of Japanese industrialization, 1750–1920 (Berkeley, 1988), 15–49, and O. Saito, ‘Pre-modern economic growth revisited: Japan and the West’, Global Economic History Network (GEHN) working paper series, 16 (Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, 2005).

3 When Marc Bloch noted that, like Europe, Japan went through the phase of ‘feudalism’, it was this time period between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries that he had in mind (see his Feudal society, trans. L. A. Manyon (London, 1961), 446–7). For a more recent account of the decline of the estate system and the rise of the samurai class, see Keiji Nagahara, ‘The decline of the shōen system’, in K. Yamamura ed., The Cambridge history of Japan, vol. 3: Medieval Japan (Cambridge, 1990), 260–300.

4 For interpretations of the kokudaka system, see Wakita, Osamu, ‘The kokudaka system: a device for unification’, Journal of Japanese Studies 1, 2 (1975), 297–320Google Scholar, and Yamamura, Kozo, ‘From coins to rice: hypotheses on the kandaka and kokudaka systems’, Journal of Japanese Studies 14, 2 (1988), 341–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 It should be noted that no such restriction was imposed on holders of city land. Excerpts from the 1643 decree are translated in D. J. Lu, Japan: a documentary history, vol. 1 (New York, 1997), 211, with some other restrictive measures issued by the Tokugawa shogunate, such as the proscription on ‘parcelization of land’ in 1672. Seventeenth-century domain lords were also concerned with the tendency towards the fragmentation of peasant land and issued similar restrictive decrees. However, it is widely agreed that those were much less effective compared with the proscription on the permanent sale of land. For how laws such as these were circumvented, see H. Ooms, Tokugawa village practice: class, status, power, law (Berkeley, 1996), 234–40.

6 Ooms, Tokugawa village practice, appendixes 2 and 3, and J. H. Wigmore ed., Law and justice in Tokugawa Japan: materials for the history of Japanese law and justice under the Tokugawa shogunate 1603–1867, vol. V: Property: civil customary law (Tokyo, 1971), chapter 1. See also Mizumoto Kunihiko, Kinsei no mura shakai to kokka (Tokyo, 1987), and Osamu Wakita, ‘The social and economic consequences of unification’, in J. W. Hall ed., The Cambridge history of Japan, vol. 4: Early modern Japan (Cambridge, 1991), 96–127.

7 ‘Pawning’ (shichiire) was conceptually distinguished from ‘mortgaging’ (kakiire) in Tokugawa legal practice. In pawning, the collateral was kept in the creditor's keeping. When the collateral was a parcel of land, therefore, a peasant debtor became a de facto tenant-cultivator of the creditor as soon as a contract was drawn up.

8 Based on evidence assembled by Tsutomu Ouchi, ‘Chiso kaisei zengo no nōminsō no bunkai to jinushisei’, in Uno Kozo ed., Chiso kaisei no kenkyū, vol. 1 (Tokyo, 1957), 37–151.

9 Tomobe Ken'ichi, ‘Tochi seido’, in Nishikawa Shunsaku, Odaka Konosuke and Saito Osamu eds., Nihon keizai no 200 nen (Tokyo, 1996), 135–51, and P. Francks, Rural economic development in Japan: from the nineteenth century to the pacific war (London, 2006), 87–101, 236–45.

10 Dore, R. P., ‘The Meiji landlord: good or bad?’, Journal of Asian Studies 18, 3 (1959), 343–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Oshima, Mario, ‘Kinsei kōki nōson shakai no moraru ekonpmi ni tsuite’, Rekishigaku Kenkyū 685 (1996), 25–38Google Scholar, and Sakane, Y., ‘The characteristics of landlord-tenant relations in modern Japan’, Hiroshima Daigaku Keizai Ronsō 23 (1999), 29–47Google Scholar.

11 Arimoto Hideo, ‘Kosakuno zokusuru jinushi-sū ni tsuite’, Teikoku Nōkaihō 11, 10 (1921), 9–14.

12 Michihiko, Miyamoto, ‘Kosakunin ha ikunin no jinushi kara kariirete iruka’, Shakai Seisaku Jihō 225 (1939), 146–53Google Scholar. The survey was conducted in summer 1937 by a research section of the Kyōchōkai (literally ‘Harmonization society’, a quasi-government body established in order to ‘harmonise’ management–labour and landlord–tenant relations). According to the published report (Zenkoku issen nōka no keizai kinkyō chōsa (Tokyo, 1939)), questionnaires were sent to about 1,000 farm households through prefectural branches of the Japan Farmers' Union but the number of respondents was reduced to 794, of which 466 were tenant farmers. Although it is unlikely that they were chosen randomly in the statistical sense, the prefectures covered ranged from the northernmost island of Hokkaido to the southernmost Kyushu. It is worth noting, moreover, that the sample size was substantially larger than that of an official survey taken by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry for the same year. The Miyamoto paper re-analysed the 466 tenant-farmer households, tables of which were not included in the published survey report.

13 A. Booth and R. M. Sundrum, Labour absorption in agriculture: theoretical analysis and empirical investigations (Oxford, 1985), 145. For a similar argument, see Tomobe, ‘Tochi seido’.

14 Tōkei-in, Kai no kuni genzai ninbetsu shirabe (Tokyo, 1882). Previous studies that have made intensive use of this source material include M. Umemura, ‘Agriculture and labor supply in the Meiji era’, in K. Ohkawa et al. eds., Agriculture and economic growth: Japan's experience (Tokyo, 1969), 175–97, and O. Saito, ‘The rural economy: commercial agriculture, by-employment and wage work’, in M. B. Jansen and G. Rozman eds., Japan in transition: from Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton, 1986), 400–20.

15 For Yamanashi's geography, its early modern legacy and changes that took place after 1859, see R. J. Smethurst's excellent account in his Agricultural development and tenancy disputes in Japan, 1870–1940 (Princeton, 1986), chapter 2.

16 Smith, T. C., ‘Farm family by-employments in preindustrial Japan’, Journal of Economic History 29, 4 (1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, reprinted in Smith, Native sources, 71–102, and Nishikawa, S., ‘Productivity, subsistence, and by-employment in the mid-nineteenth century Chōshū’, Explorations in Economic History 15, 1 (1978), 69–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘The economy of Chōshū on the eve of industrialization’, Economic Studies Quarterly 38, 4 (1987), 323–37.

17 Saito, O., ‘Population and the peasant family economy in proto-industrial Japan’, Journal of Family History 8, 1 (1983), 30–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 For details, see Saito Osamu, Chingin to rōdō to seikatsu suijun: Nihon keizaishi ni okeru 18–20 seiki (Tokyo, 1998), 89–95, and Saito, ‘The rural economy’, 411–14.

19 T. C. Smith, The agrarian origins of modern Japan (Stanford, 1959), 108.

20 Smith, Agrarian origins, 112n. Hence, this type of service was called shichimotsu hōkō (pawn service). See M. L. Nagata, Labor contracts and labor relations in early modern central Japan (London, 2005), 54, 86.

21 Maki Hidemasa, Koyō no rekishi (Tokyo, 1977), chapter 2. Maki also notes that, by issuing those successive laws, the Tokugawa administration was trying to establish the notion that the contact period, whether the servant was placed in pawn or not, should not extend over more than ten years.

22 Smith, Agrarian origins, 118–23, and Nagata, Labor contracts, 91–3.

23 P. Laslett, ‘Introduction: the history of the family’, in P. Laslett and R. Wall, eds., Household and family in past time (Cambridge, 1972), 82. See also A. Kussmaul, Servants in husbandry in early modern England (Cambridge, 1981).

24 O. Saito, ‘The changing structure of urban employment and its effects on migration patterns in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japan’, in A. van der Woude et al. eds., Urbanization in history: a process of dynamic interactions (Oxford, 1990), 205–19.

25 Saito, ‘Changing structure’, 207.

26 Smith, ‘Pre-modern economic growth’, and Saito Osamu, Edo to Osaka: kindai Nihon no toshi kigen (Tokyo, 2002), 28–37.

27 Saito, ‘Changing structure’, 211.

28 Inui Hiromi, Edo no shokunin (Tokyo, 1996).

29 Saito, Chingin to rōdō, 34–5.

30 Nagata, Labor contracts, chapters 5 and 6.

31 Saito, Edo to Osaka, 107–22; see also Saito, ‘Changing structure’.

32 The 1632 regulations were issued in relation to a neighbourhood group system called gonin-gumi, literally a ‘group of five’ (see Lu, Japan, vol. 1, 210). The group of five households, formed within the village, was given joint responsibilities in mutual surveillance. Similar systems were commonly found in other domains too.

33 A. Hayami, The historical demography of pre-modern Japan (Tokyo, 2001), chapter 5.

34 There could be another option for them. If the family had enough resources to allocate among the children, they may have been allowed to establish branch households for themselves within the village. This possibility diminished over time, however, although the timing of the diminution varied from region to region. According to Moto Takahashi, for example, in a village of Shinano province, central Japan, branching out took place as late as 1807–1809 (‘Family continuity in England and Japan’, Continuity and Change 22, 2 (2007), 201). For a general discussion of how the Japanese stem family system worked, see O. Saito, ‘Two kinds of stem-family system? Traditional Japan and Europe compared’, Continuity and Change 13, 1 (1998), 167–86.

35 Lewis, W. A., ‘Economic development with unlimited supplies of labour’, Manchester School of Economic and Social Studies 22, 2 (1954), 139–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lewis's idea was applied to pre-war Japan by Ohkawa, K. in ‘Agriculture and turning points’, Developing Economies 3, 4 (1965), 471–86Google Scholar, and in R. Minami, The turning point in economic development: Japan's experience (Tokyo, 1973).

36 Odaka, K. and Yuan, T.-J., ‘Disguised unemployment revisited’, Journal of International Economic Studies 20 (2006), 57–73Google Scholar.

37 Nishikawa, ‘Productivity, subsistence, and by-employment’.

38 Saito, O., ‘The labor market in Tokugawa Japan: wage differentials and the real wage level, 1727–1830’, Explorations in Economic History 15, 1 (1978), 84–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 O. Saito, ‘Wages, inequality and pre-industrial growth in Japan, 1727–1894’, in R. Allen, T. Bengtsson and M. Dribe eds., Living standards in the past: new perspectives on well-being in Asia and Europe (Oxford, 2005), 77–97, and Saito, ‘Pre-modern economic growth revisited’.

40 A. Smith, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations [1776], reprinted in R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner eds., The Glasgow edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith, vol. I (Oxford, 1976), 101.

41 Saito, Edo to Osaka, chapter 4.

42 Quoted in Saito, Edo to Osaka, 86–8.

43 Osamu, Saito, ‘Machi kōba sekai no kigen: ginō keisei to kigyō shikō’, Keizai Shirin 73, 4 (2006), 315–31Google Scholar.

44 Tanaka Koji, ‘Kinsei ni okeru shūyaku inasaku no keisei’, in Watabe Tadayo ed., Ajia no naka no Nihon inasaku bunka: juyō to seijuku (Tokyo, 1987), 291–348.

45 T. C. Smith, ‘Peasant time and factory time in Japan’, Past and Present 111 (1986), reprinted in Smith, Native sources, 199–235 (quotes are from pp. 206 and 214).

46 In light of the recent debate between Larry Epstein and Sheilagh Ogilvie over the role of guilds in traditional Europe (see his ‘Craft guilds in the pre-modern economy: a discussion’ and her ‘Rehabilitating the guilds: a reply’, Economic History Review 61, 1 (2008), 155–74, 175–82), it would be interesting if a comment could be made from a Japanese perspective. Unfortunately, however, the Japan–Europe comparison in guild history is so complicated an issue that it is beyond the scope of the present article.

47 See Nishikawa, ‘Productivity, subsistence, and by-employment’.

48 Odaka and Yuan, ‘Disguised unemployment’, 59–60; Minami, Turning point, 179–85; and Y. Hayami et al., A century of agricultural growth in Japan: its relevance to Asian development (Tokyo, 1975), 89–99.