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The Roots of Divergence? Some Comments on Japan in the ‘Axial Age’, 1750–1850*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 April 2010

Janet Hunter
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Extract

Much of the recent work on the economic and social history of Tokugawa Japan (1600–1867) has been driven by a desire to identify what T.C. Smith has called ‘native sources ofJapanese industrialisation’. From the Marxist-influenced historians in the 1920s who sought to explain the pre-industrial roots of the structure of production in interwar Japan, through to contem-poraryJapanese historians' studies of the pattern of Japanese development, a major part of the agenda has been to identify how Japan had got to where it was, in other words, what was the secret of its twentieth century successes and weaknesses. It is not possible to explore the situation of Japan's economy in the century 1750–1850 without benefit of this hindsight, without being aware that while Japan's situation may have been in many ways analogous to that of China and Europe in the mid-eighteenth century, its economic fortunes were by the latter part of the nineteenth century experiencing their own ‘great divergence’ from those of China, India and the other countries of Asia and the near East. To search for the antecedents of this divergence is for economic historians of Japan a parallel exercise o t any search for the sources of the European ‘miracle’. While a focus on the period 1750–1850 as an era of European/Asian divergence means, therefore, that we must highlight the situation inJapan during that century, it must also be accepted that in the case of Japan any comparison with other countries or regions may also suggest the causes of Japan's own divergence some fifty to a hundred years later.

Type
Conference: European Miracle
Information
Itinerario , Volume 24 , Issue 3-4 , November 2000 , pp. 75 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2000

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References

Notes

1 See Bix, H., Peasant Protest in Japan 1590–1884 (New Haven 1986)Google Scholar; Vlastos, S., Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley 1986)Google Scholar; Walthall, A., Peasant Uprisings in Japan (Chicago 1991)Google Scholar.

2 Pratt, E.A., Japan's Proto-industrial Elite: The Economic Foundations of the Gono (Cambridge MA, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pratt's work includes consideration of the role of the national and local authorities in the growth of proto-industrial activities.

3 Examples of such cases can be found in Takeuchi, J., Abe, T. and Sawai, M. eds, Kindai Nihon ni okeru Kigyoka no Shokeifu (Osaka 1996)Google Scholar.

4 Pratt, , Japan's Proto-industrial Elite, 23Google Scholar.

5 Smith, T.C., Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in aJapanese Village, 1717–1830 (Stanford 1977)Google Scholar;Hanley, S. and Yamamura, K., Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan 1600–1868 (Princeton 1977)Google Scholar;Hayami, A., ‘Population Changes’ in: Jansen, M. and Rozman, G. eds, Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton 1986)Google Scholar.

6 The Tenpo crisis is discussed in Bolitho, H., ‘The Tempo Crisis’ in: Jansen, M. ed., Cambridge History of Japan V (Cambridge 1989)Google Scholar.

7 This disparity in economic fortunes dated back at least to the early Tokugawa period, but was sustained. Yamamura focuses on the division of wealth between the north/east and south/west in his article ‘Toward a Reexamination of the Economic History of Tokugawa Japan, 1600–1867’, Journal of Economic History 33 (09 1973)Google Scholar.

8 Application of the term ‘proto-industrialisation’ to Japan has been much discussed, and what was occurring in parts of Japan was not identical to the European experience. The term is used here to denote the development of rural commercialisation and manufacturing, much of it based on peasant by-employment.

9 Hauser, W., Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade (Cambridge 1974) 173Google Scholar.

10 Nakamura, S., ‘Development of Rural Industry’ in: Nakane, C. and Oishi, S. eds, Tokugawa Japan (Tokyo 1990)Google Scholar. The shift is also discussed in Miyamoto, M. and Hirano, T., ‘Shogyo’ in: Nishikawa, S. et al. eds, Nihon Keizai no 200 Nen (Tokyo 1996)Google Scholar. The nature of rural handicraft development can be fruitfully considered in the context of Wong's, R. Bin China/Europe comparison (China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of the European Experience (Ithaca, NY 1997))Google Scholar.

11 The prominence of Osaka in the first half of the Tokugawa period is discussed in McClain, J. and Wakita, O. eds, Osaka, the Merchant Capital of Early Modern Japan (Ithaca, NY 1999)Google Scholar.

12 The significance of interaction between different regions in the context of Tokugawa development, as shown through price trends, is discussed in Harada, T. and Miyamoto, M. eds, Rekishi no naka no Bukka — Zenkogyo Shakai no Bukka to Keizai Hatten (Tokyo 1985) Chapter 3, pp. 69–105Google Scholar focuses on the mid-Tokugawa period (eighteenth-early nineteenth centuries).

13 Hanley, S., Everyday Things in Tokugawajapan: The Hidden legacy ofMaterial Culture (Berkeley 1997)Google Scholar. See also Hanley's, earlier article ‘A High Standard of Living in Nineteent h Century Japan: Fact or Fiction?’, Journal of Economic History 43 (09 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See e.g. Nagano, H., Bakuhansei Kokka no Keizai Kozo (Tokyo 1987)Google Scholar, which focuses on Mito domain.

15 Chapter 7 of Sumiya, M. and Taira, K. eds, An Outline of Japanese Economic History 1603–1940 (Tokyo 1979)Google Scholar discusses the concept of ‘manufactory’ or ‘manufacture’, and its application in a number of works on Japan's pre-modern industry.

16 Frank, Andre Gunder, Re–Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley 1998)Google Scholar.

17 See Nishikawa, N., ‘Kaikei Soshiki to Hakki Giho’ in: Yasuoka, S. and Amano, M. eds, Kinseiteki Keiei no Hatten I of Iwanami Nihon Keiei Shi (Tokyo 1995)Google Scholar.

18 Technology in general, including these networks, is discussed by Morris-Suzuki, Tessa in The Technological Transformation ofJapan (Cambridge 1994)Google Scholar, an d networks also figure in K. Moriya, ‘Urban Networks an d Information Networks’ in: C. Nakane and S. Oishi, Tokugawa Japan. Vaporis, C. (Breaking Barriers, Travel and the Stale in Early Modern Japan (Cambridge, MA 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar) looks at the spread of travel.

19 Diamond, Jared, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (London 1997)Google Scholar.

20 Totman, C., The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Pre-industrialJapan (Berkeley 1989)Google Scholar.

21 Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton 2000)Google Scholar.

22 Dutch learning is discussed in Hirakawa, S., ‘Japan's Turn to the West’ in: Jansen, ed., Cambridge History ofJapan VGoogle Scholar.

23 Tsunoyama, S., ‘Sino-Japanese Trade and Japanese Industrialisation’ in: Latham, A. and Kawakatsu, H. eds, Japanese Industrialisation and the Asian Economy (London 1994)Google Scholar.

24 Smith, T.C., ‘Pre-modern Growth: Japan and the West’, Past and Present (08 1973)Google Scholar reprinted in idem, Native Sources ofJapanese Industrialisation (Berkeley 1988).

25 Hayami, A., ‘Kinsei Nihon n o Keizai Hatten to “Industrious Revolution”’ in: Hayami, A., Saito, O. and Sugiyama, S. eds, Tokugawa Shakai kara no Tenbo: Hatten, Kozo, Kokusai Kankei (Tokyo 1989)Google Scholar.

26 Crawcour and others argue that the significance of Tokugawa developments has to be understood in relation to the transitional period 1868–1914, during which the ‘traditional’ economy continued to develop and comprised the major part of all economic activity.

27 Moulder, F., Japan, China and the Modern World Economy (Cambridge 1977)Google Scholar.

28 Jansen, M.B., ‘Japan in the Early Nineteenth Century’ in: Jansen, ed., Cambridge History of Japan, 111Google Scholar.

29 Howell, D., Capitalism from Within: Economy, Society and the State in a Japanese Fishery (Berkeley 1995)Google Scholar.