Tosa - 繁栄 – ‘‘the prosperity of the country’’

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. On the one hand, the Tokugawa period witnessed a remarkable economic transformation, perhaps best evidenced in the growth of the three major cities of Edo, Kyoto, and Osaka, not only in terms of population but in the number and scale of commercial and manufacturing enterprises. The transformation was no less pronounced in the countryside, where growing production for the market engendered the rise of a class of wealthy farmers, significant interregional trade, and a mushrooming of local and regional markets. On the other hand, the Tokugawa economy was at times remarkably volatile and unstable. Fortunes were lost as quickly as they were made, famines interrupted periods of growth and devastated the lives of countless farmers, and large numbers of rural dwellers found themselves forced to sell their lands and to earn their livelihoods through the sale of their own and their family labor. The Tokugawa economy defies easy explanation.

The starting point for any examination of the Tokugawa economy is the question of the extent of Japan’s commercial contacts with the outside world. Historians on both sides of the Pacific once asserted that the Tokugawa bakufu rigorously pursued a policy of seclusion. From 1639, when only the Dutch of all the European countries were allowed to trade with Japan, until 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his gunboats in Edo Bay, Japan had been cut off from all significant contacts with the outside world. And even the Dutch were restricted in their activities: they could only trade and live on a small man-made island in Nagasaki harbor. This view concerning Japan’s isolation reinforced the overall assessment of the Tokugawa economy at the time: that it stagnated under weighty feudal impositions and received no stimulation from commercial contacts with the outside world. It was only with the coerced termination of the seclusion policy in the 1850s that Japan entered the ‘‘modern world.’’ The bakufu enacted policies restricting contacts with the outside world, not out of anti-foreignism or any desire to cut off trade, but due to concern over legitimacy, especially in terms of not wishing to be a subordinate in the Sinocentric world order. The bakufu was concerned, too, about national security in particular the very real threat posed by the countries of Western Europe supplying the Catholic missionaries sent to Japan. It had no wish, however, to see a diminution in foreign trade. With the banning of the Portuguese from the Japan trade in 1639, in fact, the bakufu adopted measures to ensure that trade continued as before, even on a greater scale, and it extracted a promise from the Dutch to supply the Japanese with the silk that the Portuguese once handled. The Japanese also continued to trade actively with its Asian neighbors, especially Korea, China, and the Ryu¯kyu¯ Islands.

Massive silver exports from Japan, together with the growing depletion of the country’s silver mines, led to a domestic shortage and a currency crisis, prompting the bakufu to restrict its outflow. At the same time, the bakufu encouraged the domestic production of silk in order to stem the imports paid for in silver. Silk was particularly important, because it was by far the major import item, and domestic demand seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds. With growing domestic production of silk, total trade volume declined. By the first decades of the eighteenth century Japan’s trade with the outside world, including its Asian neighbors, was negligible. In sum, we are forced to argue that, in terms of trade alone, Japan was indeed a closed country, at least from the 1680s. In terms of stimulants to economic growth, Japan was largely left to its own devices.  It was only with the opening of the ports in 1859 that foreign trade again had a major impact on the domestic economy.

The rise of castle towns, in particular, resulted from a conscious decision on the part of many domain lords to remove the threat posed by samurai with power bases in the countryside. With their forced removal to castle towns, beginning in the late sixteenth and continuing into the seventeenth century, Japan could boast of dozens of towns with populations of 10,000 or more, each with large numbers of merchants and artisans catering to the needs of resident samurai. The metropolis of Edo, too, was a political construct. With the institution of the alternate attendance system, Edo became a bustling urban center with a population of over one million by the early eighteenth century. It relied heavily on imports from Osaka and Kyoto, especially in the first half of the period, but by the mid to late eighteenth century Edo had emerged to become a major manufacturing and commercial center in its own right, taking advantage of increased production for the market in central and eastern Japan.

Japan’s towns stagnated or lost population, he argues, because of growing competition from residents in rural areas, who increasingly usurped functions once monopolized by urban merchants and manufacturers. The evidence supporting this position is overwhelming: there is an abundance of demographic data showing population decline or stagnation in the major cities and many castle towns and rural towns, and countless documents from the period testify to urban dwellers’ growing inability to compete with competitors in the countryside. Hauser, too, has described in some detail the growing power of rural Kinai merchants vis-a`-vis the once powerful Osaka wholesalers. The textile industry is a case in point. It is true, for example, that established Edo firms saw their textile sales stagnate, beginning in the closing decades of the eighteenth century. Much of this stagnation was due to their growing inability to monopolize the purchase of rural products and to control their prices, but there was also growing competition from newcomers within Edo itself. Many of these new merchants became successful because they adopted innovative business strategies, such as by selling to rural areas, taking advantage of budding rural consumer demand. The growing literature on samurai life in the cities places us on somewhat firmer ground. We know that the lives of samurai changed in very profound ways as a result of urbanization and the burgeoning consumer culture. The greater use of commercial fertilizers enabled double and triple cropping to be carried out in more areas, for example. Farmers adopted new plant varieties, introduced improved cultivation methods, reclaimed land, and constructed irrigation works. Improvements in such things as reeling, weaving, and sericulture also led to greater productivity in cottage industries. Largeholders increasingly worked smaller portions of land with the labor of their nuclear family alone and released their hereditary servants, who became independent smallholders, tenants, wage laborers, or some combination thereof. The large cooperative farming units thus gave rise to a system of independent smallholders. Smith never made it clear when this change came about, but most Japanese historians date it from around the last decades of the 1600s, with sometimes significant regional variations. First coined to describe conditions in parts of Western Europe on the eve of industrialization, ‘‘protoindustrialization’’ refers to a process whereby farmers become increasingly involved in the production of handicrafts and other by-employments, and the goods they produced are sold to distant markets. In Japan, protoindustrialization became pronounced from the mid eighteenth century as growing numbers of farmers engaged in new forms of market-related activity. Unlike Western Europe, where many of the goods were exported to other European countries, protoindustrial markets in Tokugawa Japan, at least before the opening of the ports, were entirely internal. Hokkaido fishers engaged in a long-distance trade with many regions of Honshu from at least the mid eighteenth century. The most important product was herringmeal fertilizer, which they shipped to regions like the Kinai for use as a commercial

fertilizer. Initially, the organization of production was not capitalist in nature, because it was an appendage of Matsumae domain. Matsumae operated a contract fishery system, by which designated merchants controlled the fishing industry. Also, it was not capitalist in that the Ainu labor force so integral to the system was not free.

The term Tosa officials used – kokueki, meaning ‘‘the prosperity of the country’’ but referring more specifically to the domain or province – had its origins in the merchant class, who invoked the term to justify the important role they played in society. By the closing decades of the century, domain officials had appropriated the term to justify policies aimed at encouraging commercial enterprises, so that their profits could be tapped to strengthen domain finances. Tosa encouraged relatively new industries, such as sugar, eggs, and gunpowder, that had export potential or that could reduce the domain’s reliance on imports. It also gave support to well-established industries, such as paper, by abolishing existing monopolies and by temporarily suspending taxes.

The rate of economic growth exceeded the rate of population growth, thus raising the living standards of the vast majority of the farmers throughout the period, despite a number of famines and natural disasters. Farmers limited family size through such practices as abortion, infanticide, and delayed marriage in order to realize a rise in their standards of living. Hanley and Yamamura also propose that the country’s population figures themselves might be suspect. Although uneven, every region witnessed some population growth over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rural areas became vibrant areas for commerce, with many villages supporting shops selling dozens of consumer goods, including hair ornaments, footwear, oils, pots, and paper. When viewed through the lens of life expectancy, Japanese led surprisingly long lives, even by the standards of Western societies around the same time. Changing patterns of consumption may indicate that people’s material lives are improving but, as we know from our own society, the link between the two is not always so clear. It is not even clear to economic historians of the West that economic growth, especially the process of industrialization, necessarily leads to improvements in people’s well-being; in many cases, there is a negative correlation.

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