1. Thomas Wright Blakiston, Japan in Yezo (Yokohama: Japan Gazette, 1883), p. 5.

2. William W. Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 24.

3. Richard Smethurst, Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), stresses the benefits of commercialization and capitalism for the peasantry. Taking a much dimmer view is Mikiso Hane, Peasants, Outcastes, and Rebels: The Underside of Modern Japan (New York: Pantheon, 1982). See the discussion in Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan , pp. 14-25.

4. See Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman, eds., Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Thomas C. Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); and the introductory chapter to Andrew Gordon's study of labor relations, The Evolution of Labor Relations in Japan: Heavy Industry, 1853-1955 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1985). Business histories, such as W. Mark Fruin, Kikkoman: Company, Clan, and Community (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1983), try to bridge the gap, though their concern is not with the transformation of social relations.

5. Maurice Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism (New York: International Publishers, 1947), pp. 1-11.

6. James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).

7. This definition of capitalism is adapted from Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism , p. 7. The feudal mode of production is characterized, according to Rodney Hilton, "Introduction," in The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism , ed. Rodney Hilton (London: Verso Editions, 1978), p. 30, by an "exploitative relationship between landowners and subordinated peasants, in which the surplus beyond subsistence of the latter, whether in direct labour or in rent in kind or in money, is transferred under coercive sanction to the former."

8. Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), p. 12.

9. Kazushi Ohkawa and Henry Rosovsky, "A Century of Economic Growth," in The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan: Essays in the Political Economy of Growth , ed. William W. Lockwood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), p. 58; Eric L. Jones, Growth Recurring: Economic Change in World History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

10. In addition to Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan , see Kozo Yamamura, "Toward a Reexamination of the Economic History of Tokugawa Japan, 1600-1867," Journal of Economic History 33 (1973): 509-41, and Susan B. Hanley, "A High Standard of Living in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Fact or Fantasy?" Journal of Economic History 43 (1983): 183-92.

11. Thomas C. Smith, "Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan," Past and Present 111 (1986): 165-97.

12. Hayami Akira, "Kinsei Nihon no keizai hatten to 'Industrious Revolution,'" in Tokugawa shakai kara no tenbo: Hatten, Kozo, kokusai kankei , ed. Hayami Akira, Saito Osamu, and Sugiyama Shin'ya (Tokyo: Dobunkan, 1989).

13. For an excellent discussion of this type of problem, see Philip C. C. Huang, The Peasant Economy and Social Change in North China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985).

14. Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959).

15. On Chichibu, see Irokawa Daikichi, The Culture of the Meiji Period , translation ed. Marius B. Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), and Irwin Scheiner, "The Mindful Peasant: Sketches for a Study of Rebellion," Journal of Asian Studies 32 (1973): 579-91; for a different interpretation, see Roger Bowen, Rebellion and Democracy in Meiji Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). On the Hibiya riots, see Andrew Gordon, "The Crowd and Politics in Imperial Japan: Tokyo, 1905-1918," Past and Present 121 (1988): 141-70. On the rice riots, see Michael Lewis, Rioters and Citizens: Mass Protest in Imperial Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

16. Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 1981), p. 6. The proto-industrialization model has run into criticism from various quarters, some of it prompted by the confusion concerning the precise role rural industry is supposed to have played in the process of structural transformation. For a critique of the proto-industrialization model in general, and particularly its claims for universal applicability, see D. C. Coleman, "Proto-industrialization: A Concept Too Many," Economic History Review , 2d series, 36 (1983): 435-48. See also the debate surrounding the value of Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization , particularly Geoff Eley's defense of that work—"The Social History of Industrialization: 'Proto-Industry' and the Origins of Capitalism," Economy and Society 13 ( 1984): 519-39—the response by Frank Perlin—''Scrutinizing Which Moment?" Economy and Society 14 (1985): 374-98—and the numerous works cited in those articles, especially Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson, and Michael Sonenscher, eds., Manufacture in Town and Country before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). For a response to their German critics, see Peter Kriedte, Hans Medick, and Jürgen Schlumbohm, "Proto-Industrialization on Test with the Guild of Historians: Response to Some Critics," Economy and Society 15 (1986): 254-72. See also the discussions in Kären Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery , 1750-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 8-9, and William D. Wray, "Afterword," in Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan's Prewar Experience , ed. William D. Wray (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1989), pp. 365-71.

17. See the discussion in Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization , pp. 1-11.

18. Franklin Mendels, "Proto-Industrializatiom The First Phase of the Industrialization Process," Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 246.

19. Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization , pp. 147-48.

20. Myron Gutmann, Toward the Modern Economy: Early Industry in Europe (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988 ).

21. Mendels, "Proto-Industrialization," p. 252.

22. Saito Osamu's discussion of Japanese proto-industrialization— Puroto-kogyoka no jidai (Tokyo: Hyoronsha, 1985)—which is summarized below, is framed largely in terms of the different courses taken by silk-reeling areas of the northern Kanto and Shinano and cotton-spinning regions in the Kinai after foreign trade was reopened.

23. Perlin, "Scrutinizing Which Moment?" pp. 386-87.

24. See E. Patricia Tsurumi, Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), and Takizawa Hideki, Mayu to seishi no kindaishi (Tokyo: Kyoikusha, 1979).

25. See Gary P. Leupp, "'One Drink from a Gourd': Servants, Shophands, and Laborers in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1989), pp. 500-545, for an overview of rural industries in Tokugawa Japan. See also a number of case studies: William B. Hauser, Economic Institutional Change in Tokugawa Japan: Osaka and the Kinai Cotton Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974); David L. Howell, "Hard Times in the Kanto: Economic Change and Village Life in Late Tokugawa Japan," Modern Asian Studies 23 (1989): 349-71; Arne Kalland, "Pre-modern Whaling in Northern Kyushu," in Silkworms, Oil, and Chips . . . (Proceedings of the Economics and Economic History Section of the Fourth International Conference on Japanese Studies, Paris, September 1985), ed. Erich Pauer (Bonn, 1986); Shunsaku Nishikawa, ''Grain Consumption: The Case of Choshu," in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji , ed. Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Edward E. Pratt, "Village Elites in Tokugawa Japan: The Economic Foundations of the Gono" (Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1991); Saito Osamu, "The Rural Economy: Commercial Agriculture, By-Employment, and Wage Work," in Japan in Transition: From Tokugawa to Meiji , ed. Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); Thomas C. Smith, "Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan," Journal of Economic History 29 (1969): 687-715; and Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery .

26. Saito, Puroto-kogyoka no jidai , pp. 168-69. See also Saito Osamu, "Population and the Peasant Family Economy in Proto-Industrial Japan," Journal of Family History 8 (1983): 30-54.

27. Saito, Puroto-kogyoka no jidai , pp. 197-205.

28. Ibid., p. 173.

29. Contrary to the general pattern discerned by Saito, communities of outcaste leather workers in the Kansai region did develop higher population densities as a result of their proto-industrial activities. Although the Japanese population as a whole leveled off after the mid-eighteenth century, the outcaste population grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period, apparently as the result of natural increase rather than the recruitment of new outcastes from the commoner population. Hatanaka Toshiyuki, "Kinsei 'senmin' mibunron no kadai," in Soten: Nihon no rekishi , ed. Aoki Michio and Hosaka Satoru (Tokyo: Shinjinbutsu oraisha, 1991), 5: 179-80.

30. Saito, Puroto-kogyoka no jidai , p. 168.

31. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan .

32. According to Mendels, "Proto-Industrialization," p. 245, "Those [in continental Europe] who had remained isolated from market forces and those who had become fully specialized in commercial agriculture did not feel the necessity of turning to modern industry as much as those who had been depending on handicrafts." However, Gay L. Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay: Rural Industry and the Sexual Division of Labor in a French Village, 1750-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 65, while conceding that "proto-industrialization may have occurred more often in subsistence farming or pastoral regions," argues that "seasonal unemployment and landlessness, not poor land, were the distinguishing features of proto-industrial regions."

33. Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialization before Industrialization , p. 108.

34. Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan , organize their whole book in terms of this dichotomy but in doing so follow common practice; For a discussion of the innovative aspects of their treatment of regional differences, see Kären Wigen, "The Geographic Imagination in Early Modern Japanese History: Retrospect and Prospect," Journal of Asian Studies 51:1 (February 1992): 11-13.

35. Saito, Puroto-kogyoka no jidai , p. 176.

36. For a general overview, see Arai Eiji, Kinsei no gyoson (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1970).

37. Sasahara Masao, "Kinsei Kishu ni okeru takoku gyogyo no henshitsu," Chihoshi kenkyu 168 (December 1980): 31-54; Tajima Yoshiya, "Kinsei Kishu gyoho no tenkai," in Seisan no gijutsu ( Nihon no kinsei , vol. 4), ed. Hayama Teisaku (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1992); Arne Kalland, "In Search of the Abalone: The History of the Ama in Northern Kyushu," in Seinan chiiki no shiteki tenkai , ed. Seinan chiikishi kenkyukai (Tokyo: Shibunkaku, 1988), 1: 588-617.

38. Kawaoka Takeharu, Umi no tami: Gyoson no rekishi to minzoku (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1987).

39. Kawamura Suguru and Miura Shigekazu, "Kujukurihama jibikiami gyogyo no hatten to kozo," in Zairai gijutsu no batten to kinsei shakai ( Gijutsu no shakai shi , vol. 2), ed. Sasaki Junnosuke (Tokyo: Yuhikaku, 1983); Yamaguchi Toru, "Kinseiteki koyo no ichi danmen: Jibikiami gyogyo o chushin ni," Rekishi to minzoku: Kanagawa daigaku Nihon jomin bunka kenkyujo ronshu 5 (1990): 7-66.

40. Hayami, "Kinsei Nihon no keizai hatten to 'Industrious Revolution,'" p. 22.

41. In Europe, too, "proto-industrialization was most likely to occur where urban and rural needs complemented each other." Gullickson, Spinners and Weavers of Auffay , p. 67.

42. Wigen, The Making of a Japanese Periphery , p. 119.

43. Thomas C. Smith, "Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the West," Past and Present 60 (1973): 127-60.

44. Shinbo Hiroshi and Hasegawa Akira, "Shohin seisan, ryutsu no dainamikkusu," in Keizai shakai no seiritsu ( Nihon keizai shi , vol. 1 ), ed. Hayami Akira and Miyamoto Matao (Tokyo: Iwanami shoten, 1988), and Howell, "Hard Times in the Kanto."

45. C. Pemberton Hodgson, A Residence at Nagasaki and Hakodate in 1859-1860, with an Account of Japan Generally (London: Richard Bentley, 18611, p. 48.

46. A. H. Savage Landor, Alone with the Hairy Ainu: Or, 3,800 Miles on a Pack Saddle in Yezo and a Cruise to the Kurile Islands (London: John Murray, 1893; reprint New York: Johnson Reprint Company, 1970).

47. I examine the issues outlined here in depth in David L. Howell, "Ainu Ethnicity and the Boundaries of the Early Modern Japanese State," Past and Present 142 (1994): 69-93.

48. Oishi Naomasa, "Kita no bushidan: Ando shi," in Nihonkai to hokkoku bunka ( Umi to retto bunka , vol. 1), ed. Amino Yoshihiko (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1990), pp. 318-42; Kaiho Mineo, "Hoppo koeki to chusei Ezo shakai," in Nihonkai to hokkoku bunka ( Umi to retto bunka , vol. 1), ed. Amino Yoshihiko (Tokyo: Shogakukan, 1990), pp. 255-86; Mural Shosuke, Ajia no naka no chusei Nihon (Tokyo: Azekura shobo, 1988), pp. 339-43.

49. See Mural Shosuke, "Kenmu, Muromachi seiken to higashi Ajia," in Koza Nihon rekishi , ed. Rekishigaku kenkyukai and Nihonshi kenkyukai (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1985), 4: 1-42, and the discussion of a "pan-Japan Sea" region in medieval Japan in Mural, Ajia no naka no chusei Nihon , pp. 126-28.

50. For a discussion of the way the Tokugawa bakufu asserted its legitimacy through its ordering of international relations, see Ronald P. Toby, State and Diplomacy in Early Modern Japan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). See also Arano Yasunori, Kinsei Nihon to higashi Ajia (Tokyo: Tokyo daigaku shuppankai, 1988); Asao Naohiro, ed., Sekaishi no naka no kinsei ( Nihon no kinsei , vol. 1) (Tokyo: Chuo koronsha, 1991); and Fukaya Katsumi, Kitajima Manji, and Kato Eiichi, eds., Bakuhansei kokka to iiki, ikoku (Tokyo: Azekura shobo, 1989).

51. As Kamiya Nobuyuki, "Nihon kinsei no toitsu to Dattan," in Nihon zenkindai no kokka to taigai kankei , ed. Tanaka Takeo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa kobunkan, 1987), pp. 166-72, points out, the initial object of the buffer was not Russia but rather the Jurchens, whose Qing dynasty later controlled China.

52. Donald Keene, The Japanese Discovery of Europe, 1720-1830 , rev. ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1969); Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Antiforeignism and Western Learning in Early-Modern Japan: The New Theses of 1825 (Cambridge: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1986), pp. 73-86; John A. Harrison, Japan's Northern Frontier (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1953).

53. See Kelly, Deference and Defiance in Nineteenth-Century Japan , pp. 14-25, for a discussion of the continuity/disjunction issue. In addition, the articles in Jansen and Rozman, Japan in Transition , stress the continuities in every major facet of society, save the intellectual, while Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann, eds., Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), part l, contains several articles examining discontinuities in the Restoration period. Anne Walthall, Social Protest and Popular Culture in Eighteenth-Century Japan (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), deals with the 1780s, but with an eye on the 1860s.

54. Harry Harootunian, "Ideology as Conflict," in Conflict in Modern Japanese History: The Neglected Tradition , ed. Tetsuo Najita and J. Victor Koschmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 60. People were, however, quite aware of the political and military events of the Restoration period. See the discussion of the diary of Hirasawa Toyosaku, a resident of Oshamanhe on the southeast coast of Hokkaido, in Kaiho Mineo, Bakuhansei kokka to Hokkaido (Tokyo: San'ichi shobo, 1978), pp. 268-82.

55. "Ichinen no yume Ezo miyage" [n.d.], Hokkaido Prefectural Archives.

56. Dobb, Studies in the Development of Capitalism , p. 7.