Chapter 6
Conclusion

Within a period of twelve decades after its feudal government collapsed in ruins, Japan, a country by and large lacking natural resources and geographically isolated from the Atlantic region that dominated international trade before World War I, achieved remarkable growth in per capita income through industrialization, growth that reached the level obtaining in some Western European nations. It takes no great leap of imagination to conclude that Japan managed to catch up with the West because she was able to develop her human resources. Indeed, the improvement in her standard of living, as Sen defines it, in terms of capabilities, certainly serves both as the best explanation for Japan's successful growth and the best measure of that growth. Surely measuring Japan's standard of living in terms of capabilities is superior to measuring it in terms of opulence precisely because the capabilities definition includes both a yardstick for gauging the level and speed of growth and an explanation for growth. However, practical measurement of the standard of living defined in terms of capabilities is an exceedingly difficult, perhaps hopelessly impossible, task. For this reason I propose a substitute measure: population quality measured in terms of standard anthropometric variables like height, weight, chest girth, and the body mass index. And because I am interested in a measure of population quality that comes close to capturing capabilities, I focus on the indicators of human growth for children and young adults.

Using data on schoolchildren it is possible to construct for Japan an

annual auxological data set for children aged 6, 12, and 18 that extends from 1900 to 1985 and that gives us a clear picture of a remarkable secular improvement in population quality. Combining these data with estimates of net nutritional intake it is possible to show that the main factor underlying the great improvement in population quality is the secular trend in net nutritional intake. That the population quality of Japan is far higher today than it was in the 1870s is because of improvements in agricultural technology that raised per capita levels of gross nutritional intake; because of greater levels of expenditure on public health and medicine and an awareness on the part of doctors and public health officials of the germ theory of disease and antibiotic drugs; and because children in Japan now spend their formative years in school rather than working under the blistering sun in the rice fields. Thus one can say that the great secular improvement in population quality is the end result of the triumphant spread of Western scientific knowledge and of industrialization to a remote island nation off the Chinese mainland.

One can certainly summarize the central message of my statistical analysis in this way. But to do so is, in my opinion, a great mistake. For the statement does not do justice to the social struggle Japan went through as it transformed its system of health-enhancing entitlements from the balkanized form characteristic of feudalism to the modern form in which programs emanate from a centralized national government in Tokyo. Demand matters; or rather the way demand is voiced through markets and through the political process matters.

No better proof of the importance of demand forces can be offered than the account that constitutes Part II of this volume, an account that details the gradual breakdown in health-enhancing market institutions and in the balkanized system of entitlements developed during the late feudal period. The breakdown stretched over a period of almost half a century, in part because the labor market structure and the institutions governing contracts between employers and employees which developed during the late feudal period persisted into the balanced economic growth era following the demise of feudalism, in part because the balkanized system of entitlements had become deeply rooted in Japan's society and polity, especially in landlord-tenant relations. Indeed, Japan's ability to successfully absorb Western technology in a short time must be partly attributed to the development of population quality during the late feudal period, a development that was encouraged by market forces and by the entitlement system.

Nonetheless, the feudal system eventually did break down. These institutions were no longer viable in a world of large industrial enterprises and in a world in which harvest crises rarely, if ever, occurred. But what was to replace them? The liberal bureaucrats had a vision of what could and should replace these institutions just as surely as industrialists had a vision of what machinery should replace traditional Japanese silk reeling equipment: the entitlement systems developed, and evolving, in Germany, France, and the United States. But to have a vision and to realize it is another matter, and the liberal bureaucrats faced two major obstacles to realizing their vision. One was represented by remnants of the balkanized system of feudal entitlements, especially that part of the Tokugawa system embodied in landlord-tenant relations. And the other was militarization and the growth of fascist ideology among some segments of the bureaucracy. The legacy of the past acted as a barrier; so did Japan's military expansion into the rest of Asia and her alliance with fascist Germany. Despite widespread rural unrest and the diffusion of socialist ideology in a nascent industrial labor movement—the two movements vociferously crying out for reform of entitlements and a restructuring of market institutions—the impediments to the development of a sweeping program of entitlements proved so great that reform remained anemic at best. The hallmarks of that reform—the Factory Act of 1911 and the health insurance legislation of 1938—were hardly earthshaking. At the root of the problem was the program of militarization Japan was increasingly committed to after the late 1920s. Hence the vision of the liberal bureaucrats was not realized in the form of comprehensive legislation until the late 1950s and early 1960s when Japan had in place a comprehensive land reform, a rice price support program that guaranteed a minimum standard of living for marginal farmers, a strict labor standards act, and a national program of health insurance and old age pensions.

But while the program of reform was not achieved until militarization of Japanese society ended and the fascist bureaucrats had been purged from the ministries in Tokyo, that program of reform echoed the demands of the tenant and labor unions of the interwar era when Japan decisively entered into a period of unbalanced economic growth. Those who dedicated their efforts to these causes did not do so in vain. My focus on demand in the development of Japan's population quality is testimony to their sacrifices.

To return by way of closing to the metaphor with which I began this account: in comparison to their ancestors, the people of Japan today are

giants on the face of the earth. They are giants today because they command a more powerful technology than they did in the past; they are giants today because they have moved from a rice-producing agrarian nation to an industrial power; and they are giants today because the ordinary people of Japan demanded it and voiced that demand in the streets of the cities, on the shop floors of the factories, and in the paths of the remote villages leading up along the steep slopes of the mountains.