PART II
THE MARKET, ENTITLEMENTS, AND HUMAN GROWTH

Chapter 3
The Tokugawa Legacy

Our focus now shifts to demand for population quality and in particular to the way demand was voiced through markets and social movements designed to assert the importance of the community over the market through the call for health-enhancing entitlements. I use the term "market," but to be more accurate I should use the phrase "the interplay of many markets" because my intention is to include labor and capital markets and the market for goods and services. As for the "health-enhancing entitlements," what I have in mind is the legal right to secure resources whether these are foodstuffs or public health and medical services. Buying and selling on markets provides one way of securing entitlements, but as I shall employ the term in what follows my concern is with entitlements determined outside of markets, that is, entitlements determined in the political and social arena.^[1] In all societies the market and entitlements each play some role in determining the actual level of population quality for particular geographic regions and particular socioeconomic groups. What is peculiar to Japan—not unique to Japan, but especially salient in the Japanese case—is both an emphasis on market incentives and the balkanization of entitlements. Why this emphasis on the market and balkanization of entitlements simultaneously developed and the significance of this fact for the relationship between net nutrition and population quality is the focus of my analysis in Part II.

Because entitlement rights are determined at the level of community and government, we must necessarily consider political organization.

Japan's political organization has changed many times over the last four centuries but most dramatically three times: at the beginning of the Tokugawa period around 1600 when feudalism became well established and refined; at the time of the Meiji Restoration and during the Bakamatsu period when the feudal system was collapsing, that is, from around 1850 to 1880; and at the end of World War II and especially during the American Occupation. While the first two periods of political discontinuity may have been more wrenching for the Japanese populace as a whole, it is the third that probably marks the greatest change as far as the central government's role in and specific policies involving entitlements is concerned. For this reason an account of the entire modern period from the 1850s until the present would be a task requiring at least two volumes. And for this reason I focus on only one of the two subperiods of the epoch since 1850: namely, the period up to 1940. However, to understand how the balkanization of entitlements developed from the 1850s until 1940 we must consider the legacy of the feudal system for postfeudal Japan. In this chapter I briefly review the most important social and economic developments during the period from 1600 to the 1850s which shaped the subsequent balkanization of entitlements.

The chapter commences with a discussion of the key political features of early Tokugawa Japan that set in motion the economic and demographic evolution underlying the balkanization of health-enhancing entitlements in late (1720-1850) Tokugawa Japan. The remainder of the chapter concentrates on the role of the market in determining population quality for subpopulations and the role of entitlements in determining population quality for subpopulations.

The Bakuhan System and the Expansion of Rice Cultivation During the Early Tokugawa Period

Fresh from victory over a coalition of rival warlords at the battle of Sekigahara in 1600, Ieyasu Tokugawa and his allied warlords initiated a remarkable experiment in government designed to bring internal peace and harmony to a country that for centuries had been plagued with internecine warfare. The fruit of Tokugawa ingenuity was the bakuhan system, a dual system of government balancing limited devolution of power to fiefs (han ) and limited centralization of authority in the hands of the Tokugawa family and its feudal allies and retainers (the

bakufu , tent government, also known as the shogunate). Directly linked to the setting up and refinement of the dual system of administration over the first half of the seventeenth century were two other policies that had momentous implications for the economic and demographic development of Japan: the partial demilitarization of the country through the forcible relocation of the sword-bearing warrior class, the samurai , from the villages into the administrative center of the fief to which they were attached, the castle town; and a policy of isolationism designed to ensure that the balance of power achieved through the dual administration system and demilitarization was not disturbed by the intrusion and meddling of foreign powers and foreign religions serving as path breakers for foreign ideologies and customs. At its root the Tokugawa system was based on pragmatic divide-and-rule principles designed to keep the country from once again fragmenting, falling into the pit of internal civil war, as it had done so many times in the past. Given the tradition of local military control, complete centralization was impossible but continuation of local military control was out of the question. Hence the bakuhan system emerged and evolved as an ingenious experiment designed to forge a compromise between strong local war-lords and the preeminent warlord and his immediate allies bent on aggrandizing power for themselves. The most dramatic social and economic consequences of the forging of the bakuhan political compromise was a century of expansion in carrying capacity of the Japanese land area as exemplified by population increase and the amount of new land put under rice cultivation, coupled with rapid urbanization and the initial nourishing of a vibrant craft and protoindustrial economy in the region immediate to the Tokkaido route connecting the two most prominent bakufu cities, Edo (now Tokyo) and Osaka.^[2]

Under the system of dual administration developed during the early Tokugawa period the central bakufu authority claimed about a quarter of the land for itself and allowed the remainder to be divided up into roughly 250 fiefs, selecting rulers (daimyo) for these fiefs from the ranks of the warlords who at the battle of Sekigahara were either victorious or defeated. The idea was to create a balance of power through the creation of a crazy quilt pattern of local administrative control in which no major coalition of powerful daimyo, bent on forming a military alliance to defeat the bakufu, could arise. Moreover, to bring the potentially restive lower-level military class, the samurai, under control, the central regime required that samurai loyal to a daimyo take up residence in the administrative capital of the fief assigned to the daimyo, thereby separating

them from their economic and political base in the countryside where they engaged in farming. As a result, as the system became increasingly refined and formalized and samurai attempts at rebellion against loss of power were successfully quelled, the samurai ceased to perform active military duties, although they continued to be trained in military techniques, and they evolved into a bureaucratic class, responsible for managing the finances of the fiefs. In particular, they managed the collection of taxes in the form of volumes of rice from the villages under fief control. The samurai no longer collected rice, but they received rice stipends from the coffers of the fief to which they owed allegiance. And at least in the early Tokugawa period the amounts of these rice stipends depended almost exclusively on the rank of the samurai household within the pecking order established in the fief into which the retainer was born. However, many reform-minded fiefs found this type of ranking system overly rigid and abandoned it in favor of a competitive examination system in the latter Tokugawa (1720-1868) era.

Another act taken by the bakufu to weaken the centripetal force of local fief rule was the establishment of the sankin kotai system, whereby daimyo were obliged to reside in luxurious domiciles within the confines of the bakufu's capital, Edo, on a regular schedule. This policy not only forced the daimyo to make extensive expenditures that were potentially ruinous for his fief's coffers but also subjected the local rulers to scrutiny by the central authority. Because the samurai were paid in rice and the daimyo were pressured to build magnificent estates in Edo and to maintain splendid castles within their castle towns, a market grew up for buying and selling rice and craft products and other goods demanded by the elite. Osaka, which was Japan's traditional merchant center, began to experience explosive growth in demand for its marketing services, and as a result the entire region contiguous to the road connecting Osaka to Edo began to flourish.

The isolationist policy was also aimed at reducing the ability of fiefs to establish independent political and military prowess. In 1639, the bakufu announced a policy of national seclusion (sakoku ) whereby diplomatic relations with foreign powers other than China and Korea were effectively terminated. Contact with Europeans was limited to a tiny island, Dejima, in Nagasaki harbor, on which a small community of Dutch people was allowed to reside. The bakufu was determined to squelch any attempts by daimyo at forming alliances with foreign powers. As part of its sakoku policy the bakufu outlawed Christianity, which it viewed darkly as a vehicle for the foreign policy of powers like

Spain and Portugal, and to ensure that the peasantry did not adopt Christian practices, it forced all peasant households to register at the local Buddhist temple (the shumon-aratame-cho registers from which contemporary historians estimate vital rates for individual village populations are a by-product of this registration policy). One important consequence of isolationism was an end to the periodic outbreaks of epidemic diseases brought by ships from the Eurasian mainland. This worked to reduce mortality and hence stimulated population growth.

The direct consequence of these policies was the extensive development of riparian works bringing water for irrigation into lands that hitherto had been unsuitable for rice cultivation. Before the establishment of the bakuhan system military clashes between local villages over the diversion of water from one to the other and hence over rights to regular use of water at a stipulated time of the year had prevented the spread of rice cultivation to many reaches of the country. A classic example of how bakufu control removed this constraint is the development of the Kiso River basin in the area running across central Japan and into the ocean near Nagoya. After the bakufu brought in military retainers from a remote fief in southern Japan to stop warfare from breaking out at the confluence of three major rivers near the mouth of the Kiso River, the process of developing dikes and irrigation ditches along the river and hence of opening up new fields for rice cultivation (shinden ) gathered momentum.^[3] As the number of rice fields that could sustain households increased, so did the number of villages. As a result the demand for labor increased, and potential costs of having a large number of children were reduced since children who could not as adults be sustained on the lands farmed by the parental household could now find opportunities for branching off and starting their own families in newly established villages. Hence between 1600 and 1720 when this process of expansion in villages seems to have come to a halt at the national level (however, some regions declined and some expanded thereafter), the population expanded at a brisk pace. It is difficult to be precise about population totals in Tokugawa Japan because the samurai were not counted in any of the estimates and counts for the country as a whole are not available before 1721 (see Hanley and Yamamura 1977: 36 ff.), but the most widely accepted figures seem to put the 1600 population at around 18.5 million and the 1720 population at 26.1 million, yielding an annual increase in numbers of about 0.3 percent per annum. In any event, there does not seem to be doubt about the fact that the population expanded at a fairly vigorous pace between the bat-

tie of Sekigahara and 1720 and that it did so in large measure because of the expansion in rice cultivation.

There was an additional factor stimulating population growth during the early Tokugawa period: urbanization. As we have seen, urbanization was stimulated by two bakufu policies: the forcible removal of samurai from the countryside and hence the expansion of castle town populations; and the sankin kotai policy that give a decided fillip to development of Osaka and Edo and to cities like Nagoya along the Tokkaido route between the two great metropolitan areas. ^[4]

In sum, the political solution to stopping internecine strife hammered out at the beginning of the seventeenth century—centered around dual administration, partial demilitarization, and isolationism—set in process economic and demographic developments that were not, and probably could not be, foreseen by the architects of the system. These developments would eventually cause the system to atrophy during the period known as late Tokugawa, that is, from 1720 until the Meiji Restoration in 1868 when the shogunate disappeared. A detailed examination of this process of decay is not of interest here. Rather, our interest is in the development of health-enhancing entitlements and in those market forces that were intimately connected to the maintenance and promotion of the standard of living in terms of work capacities and capabilities during the late Tokugawa period. We now turn to these issues, beginning with the household and the market and then turning to community and entitlements.

Household, Lineage, and the Market During the Tokugawa Period

The household and the family system are at the center of the relationship between the demand and supply of labor embodying either high or low levels of population quality during the late Tokugawa period. The reasons are various but can be summarized in terms of the following considerations: for most individuals work meant work in an enterprise managed by one's family or by the household within which one resided; in cases in which household or family members worked outside the home it was the household head, not the individual, who tended to make contract arrangements concerning remuneration and conditions of work. That household and family are the center of the supply and demand for population quality in late Tokugawa has a crucial corollary: those agents demanding workers of a given level of population quality

were also those investing in those workers and therefore supplying them. The incentive to enhance quality was built in—internalized, so to speak—since the family was simultaneously operating on both sides of the market.

During the late Tokugawa period both changes in the supply of labor conditioned by a decline in fertility among rural households and changes in demand for labor conditioned by an increase in the demand for labor that possessed a wide range of skills or could be quickly trained in the requisite skills encouraged an improvement in population quality. As a result, the role of the market in enhancing population quality was strengthened. This trend occurred in many sectors of the labor market dominated by family-run employment; and it also occurred in segments of the market in which bargaining between households by and large shaped labor contracts. Moreover, in the sectors of the labor market where households played a less pervasive role—for instance, in the market in which the samurai supplied labor services—deterioration in fief finances due to the burden of sankin kotai also tended to encourage a favorable trend in population quality.

Since family and household play a crucial role in this argument we must say something about the stem family system that by the late Tokugawa period provided the basic set of rules within which families and households formed.^[5] What is a stem family system? It is a system characterized by the following rules: (1) a spouse is brought into the family by one and only one offspring in each generation; (2) succession of the family headship falls on the offspring who has married within the family (or to the married couple); (3) inheritance, which is unequal, favors the single heir/successor; and (4) the family's organizational form passes through an alternating cycle of conjugal phases followed by a stem phase (in which the junior and senior conjugal units reside together) followed by a conjugal phase, and so forth. The transition from the stem to the conjugal phase is marked by the death of the last member of the senior couple; the transition from the conjugal to the stem phase is marked by the marriage of the heir.

That demography conditions the actual realization of a stem family system ideal is apparent from condition (4), for adult mortality and the timing of marriage play a critical role in lengthening or shortening the two phases of the alternating cycle. But demography conditions the operation of the family system in other ways. What if a family finds itself unable to biologically produce an heir, or produces an heir who is too young to assume the family headship at the same time the older couple

wishes to "retire" and commence the stem phase of the cycle? ^[6] Had there not been a religious ideology buttressing the family system in Japan, families might have been content to calmly contemplate the possibility of their lines dying out. But because ancestor worship was deeply entrenched in Japan—in part because of Buddhism, in part because of long-standing domestic spiritual traditions—families had a strong aversion to the demise of lines (although lines did die out with some frequency among the poorer landless houses). Under the ideology of ancestor worship the Japanese family was conceived of as dynastic as well as stem, with the lineage extending through past and future generations through the worship of one's ancestors. For this reason securing a successor to assume the headship and attend to the family's relics and religious artifacts was a matter of paramount concern. And hence in securing heirs, families resorted to a variety of fictions. For instance, males not related to the family by blood ties were in-adopted as "sons." In this way family lines could be perpetuated even if biology failed. But in practice biology limited most families simply because relying on the market for in-adoption was risky—because supply might be limited at the time a household found itself searching for an heir; because in-adopted heirs might be less inclined to attend to the religious rites of the ancestor cult than children conditioned to do so from birth; and because an individual brought in to the house through in-adoption was not trained in how to operate the family's enterprise (if it had an enterprise to operate) from an early age.

Still families did employ in-adoption on occasion, even bypassing biologically produced putative heirs on occasion.^[7] Why? Part of the problem was demographic and related to the timing of the transition from conjugal to stem phases of the cycle. But economics played a role as well. For it must be kept in mind that the actual working of the system was constrained by more than demographic probabilities. Most families were both demographic and economic units in the sense that they managed family enterprises like farms or craft production shops. If the biologically produced putative heir could not shoulder the task of managing the household economy in a highly competitive economy in which households vied with one another for land and rank, then the household head might be inclined to pass over his own son in favor of a more competent person unrelated by kinship.

Thus economics and demography constrained the family system in practice, if not in theory. But how actual adjustments were made very much depended on the social status, the class status, of the family. Here

I differentiate between two opposing class types: the peasant and the samurai warrior/bureaucrat. The reasons for differentiating in this way between two extreme types are both economic and ideological: economic, because in the peasant case household and enterprise overlapped and in the samurai case they did not; ideological, because in principle the code of behavior applicable to the representative samurai household was at variance with the code of behavior expected of the typical peasant household. I do not consider here merchant and craft families since they are less sharply opposed than the two types I focus on and since they were less numerous and have less bearing on my general argument.

In the case of the samurai the head of the house was invariably male as it was the male—not the female, who concentrated on the raising of a successor and domestic chores—who performed the tasks and maintained the rank and prestige of the house on which its fortunes rested. And among members of the bureaucrat/warrior class the income enjoyed by the house (ie ) was a function of the rank that that male enjoyed with the domain's elite. K. Yamamura (1974) shows that there were marked differences in family support income allotments (measured in koku of rice allotted to the house) according to the position of the head. And while at the beginning of the Tokugawa period the position of the house was hereditary, financial pressures on fief coffers due to the burdens of sankin kotai increasingly forced fiefs to become more efficient in allocation of scarce resources and therefore to seek out talented administrators among those retainers best qualified as signaled by performance in fief schools designed to train the retainer class. During the latter half of the Tokugawa period in many fiefs samurai were promoted upward and downward on the basis of ability and performance on examinations. As fiefs found their coffers depleted, many samurai, especially those of low rank, found their rice stipends inadequate for main-raining a large family in comparative luxury. And since their real incomes fluctuated with the price of rice on the Osaka market, in periods when rice prices declined the marginal retainers found themselves all the more squeezed. Hence is it surprising that family sizes among the samurai class declined and that many samurai found themselves without biologically produced sons or in need of a talented successor to replace a less competent putative biological heir? For these reasons the proportion of in-adopted family heads (yoshi ) was quite high (Yamamura 1974). In short, there was a long slow secular trend among the retainer class toward reduction in fertility—with an attendant substitution of quality for quantity of children—and an increasing emphasis on

ability and training in fief schools. Both factors tended to enhance population quality among members of this class. And this trend was directly related to changes in product markets like the market for rice and in financial markets where fiefs were forced to borrow from merchants to secure funds for their activities.

By contrast, among the peasant class the typical house served as a unit for organizing domestic activities and as a production unit in which all members regardless of sex, except the very young and the very old, were expected to perform the tasks of physical work on which the incomes of the house as a group depended. There was sexual division of labor—women devoted more time to domestic chores than did men and women were likely to engage in by-employments involving spinning and weaving (see Saito 1991)—but this division concerned differentiation within the categories of potential income-generating activities and did not draw a rigid line between those who restricted their activities exclusively to domestic work and those who engaged in market activities. Hence the de facto status of women depended on the actual activities they engaged in. If she possessed sufficient acumen and physical prowess, the mistress of a peasant ie might command greater authority than her husband. For this reason it is not surprising that the headship of the ie might devolve onto the mistress of the house or onto a daughter. Indeed Y. Hayami (1983) shows that male primogeniture, which is the form of inheritance usually associated with the stem family system in Japan, was not as common as was formerly believed. In some areas, for example, families employed ultimogeniture, and in some villages in the Northeast succession passed to the last born child regardless of sex (ane katoku ). The point can now be made by contrasting peasant and samurai forms of the stem family system: because the peasant house tended to be both a kinship and a production unit, it displayed far more flexibility in gender differentiation and inheritance than did the samurai household.

Now, as with many samurai houses, but for somewhat different reasons, there was a secular trend among the peasant household sector toward an improvement in population quality during the late Tokugawa period. The reasons lie with both supply and demand, and since peasant houses tended to simultaneously operate on both sides of the market the conceptual distinction I make here between supply and demand is somewhat artificial. In any case, in many regions of Japan, especially in rice-producing areas, there was supply side drift as fertility declined, encouraging a substitution of quality for quantity. Why did this occur?

Since the occasional extant Buddhist temple register allows us to reconstruct with considerable accuracy for each village covered in the registers the age-specific pattern of fertility for women, we know that in most cases interbirth intervals were long, overall marital fertility was low, and life expectancies at age one were quite high. Findings on fertility and mortality levels for a sample of late Tokugawa villages appears in table 15. As can be seen, fertility levels, although not low by modern Japanese standards, are modest, and life expectancies tend to be moderate to high although variability is considerable. Moreover, since use of the register data also allows us to reconstruct the sex ratios for surviving offspring, we have evidence suggesting that infanticide (or mabiki , literally winnowing out) was practiced in some villages, especially against girls (although there is some debate on whether infanticide was also systematically used against male issue in order to secure sex balance among sibling sets). Since infanticide is an emotionally charged issue, it is not surprising that the issue of why fertility reached low levels in many districts of late Tokugawa Japan is one that generates heated controversy.^[8] Without attempting to settle the issue here, I will merely note that at least three positions have been staked out as to the development of a low fertility/moderate mortality regime in late Tokugawa Japan. T. Smith (1988: chap. 4) argues that the main factor was the desire to limit competition over who would succeed to the headship; S. Hanley and K. Yamamura (1977) argue that peasants motivated by a desire to emulate the conspicuous consumption prevailing among urban dwellers limited their fertility so as to enhance their standard of living; and C. Mosk (1983) attributes the behavior to a desire to maximize survivorship for each child not eliminated through infanticide, low fertility, and a long interbirth interval strategy to reduce the number of infants requiring care at any one time. In any event, regardless of which explanation or combination of explanations is adopted, it is reasonably clear that there was a shift from a high fertility regime with frequent mortality crises and significant population growth during the early Tokugawa period to a regime of moderate fertility and moderate mortality and virtually no population growth during the late Tokugawa period (see Kalland and Pedersen 1984). Not all the regions of Japan experienced this sea change in demographic regime to the same extent, but the general pattern is clear enough. And from the point of view of this study the most important consequence of this secular change was a substitution of quality for quantity among children, as couples who restricted the overall size of their families were able to

devote more resources, more foodstuffs, and more parental time to those whom they chose to raise and train in the techniques of agriculture.

The argument involving fertility concerns the supply of population quality, but secular drift in demand was also important. On the demand side two forces were active: technological changes in agriculture that increased the importance of skill formation, especially in rice cultivation; and the expansion of by-employment opportunities in rural districts. For instance, in rice production new seed varieties were developed especially in the Southwest where experimentation with fresh strains was encouraged by the relatively benevolent climate, making double-cropping of rice possible and hence the risk of total crop failure minuscule. Moreover, the market for soil-enhancing fertilizers like fish cakes and dried sardines and the like expanded as rice cultivation spread and increased fertilizer usage improved the inherent productivity of land. And new threshing machinery like the bamboo semba-koki was introduced. Most of these innovations did not save on labor as did the mechanization of agriculture in nineteenth- and twentieth-century North America. Rather, they increased the demand for skilled labor that could efficiently choose from among a growing variety of seed varieties, fertilizers, and harvesting techniques (Smith 1959, 1988). Care and knowledge increasingly commanded a premium as is attested by the growing prevalence of the practice of transplanting the rice plants to the fields in even rows to maximize absorption of the sun's energy. Moreover, since rice was taxed by fiefs but industrial crops were not, wealthier farmers began to divert their activities to a more diverse set of crops and even to craft production aimed at distant urban markets. The result was a growth in by-employments. Especially common in late Tokugawa was the practice of dekasegi (temporary) migration to a small silk filature, or the like, for a period of a year or two. Girls with a knowledge of silk raising and spinning techniques were especially in demand in regions like Gifu and Nagano prefectures in central Japan where the growing of mulberry leaves on which silk-generating cocoons were fed was common. In short, changes on the demand side of the labor market in late Tokugawa Japan increased the demand for population quality and hence proceeded in tandem with supply changes associated with the secular drift toward moderate fertility. Indeed, A. Hayami has argued that the increase in demand for female labor in by-employments actually worked to depress fertility by raising mean ages of first marriage in many late Tokugawa villages (see Mosk 1995a, 1995b). But as a perusal

of table 15 makes clear, there was substantial regional variability in demographic regimes.

The issue of regional variability brings us to the question of the national and regional standard of living defined in terms of opulence. There has been a long-standing debate about the standard of living that was originally fueled by the question of how Japan was able to become the first country outside of the European cultural zone to successfully industrialize. One answer has been that her preindustrial income level was comparable to that of preindustrial Europe; as we have seen, recent research on late Tokugawa period village demography has suggested that fertility and mortality levels were moderate and some scholars have argued that this demographic regime was either a cause or a consequence (or both) of a reasonably good preindustrial level of income per capita. Backward projection of estimates of income per capita with real income growth rates has been commonly used as a method of coming up with figures for per capita income in the late Tokugawa and early Meiji period. Using this basic approach, S. Kuznets (1971) came up with a figure of $74 in 1965 U.S. dollars; K. Ohkawa, with $172 and $251 in 1970 U.S. dollars, the latter figure adjusted for purchasing power parity; and Y. Yasuba (1987), with $268 in 1970 U.S. dollars. By comparison, N. Crafts (1983) estimates the following for per capita income in 1970 U.S. dollars for various European countries on the verge of industrializing and having reasonably reliable data (date for estimate in parentheses): Great Britain (1760), $399; France (1830), $343; Germany (1850), $418; Italy (1860), $451; and Russia (1890), $276. With the exception of Russia, it can be seen that even the optimistic estimates for Japan like those of Yasuba (1986, 1987) put Japan below European countries in the decade before they began to industrialize. In my opinion this is not as surprising as one might think. For income per capita is an opulence measure of the standard of living, and my thesis is that if we were to measure Japan's income in the 1850s in terms of capabilities or in terms of population quality it would be considerable and that population quality, rather than the standard of living defined in opulence terms, is relevant for successful industrialization. But there is an additional consideration: the regional distribution of income. By establishing fief barriers to the diffusion of best practice technique, the bakuhan system kept pent up in the Southwest a variety of rice production techniques. Had the farmers in the remainder of the country known about these techniques, the national level of per capita income might have been considerably higher.

And of course climate played a role at the regional level both in terms of average levels of per capita output and in terms of the willingness to experiment with new seed varieties and fertilizers.

Hard data on the regional distribution of income are not easily obtained. But it is possible to come up with a few rough indicators. Hanley and Yamamura (1977) provide figures on rice output (in koku) and population for sixty-eight regions (kuni ) of Japan around 1700 and 1870. They are skeptical about the reliability of these figures, especially for the latter year, but it is worth exploring what the figures reveal about variation in output per head. I ranked the kuni by the koku per head figures and then grouped the regions into seven classes, for each of which I calculated the average koku per head. (There are 10 kuni in each group except in that with the lowest level of income for which there are eight regions; the index given over on the far right column below was secured by setting the figure ca. 1700 at 100 and then calculating the 1870 figure relative to it. Kuni in both years are grouped on the basis of the 1700 figures.)

Substantial cross-sectional variation in agricultural productivity is evident from these figures. For what they are worth, the data also suggest that the differentials did not close substantially during the Tokugawa period. However, Hanley and Yamamura (1977) warn that the koku figures for the kuni were not revised frequently so it is possible that labor productivity increased more than we have estimated in the less productive regions. But there is no reason to believe convergence occurred during the late Tokugawa period.

By contrast, rapid convergence took place during the Meiji era (1868-1912). To see this consider the following figures for rice yield per hectare in Saga prefecture in southwestern Kyushu and for rice yield per 10 hectares in Tochigi prefecture, which lies in the northeast of the main island, Honshu, of Japan (Tsuchiya 1976: 60).

How typical the Saga and Tochigi figures given here are for the regions in which they lie, Southwest and Northeast, respectively, is open to debate, but the picture of convergence drawn with these data accords with the descriptive literature on government and landlord promotion of the diffusion of best practice technique during the Meiji era.

That regional variation in climate, soil quality, and methods of farming generated substantial geographic variation in yields can also be demonstrated by examining the capacity of different regions to sustain population increase during the late Tokugawa period. Hence while for the country as a whole population growth over the 1721-1846 period was virtually nonexistent, there was considerable regional variation in growth rates. H. Kito (1983: 17 if.) gives figures for the fourteen major regions of Japan over the period 1721-1746 and I have taken these data and calculated simple unweighted averages of population group rates in percentage terms for groups of these regions classified by an overall index of the warmth of weather (there are five regions in the first two groups and four in the third group, and the northeastern regions rank low in terms of the index while the southwestern districts rank high).

The term "crisis years" refers to the periods of food shortages, especially to the major famine era, including the Kyoho (1732-1733), Tenmei (1783-1786), and Tempo (1836-1838) famines. Note that regional variation in population growth rates is substantial during crisis periods but not during normal years. Thus whatever is checking population growth is related to a realized or potential threat of food shortage. That

this appears to be the case makes one a bit skeptical of explanations for low fertility that emphasize a positive linkage between the level of income per capita and the willingness to restrict fertility.

In sum, the family lay at the center of the adjustment of population quality to changes in labor markets: it was the unit that determined supply, and for the great mass of the people who were peasant producers it was also the unit determining demand for skills, work capacity, and capabilities. In the regions of the country where technological progress in rice farming or the expansion in the demand for by-employments was especially vigorous, there seems to have been a secular trend toward improvement in population quality. This improvement was driven by a decline in fertility and an increase in the amount and quality of training accorded offspring. That the market was as effective as it was in enhancing population quality is one reason why entitlements played a more circumscribed role. However, as we shall now see, entitlements did play a role, especially in the fiefs where food crises occurred throughout the late Tokugawa period.

Community and Entitlements During the Late Tokugawa Period

As pervasive as the market was in promoting improvements in population quality during the late Tokugawa period, entitlements supplemented the market. During this time the most important entitlements were those that provided insurance of sufficient food to eat in times of dearth for individual households and villages. Because entitlement insurance in the late Tokugawa period tended to be spread out among fairly small numbers of households—at the level of the village the number of households was of course small, but even at the level of the fief, which was the largest unit involved, population size typically ran into the low 100,00s—I refer to the "balkanization of entitlements." By this term I mean to highlight the local nature of the guarantee and distribution of entitlements in feudal Japan.

The most salient of the entitlements over foodstuffs were those offered by the fief. Villages paid taxes in the form of rice. What did they get in return? Certainly the fief provided protection and quelled local uprisings that might spill over from village to village. They also organized the creation of ditches, dams, and other riparian works. But most important, fiefs provided rice and other foodstuffs in times of dearth. S. Vlastos (1986) characterizes many of the three thousand or so peasant

rebellions (ikki ) that broke out during the Tokugawa period as political movements on the part of the peasantry, serving to remind the fief that it had an obligation to extend "benevolence" down to the villages when harvests were poor. It must be kept in mind that the peasants had leverage in their relationship with the fief and that organizing ikki was one way of sending a signal to the daimyo —households could steal across fief boundaries and attempt to settle in the villages of neighboring fiefs if local conditions were unbearable, thereby reducing the tax-producing capacity of their home fief—or of putting pressure on the daimyo whose subjects were becoming too restive. Typically the villages wanted either lower taxes or outright supplies of grains. Vlastos (1986) argues that during the early Tokugawa period ikki were mainly organized by village headmen, but that by the later Tokugawa period village landowners often organized rebellions to demand a redress of grievances against the headman or other groups of landowners. For instance, he argues that one reason ikki tended to break out in silk-raising areas toward the close of the Tokugawa period was that silk-producing families often devoted little land to rice cultivation and hence they were unusually adversely affected when rice prices rose in times of dearth since they had to purchase most of the rice they consumed. In short, groups of peasants did not want to abolish or negate the operation of the market with entitlements, but they did want the fief to provide them with insurance in the form of a backup in times of dearth, especially in times when demand outstripped supply on the rice market.^[9]

The fief was not the only organization providing entitlement insurance to peasant households. At the village level poorer households often sought the protective benevolence of more economically prosperous households and formed dozoku units—that is, extended households often bound together in fictive kinship terms—within which the economically inferior parts supplied labor services in exchange for access to land for production and for foodstuffs in time of need. C. Nakane (1967) argues that these dozoku, which have been extensively studied by anthropologists, are usually not groups tied together by true bonds of kinship but rather are economic organizations that in effect exchange labor services for use of land and insurance services. Moreover, even in areas of Japan where dozoku were absent, landlord-tenant relations that were well developed by the later Tokugawa period, especially in the commercially oriented region contiguous to Osaka and to the Tokkaido route leading from Osaka to Edo, often involved insurance entitle-

ments. For instance, A. Waswo (1977: 29 ff.) notes that landlords often assumed fictive roles as "parents" of tenants, or as "grandparents" (of tenants of tenants), and in exchange for the rent that they extracted from their tenants were expected to provide rent reductions or even outright grants of food in times of dearth.

The Legacy: The Strength of the Market and the Balkanization of Entitlements

For two and a half centuries, from the early seventeenth century until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, the bakuhan system guaranteed a high level of internal peace and stability to Japanese peasants. As a result rice cultivation and population spread rapidly during the first century or so of Tokugawa rule. At this point, around 1720, population growth at the national level seems to have stopped, although at the regional level the pattern is more complex and variegated. Why population growth stopped is a matter of debate, but there seems to be considerable evidence that it slowed down because fertility declined, perhaps in response to a growing scarcity of land that could be readily brought into cultivation, perhaps because households found themselves increasingly pressed and therefore concerned about economizing on scarce resources by maximizing the survivorship of children through the lengthening of interbirth intervals, and so forth. In any event the decline in fertility tended to improve population quality on the supply side. And on the demand side the same households who by limiting supply enhanced quality also demanded greater work capacity and capabilities from their offspring. For agriculture grew increasingly sophisticated in terms of labor requirements. And the expanding market for by-employments demanded flexible and ready skill development. For these reasons market forces played a central role in the development of population quality and the standard of living defined in terms of capabilities during the late Tokugawa period.

Entitlements that supplemented the market were less pivotal but were still important. The most important of these were insurance entitlements over foodstuffs and were provided at a fairly local level by fief governments. And at an even more local level dozoku and landlords provided insurance entitlements in time of dearth. In short, balkanization of entitlements was a fact of life under the system of bakuhan dual administration.

Thus strong market orientation and balkanized entitlements were the

legacy that late Tokugawa Japan offered to a country that, after the Meiji Restoration, rapidly moved down the path of industrialization. The profound imprint of this legacy on the relationship between economic development and population quality during an era when, as Western technology poured into the country, labor markets only gradually took on a complexion differing from that characteristic of the late Tokugawa period is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 4
Population Quality in an Era of Balanced Economic Growth, 1880-1920

During the first half century of industrialization following the Meiji Restoration, economic growth was balanced in the sense that levels and growth rates in wages and labor productivity were roughly equal in agriculture and other sectors employing traditional Japanese technology and in the new industries utilizing a combination of imported Western techniques and traditional Japanese methods. As a result, labor moved smoothly back and forth between the two sectors of the economy. Discontinuity introduced with Western machinery and production methods was largely mitigated by the continuity of labor recruitment practices inherited from the late Tokugawa period when by-employments flourished in many rural districts and young women went out for several years of dekasegi work; indeed, it was females who predominated in the labor forces of the new textile plants using British-style ring spinning devices and mules, just as women had predominated in dekasegi migration streams during the late Tokugawa period. But the nature of contracts and work conditions changed as the large impersonal factory with constant turnover and a nebulous connection to the households supplying short-term labor to it supplanted the smaller operations of the Tokugawa period. Employers in large concerns did not have the incentives to preserve the health of their workers. For this reason, as the locus of employment gradually shifted away from the family-managed enterprise, there was a slow but inexorable breakdown in

the market institutions that had favored an enhancement of population quality during the late Tokugawa period.

Moreover, there was a breakdown in the balkanized system of entitlements developed during the late Tokugawa period. In part, this occurred because of administrative changes as the fief governments and the villages under them were abolished or restructured and a system of prefectural, city (shi ), and rural county (gun ) governments—with town (machi ) and village (mura ) governments underneath county administration—was brought in to replace the feudal structure. Political decision making became more centralized, and the structure of balkanized insurance entitlements was significantly weakened in concept as well as in practice. Lacking a domestic model for how to reorganize entitlements, the central government shied away from demand for population quality policies, its innovations taking on a supply side bias favoring the importation of Western medical and public health technology. The breakdown in entitlements also resulted from the reshaping of landlord-tenant relations that had been a cornerstone of balkanized entitlements during the late Tokugawa period. Productivity gain in agriculture associated with a diffusion and refinement of best-practice Tokugawa technique diminished variance in harvest yields, thereby largely eliminating the dependence of tenants on landlords; and at the same time, to the degree that the return on agricultural investments fell relative to the return on investments in industry, innovating landlords began to lose interest in agricultural activities, thereby surrendering their roles as spearheads of improvement in rural Japan.

Three factors kept this breakdown in health-enhancing market and entitlement institutions from generating political and social unrest sufficient to force the government and large employers to drastically revamp their practices and establish a set of market- and entitlement-based substitutes for those that had previously served households and communities. The first factor was the legacy of the Tokugawa period and the implicit assumption that employers would naturally look after the health of their employees. It was widely believed in many circles that government coercion was likely to be unfairly enforced and might even be counterproductive. Governmental responsibility—insofar as it extended beyond its own employees—was best left to taking care of food crises and the like. And because of improvements in agricultural productivity, these crises were infrequent. The second factor was the nature of labor markets in the nascent large industrial sector, in particular, the high turnover and the predominance of female workers employed on

short-term contracts. Unlike a farm household that invested in its own family members with the expectation of securing years of productive service, or invested in its members because when they left the household for marriage a long-lasting bond might be established between the household losing the child and the household gaining the child, the owners and managers of large spinning and weaving companies lacked a clear imperative to actively protect the health of their employees. Moreover, the mills tended to recruit workers from the ranks of small-scale tenant households, the least healthy and physically robust segment of the rural population, which further discouraged active investment in worker health. Village entrepreneurs who operated small spinning filatures and risked losing a good reputation if a girl's health was ruined might have a strong incentive to develop aggressive health-enhancing practices. But for the large spinning and weaving companies, whose female workers moved in and out of the labor force, the situation was different. And since the girls themselves did not expect to stay with the industry for a sustained length of time, they lacked the drive to actively organize unions or other employee-based organizations aimed at voicing a demand for better conditions. The third factor was that most employment continued to be located within the world of household-managed enterprises like farms and small shops, although there was a clear drift away from this sector over time. To some extent the problem was restricted to a relatively small portion of the population during the early Meiji period. As long as those experiencing the dirt and noise of mill work, the inadequate ventilation, the related outbreaks of pneumonia and bronchitis, and the possibility of succumbing to the ravages of tuberculosis were almost invisible, society at large took scant interest.

In short, those factors that had sustained and encouraged an improvement in population quality during the late Tokugawa period now acted as an impediment to further improvements. As the breakdown in entitlements occurred, differentials between groups favored and not favored by the market tended to widen. Unfortunately, systematic evidence on this breakdown and divergence in population quality is at best fragmentary. Therefore, in sifting through the various strands of evidence I will range widely. My discussion begins with a description of balanced economic growth during the Meiji Restoration, turns to the technological bias in government policy, moves on to the issue of the health and physical well-being of female factory workers, and closes with an analysis of regional differentials in population quality. To fully understand the significance of the evidence assembled here, it is neces-

sary to compare the findings in this chapter with those in the next chapter, which deals with the interwar period when a new set of market and entitlement institutions began to emerge and take shape.

The Economics and Demography of Balanced Growth

During the period from the Meiji Restoration until World War I productivity in agriculture grew, as did productivity in the nonagricultural sector, and while growth in manufacturing outstripped growth in farming and fishing, differentials in growth were not large. At the time of the Meiji Restoration a common labor pool moved back and forth on a regular basis between farming and by-employment, including small-scale light industry, and the forces of supply and demand tended to equalize earnings and marginal labor productivity in the agricultural and nonagricultural sectors. Because differential labor productivity growth after the 1870s did not unduly favor the nonagricultural sector and because the vast majority of the newly created industrial jobs were in textiles and food processing, which made extensive use of short-term female labor that did not require long periods of training, employers had little incentive to offer premium wages to keep workers who by dint of job experience were especially skilled. As a result, marginal productivity of labor in agriculture set a wage floor for manufacturing and there was almost no divergence in earnings between manufacturing and agriculture.^[1]

One of the reasons growth was balanced was because productivity of farmworkers increased as population quality improved. Consider the figures in panel A of table 16. While the number of farm families remained virtually unchanged throughout the 1880-1920 period, the number of workers per farm family gradually declined, mainly because the number of female workers per farm household was dropping. For example, the ratio of female farm household workers to male farm household workers, always less than 1.00 throughout the period, declines somewhat over the four decades. Now one reason why farm households could increasingly afford to release workers for dekasegi employment in factories is apparent from the figures on workdays per worker and on labor productivity: both days worked and productivity per workday go up. As each worker became potentially more efficient, the household was better able to "lend" some of its members to industry without much sacrifice in output. With the steady improvement in

population quality and with the lengthening in number of years mandated under the compulsory education requirement, the physical and mental capacity of those who entered into agricultural pursuits was enhanced. Moreover, as can be seen from the figures on fertilizer and machinery inputs, the worker also benefited from more fixed (machinery) and variable (fertilizer) capital. In this context it is useful to keep in mind that increasing the application of fertilizer not only improves the inherent quality of the soil but also, by curtailing the amount of time devoted to weeding, reduces labor requirements (see Brandt 1993). Indeed as farm children, who often did the weeding, were withdrawn from regular work to attend school, presumably the demand for fertilizers increased. In short, the secular improvement in population quality commenced during the late Tokugawa period and continued into the Meiji period as traditional best-practice techniques (the so-called rono gijutsu , technology of veteran farmers) diffused throughout the country under the active promotion of the government. This diffusion raised per capita agricultural output, and in its wake per capita gross nutrition also improved. And the effect of these trends was to free up workers for manufacturing, thereby encouraging the continuance of a balanced growth process begun during the late Tokugawa period.

Hence under conditions of balanced growth the agricultural sector and the legacy of techniques built up in the more productive fiefs made a major contribution to economic growth both in terms of generating output growth and in terms of elastically freeing up labor for manufacturing activities. Some indicators of the quickening pace of growth in nonagricultural activities and of its implications for urbanization and income growth can be seen in panel B of table 16. Note that the proportion of the population living in the six big cities where industrial production tended to be concentrated—five of the six big cities were either in the Tokyo (formerly Edo) or Osaka region or lay along the Tokkaido where by-employments had most vigorously flourished during the late Tokugawa period—grows rapidly and the proportion in primary industry declines. With the shift out of agriculture into the manufacturing sector, which enjoyed labor productivity growth rates somewhat in excess of those experienced by agriculture, real income and consumption per capita grew slowly but steadily (see panel B of table 16). It is important to keep in mind that this growth in manufacturing production during the 1880-1920 era was mainly restricted to light industry and that in light industry female workers predominated. Consider the figures on percentage of hours in cotton spinning supplied

by females. As can be seen from panel B over 75 percent of the hours were supplied by females and this proportion actually grew during the period 1890-1900. Moreover, wages for the factory girls actually fell short of wages paid females in farming; being a seasonal activity, farming could not provide the regularity of work offered by many textile enterprises.^[2]

What about male workers for whom—as panel B of table 16 demonstrates—manufacturing wages usually exceeded agricultural wages, albeit not by a large margin? Why does the wage pattern vary between the sexes? The critical differences were the skill levels required and the nature of the labor contract. Male employment was largely concentrated in government-managed military arsenals, mines, and a few heavy industrial facilities (some of which were later sold off to the private sector) and in a relatively small number of privately operated heavy industrial concerns that manufactured ships and the like. During the Meiji period when labor capable of employing the techniques necessary for using Western machinery was in short supply, a typical pattern was for these factories to contract out work with labor bosses who brought in with them to the shop floor their crews of subordinate workers. The labor boss trained these subordinate workers and allocated wages to them from the overall payment negotiated between him (it was always a male) and the firm. In fact, the labor boss system was a carryover from the Tokugawa period and is one more example of balkanized entitlement insurance as the labor boss "took care" of the basic subsistence needs of his subordinates in good times or bad. Fearing that the labor bosses could and would use their oligopoly position to extract excessively high rents out of the enterprise, corporations attempted to establish direct control over their workers, replacing the free-floating labor boss with the co-opted labor boss or internally promoted foreman whose fate was more closely linked to the company. Increasingly, as heavy industry grew and established direct managerial control over the shop floor, special status within companies was accorded professional workers graduating from the higher educational system and co-opted labor bosses. These favored workers were called shain (literally company workers), and as an elite they earned high wages, wages the enterprises tied to seniority and age in order to reduce turnover. Corporate paternalism in Japan initially developed around this elite and was associated with wage payments that, in comparison with agriculture, were generous^[3]

The vast majority of male industrial workers, however, were not given shain status. Until the slowdown in growth of the nascent heavy

industrial sector, coupled with an expansion in the number of graduates from industrially oriented vocational schools during the 1920s, spelled the end of excess demand conditions for skilled labor, most highly trained blue-collar workers moved about with considerable frequency. Some moved with labor bosses and some moved on their own initiative. Consider, for instance, figures for the Shibaura and Ishikawajima engineering works in 1902 (Gordon 1985: 35):

Not only did blue-collar workers leave plants with frequency, employers often complained of poor work habits and lax work discipline among their ranks and as a result often resorted to firing these workers who were denied shain status and were known as koin , which implies hired worker/outsider status. For these workers wage levels were not especially generous, although the more skilled they were, the greater the premium. At the time the typical heavy industrial enterprise saw no incentive in offering a generous seniority-based wage package as a vehicle for eliciting loyalty and effort.

As it had during the late Tokugawa period, female dekasegi labor continued to be the backbone of the industrial labor force. In other words, despite the great advances being made in importing and adapting American and European technology in Japan, continuity in the labor market remained strong in the sense that high turnover and the short-term labor contract prevailed. What was new was the fact that large plants operating with central power sources like steam engines or with electricity began to supplant the small rural workshop of late Tokugawa. And what was new within the large confines of textile plants or in the depths of coal mines was the danger of industrial contamination and exposure to airborne infections that had not been prevalent in the small shops of the late Tokugawa period. In short, as the large enterprise employing the bulk of its workers on a short-term basis increased its share of the total labor force, the proportion of employers with an active incentive to protect the health and physical well-being of their workers declined. And at the same time the health of the industrial work environment deteriorated. Slowly but steadily the health-

enhancing nature of the Japanese market was breaking down. And this was taking place in an environment in which the government was reluctant to intervene for reasons to which we shall now turn.

Community and Government Policy

During the Tokugawa period, the strength of the market and the balkanization of entitlements under the dual administrative system of bakuhan rule kept the nominal bakufu government of Japan out of entitlement programs aimed at the mass of its populace. For this reason the new Meiji government was reluctant to pursue an activist entitlement policy. But as Japan opened herself up to trade and to contact with the West, it became apparent to the former samurai who, as the educated elite, assumed responsibility for guiding the country along the path to industrialization that foreign models could be profitably and efficiently studied and adapted in many areas outside of that involving industrial machinery. As a rational borrower Japan could pick and choose the countries it wanted to imitate depending on the type of institution involved: thus the Meiji government designed its new police system along French lines, its military along German lines, its higher academic system along German lines, and so forth. But two factors constrained the government in its eagerness to follow Western guidelines: financial and resource limitations and potential resistance to social engineering, namely, the extent to which Tokugawa institutions were so deeply rooted that new institutions were unlikely to be accepted, or accepted only at the expense of social unrest. Financial constraints and the Tokugawa legacy of balkanized entitlements and reliance on the market must be given pride of place in attempting to explain why the Japanese government exhibited a strong "supply side" technological bias in its health/population quality maintenance and enhancement programs, eschewing social engineering in the entitlement field in favor of importing Western medical and public health methods and knowledge.

Not surprisingly, the technological bias was already evident during the later Tokugawa period and especially at the close of the Tokugawa era—known as the bakumatsu period—when Western ideas and goods starting streaming into Japan as isolationism collapsed under American pressure in the early 1950s. Dutch treatises concerning anatomy and surgical and other medical treatments had made their way into Japan through the small Dutch population residing on Dejima in Nagasaki harbor, Tokugawa Japan's sole window onto the West.^[4] For instance, in

1774 Gempaku Sugita published Kaitai Shinsho , which describes Western concepts of anatomy. While the bakufu sponsored a special academy for the study of Chinese medicine (kanpo ), over fifty individual fiefs set up schools to teach medicine, in some of which Dutch methods—so-called rangaku —were espoused (Sugaya 1976: 51 ff.). This espousal of Western methods, however, was opposed by the kanpo doctors, who managed to get the bakufu to require that all books be reviewed by the Igakuin (Academy of Medicine) before publication. Thus, while it is not untrue that the mainstream Tokugawa tradition of medicine inherited by the Meiji government was that distilled from Chinese medical theory, Western ideas had some currency during the bakumatsu period, when the bakuhan system was steadily collapsing. Indeed H. Hirota (1957) estimates that at the inception of the Meiji period around 19 percent of the doctors practiced Western medicine. In short, it was far easier for the central authorities to swing the country toward Western technical concepts of public health and medicine than toward a restructuring of the system of entitlements, which, even more than medical theory, was tied up with deeply held cultural traditions. But even in the area of medicine a strong opposition campaign was mounted by the defenders of Tokugawa traditional practice.

The new Meiji government took up the challenge laid down by the kanpo school and carried through the struggle by decisively tilting in favor of the Western school. But the issue was not quickly settled. The Meiji oligarchs proceeded on a variety of fronts, at first placing the Inuka (Medical Affairs Section) under the control of the Ministry of Education, but later renaming it the Eisikyoku (Sanitary Bureau) and placing it under the Ministry of Interior. To this agency was delegated the authority and responsibility for issuing guidelines on the standards expected of medical and public health personnel, the formulation of regulations for dealing with epidemics (with the opening up of the country to international trade after the mid-1850s epidemics became a problem), and the control over and testing of drugs. After systematic comparison between the efficacy of Western and Chinese medical practices, the Inuka bureaucrats decreed that Western concepts were to be given preference in the examination tests required of those seeking certification as doctors and in the licensing of schools offering programs in medicine (see Sugaya 1976:45 ff.). However, since most doctors already practicing during the early Meiji period used Chinese methods, kanpo practices continued to dominate throughout the late nineteenth century, a fact that increasingly ran counter to the posture of the government.

Within the government a growing belief in the efficacy of Western medical practices—especially German practices, on which Dutch rangaku medical theory was based—led the government to not only tilt in favor of Western medical concepts in examining and training doctors but also to enthusiastically embrace the new field of bacteriology. For example, the bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato, who was the first to isolate the tetanus bacillus, was sent at government expense to work with Robert Koch in Germany.

In short, the Meiji government actively exploited Western imports in the area of technological improvements—what I call supply side improvements as opposed to demand side factors such as the organization of national entitlement programs like those developed in Germany under Bismarck—to enhance population quality. In particular, through its power to impose regulations the central authorities actively pursued a policy of raising standards for medical and public health personnel. Doctors were required to register with the government, and it was decreed that examinations for certification of doctors were to follow nationally imposed guidelines (although a fully standardized national test was not introduced until after World War II). In 1899 midwives were brought under regulation and in 1915 regulations for nursing were promulgated. One of the consequences of this policy of standardizing around Western medical principles was a temporary reduction in doctors per person. The kanpo doctors aged and eventually either died in active service or retired. Due to inevitable delays in the establishment and staffing of educational and medical institutions designed to train young personnel in Western methods, replacements to the ranks of the medical profession were outpaced by the older generations of kanpo doctors. This explains why, as we see in the lefthand column of table 9, the number of doctors per capita decline between the decade 1911-1920 and the decade 1921-1930, before increasing thereafter. Even in the area of medical personnel the legacy of the Tokugawa period lingered far into the Meiji period. And because of the tradition of balkanization of entitlements central to Tokugawa government policy, gradually gathering momentum toward centralization was slowed.

But the long-run trend definitely favored centralization, and one of the most important agents of that change was the military. A case in point is the military's innovations in preventing the spread of disease in military camps due to waterborne microorganisms. During the Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s, the number of Japanese soldiers dying from infections far exceeded the number dying from war-related wounds.

Because of this the Japanese military authorities began a systematic study of why epidemics broke out in military encampments: they dispatched a research team abroad to study methods of preventing infection in foreign military organizations, finally settling on American practices, which they then methodically implemented. Henceforth they equipped all base and field hospitals with bacteriological laboratories; they made certain that every division included a sanitary detachment that carried water-testing kits; they made compulsory the boiling of water; and so forth. Thus during the Russo-Japanese War at the beginning of the twentieth century, the ratio of those dying from infection to those dying from wounds dropped to one to four. And of course, since military service was compulsory—although exemptions to military service were granted—the military innovations diffused down to the village level both through government regulation and through word of mouth.

In contrast to its assertive role in promoting the importation and dissemination of German medical and public health knowledge, the Japanese government showed remarkably little interest in adopting German innovations in the field of entitlements, for example, health and disability insurance, legislation regulating contamination in factories, and so forth.^[5] The reason has already been stated: the legacy of the Tokugawa period carried with it an assumption that voluntary agreements between employer and employee lay at the center of health enhancement and that insofar as governments felt compelled to intervene, responsibility was to be exercised at the local community level. A telling illustration of this point is the protracted length of time required for passage and implementation of national mining and factory acts setting minimum safety standards, restricting the amount of overtime work, and outlawing child labor: over a half century of debate and study went into this effort. The lethargic speed at which legislation was adopted could hardly be said to be due to lack of knowledge of Western practice: during the early Meiji period the government had passed legislation assuming responsibility for the factories it directly managed. For instance, it hired French doctors in the Ikuno branch of the Government Mining Bureau to look after the health of the French technicians and miners who worked in the pits. By the 1910s mining injuries were in excess of 150,000 a year, many stemming from accidental explosions of inflammable gases, and yet stiff regulations were limited to government-managed operations. Moreover, the central bureaucracy had actually tried to draft and get Diet passage for a mining law as early as

the 1880s. Finally in 1905 a mining law passed the Diet. And even more time was required to pass a factory act: even when the Kogyoho (Factory Act) finally reached the floor of the Diet in 1910, resistance to the legislation remained widespread among the ranks of organized business who argued the "beautiful Japanese traditions" governing the relationship between employer and employee should not be subject to government intervention and regulation. And the law that was finally passed in 1911—whose twenty-five articles included banning employment of minors; stipulating that a certain number of minutes should be set aside each workday for rest; requiring that factory owners compensate employees disabled by dint of their duties in the factory; and appointing a small number of factory inspectors to investigate conditions in factories above a minimum size—was not actually implemented until 1916, almost fifty years after the Meiji Restoration.

Given the central government's bias toward supply side—technological—solutions to health enhancement and away from demand side—entitlement—approaches, the responsibility for organizing and financing public health and medical activities and for policing factories largely fell to local authorities. For this reason we should not be surprised that there is a fairly close relationship between per capita income and size and density of communities—the larger a community, the greater the economies of scale in the provision of clean water, removal of sewage, and the dispensing of medical knowledge—and per capita levels of investment in public health and medicine. In regard to this point see table 17, which gives figures for the forty-seven prefectures of Japan classified by levels of urbanization and per capita levels of medical personnel, hospitals, and hospital capacity during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.^[6] There are certainly exceptions—see the figures on maximum levels for group D—but in general the greater the level of urbanization, the greater the per capita resources devoted to enhancing health. Balkanization of health-enhancing entitlements was continuing. Now, however, the force of per capita income and the tax base and scale economies were dictating the geographic pattern, not the dual administrative bakuhan system. And that local areas, not the central authority, were carrying the main fiscal burden for these programs helps us to make sense of the very low levels of national government expenditure on social security (including public health and medicine) evident in table 16.^[7] In short, many aspects of the Tokugawa heritage in entitlements were, under a new guise, being perpetuated in the Meiji period, even four decades after the bakuhan system lay in ruins.

Enterprise and the Female Factory Worker

How bad were conditions in the textile factories? To what extent do the anthropometric measures allow us to draw conclusions about the supply pool from which the girls were drawn and about conditions in the factories themselves? Many studies, for example, E. P. Tsurumi's (1990), have documented the fact that the mills were dirty, noisy, and poorly ventilated. But how much of a toll did these conditions exact on the girls who entered the mills?

We have some evidence on both points. As a result of the passage of the Factory Act of 1911 factory inspectors began to enter the larger mills in 1916 and to file reports on an annual basis thereafter.^[8] From the tables compiled from these reports it is clear enough that mortality rates among workers and former workers in the factories exceeded those for persons of comparable age in the prefectures in which the factories were located. Moreover, rates of airborne infection were especially high in the factory mills, particularly for workers who resided in factory dormitories and were thus exposed both at work and at their place of residence.

Anthropometric data for spinning mill recruits and spinning mill workers of various lengths of job tenure allow us to supplement the qualitative impressionistic accounts penned by factory workers and social critics. The data appear in table 18. On the basis of these figures we can make the following points. First, factory recruits were considerably shorter than students at all ages; second, factory recruits seem to have matured at later ages than did students (the gap in height between recruits and students decreases between ages 15 and 20); third, in comparison to students, recruits are heavier at any given height (i.e., recruits have larger body mass indexes than do students). Therefore, there is no doubt that there were rather large differences in the population quality of the supply pool from which the spinning mills drew and that of the female student population who were, in general, daughters of middle-class and well-to-do families.

But what about operatives who had worked in the mills a year or two? What was the extent of the impact of the work and living environment of the mills? As we can see from panel B of table 18, the pattern is a bit erratic, but in general the argument that more years of work in the mill adversely affected physique is not confirmed by these data. It is possible that there is a selectivity problem. That is, it is possible that the less healthy and sickly voluntarily or involuntarily left the mills early on in their work careers. But if we compare recruits with those

having mill experience, the superiority of the latter is evident. This does not really prove the argument of the mill owners that the "beautiful Japanese relations" between employer and employee were promoting enhanced health. After all, the mills drew from some of the lowest income groups in the country and it is quite possible that the food provided to the factory girls in company cafeterias, which was designed to keep up the stamina of the workers, was superior to that eaten in poor agricultural households. But the data do not contradict the argument of the mill owners, either. Perhaps the most reasonable way to put the matter is this: by the early twentieth century socioeconomic differentials in population quality were becoming very large. This was in part due to widening income differentials as the incomes in the industrial conurbations like Tokyo and Osaka increased and those in rural areas increasingly lagged behind; the process whereby differentials widened was not rapid as economic growth was balanced, but it was steadily occurring nevertheless. But more important were the debilitating effects of physical work and disease. The female students were not accustomed to doing physical work on a regular basis, and they came from households that could afford to spend more time and resources on coping with infectious disease. In short, net nutrition was far better among the young adult student population of Japan than it was among the young adult factory worker population. And the fact that central government was relying heavily on the market and was not aggressively promoting entitlement programs to supplement market outcomes was contributing to the widening of the differential.

Regional Distribution of Young Male Height

Without doubt, then, socioeconomic differentials were pronounced toward the close of the era of balanced economic growth. But what about geographic differentials? In light of the fact that Tokugawa period entitlements were balkanized and that socioeconomic differentials appear to be quite pronounced, would we not expect these to be substantial as well? After all, the combination of income per capita and socioeconomic differentials, coupled with the fact that some fiefs had devoted more resources to ensuring their peasants against food crises than other fiefs (which presumably left its mark on the physical growth of children at the beginning of the Meiji period), should generate regional variations in height and weight among young adults during the period of balanced growth.^[9]

We can begin the investigation with regional figures on the percentage of twenty-year-old males examined in military recruitment physicals who are short (defined as 4 shaku or less [1 shaku = 30.3 cm]). As can be seen from map 1, the forty-six prefectures of Japan (excluding prefecture 47, Okinawa) fall into ten regions. And for these ten regions we have data for 1918 on the percentage of males examined for military recruitment examinations who are short. The percentages are given on map 2. There is considerable regional variability in shortness. It is least evident in Hokkaido—where the Ainu population, which once was genetically distinct, resides and has intermarried with the population originating from the remainder of Japan—and in the Kinki region, which includes Osaka, Kyoto, and Hyogo prefectures, which during the Tokugawa period constituted the most economically advanced area of Japan. The regions where shortness is most pronounced are the districts in the northeast of Honshu, the main island, and especially the districts just north of Tokyo. To what extent these differentials are long-standing is, of course, a matter of debate. That they may have been long-standing is suggested by the fact—for which some statistical evidence is offered in the next chapter—that the high income areas of interwar Japan tended to be those that had been heavily urbanized during the late preindustrial period.

Conclusions and Implications

In this chapter I have argued that despite the wrenching changes brought on by the introduction and adaptation of Western technology and institutions in Japan over the period 1880-1920, the structure of the labor market as measured by intersectoral differentials in labor productivity and in wages did not experience sudden and dramatic upheaval. Indeed, what is most striking about the labor market is how strong is the continuity running from the late Tokugawa period into the period around World War I. However, while the composition of employment in terms of gender and wage levels relative to agriculture does not exhibit dramatic change, the size of industrial enterprises employing workers does. As a result of an increase in the number of large firms employing workers, especially in mining and in textiles, there was a gradual breakdown in the health-enhancing institutions built into labor markets during the late Tokugawa period. As these institutions crumbled there was a growing potential for a widening of the gap in population quality between various socioeconomic groups within the population of Japan.

Map 1.
The Regions and Prefectures of Japan

Map 2.
Percentage of Males Examined for Military Service Who
Are Short (4 Shaku or Less) in Each Region of Japan, 1918

Moreover, the central government was not eager or able to step in and—through regulation and a program of centralized entitlements—redress the disparities in population quality that by the Meiji period were becoming increasingly apparent. The legacy of Tokugawa Japan played a decisive role in determining the course government intervention would take. Hence during the first half century of industrialization the central government concentrated its efforts on importing Western knowledge in the areas of public health and medicine and on setting standards for medical personnel, focusing its attention on supply side policies rather than on the demand side entitlement policies pioneered by Bismarckian Germany.

But the breakdown in the population quality-enhancing institutions of the market coupled with a legacy of balkanized entitlements that was becoming increasingly irrelevant for the new challenges of industrializing Japan was not to go unchallenged by the poorer and less economically favored groups in Japan. Moreover, after 1920 balanced economic growth disappeared. A surge in heavy industrial production occurred in the wake of World War I in part because embargoes of shipments to Japan among the belligerent countries acted as a nontariff barrier to imports of manufactured goods, thereby stimulating the rapid expansion of heavy industry. With the emergence of dualistic or unbalanced growth the potential for an even greater widening of socioeconomic and geographic differentials in population quality loomed increasingly large. The result was rebellion in the countryside and pressure for the creation of a new system of entitlement insurance to replace the defunct Tokugawa entitlement institutions. The story of emergent unbalanced growth and the attendant political struggle over entitlements is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 5
Enterprise, Community, and Human Growth in an Era Unbalanced Economic Growth, 1920-1940

A Changing Market Environment

After World War I, heavy industry, which hitherto had constituted a minuscule sector submerged by a sea of agricultural and light industrial enterprises, emerged as the driving force, the engine, of Japanese economic growth. As a result the era of balanced growth ended. And a new epoch characterized by wide and widening differentials in wages and labor productivity between the heavy industrial sector and the rest of the economy commenced.

The new market environment brought down once and for all the curtain on the system of Tokugawa entitlements. Why? Recall that Tokugawa entitlements had supplemented a set of market institutions that had automatically built in—through incentives—a considerable amount of health protection for employees. Indeed, in the case of the majority of workers in Tokugawa Japan the "employer" and the "employee" were really inseparable since the enterprise for which the latter worked was the family into which he or she was born. The entitlement system was therefore oriented to providing insurance for households that were also enterprises so that they could continue to stay in operation. Since most enterprises engaged in rice cultivation and rice was ultimately the basis for taxes and for stipends for the samurai, entitlements were focused around rice. Entitlements basically involved transfers of rice and were aimed at dealing with short-run fluctuations in supply and demand at the local level, with market price serving as a barometer for

this supply/demand balance or lack of balance. Most ikki protests, most conflicts between landlord and tenant, ultimately had their origins in local conflicts over the distribution of rice. Entitlements were balkanized and therefore conflicts over them were also local.

But the trends underlying and leading up to the new market environment made a mockery of the Tokugawa system of entitlements. First of all, with the growing breakdown within the labor market of the industrial sector of enhancement of population quality, the assumption that matters could be left to enterprises was no longer credible. And even more important was the decline in the proportion of the labor force working in agriculture, and within the farming sector itself the decline in farming income relative to total income. As long as domestic rice production expanded rapidly enough to satisfy a population that, increasingly, was engaged in pursuits other than producing rice, the government allowed the farmer to enjoy the benefits of a healthy expansion in demand in the form of favorable—favorable to farmers, that is—movements in terms of trade of agricultural products vis-à-vis manufactured products. But as best-practice Tokugawa agricultural techniques diffused throughout the countryside, growth in agricultural productivity began to falter. It became apparent to a government concentrating its focus on the building up of production of iron and steel, chemicals, and transportation equipment that relying on domestic sources for foodstuffs might hamper the speed with which the nation could turn toward nonagricultural pursuits. The Rice Riots of 1918 heralded the end of an agricultural policy aimed at solving the problem of food supply for urban industrial regions through technological progress in domestic agriculture. The government began to aggressively promote the importation of foodstuffs, especially rice, from its colonies, Korea and Taiwan. In short, the central government adopted a policy that inevitably depressed either the level or growth of domestic rice prices relative to manufacturing output price levels and growth rates.

The political tilt toward industrial districts created havoc with the traditional concept of entitlements for two very important reasons. It made clear that the government was now sufficiently satisfied with domestic conditions in farming—of the ability of agricultural villages to avert subsistence food crises—that it could turn the principal focus of its food policy away from promoting domestic productivity to guaranteeing to the growing legion of industrial workers that prices for basic food staples would remain fairly stable relative to nominal wages. In effect, the government was trying to solve the growing population quality

problem caused by the gradual breakdown in health-enhancing labor market institutions within industry with its rice import program. In weighing the needs of the industrial sector against those of the agricultural sector the central authorities came down on the side of industry, effectively transforming the rice price question from an agricultural into an industrial entitlement issue. Moreover, partial justification for this policy twist was the fact that agricultural crises occurred with diminishing frequency and ferocity. And a corollary of this was the fact that tenants benefited less and less from the entitlement insurance traditionally offered by landlords since the probability of harvest failure was steadily in decline. Thus the two mainstays of Tokugawa entitlement insurance, which had been falling into disuse even during the last decades of the balanced growth era, now ceased to exist altogether. The result was rural rebellion—limited perhaps, but rebellion nevertheless—as the rural sector, especially its poorer segments, began to aggressively voice its discontent with the attention shown to the industrial sector and the almost exclusive attention now being devoted to building up a new system of entitlements to cope with the social problems of manufacturing. The increasing policy of according wage premiums to male workers in heavy industry served to further fan the flames of rural discontent.

The wrenching changes experienced in the structure of labor markets can be seen in table 19. First consider wage differentials in panel C of that table. The premium enjoyed by male industrial workers both over male workers in agriculture and over female industrial employees sharply and decisively increases during the interwar period, especially during the 1930s. In response to the changes in relative wage ratios for males and females in industry and in agriculture, which in turn reflects the surge in demand for males in heavy industry, farm families began to change the sexual composition of their labor forces. This is apparent in panel A of the table: the number of male workers declines with some fluctuation until the mid-1930s and then precipitously drops thereafter as the number of female workers increases, most dramatically after the mid-1930s. Female workers, who constituted the backbone of the low-wage/low-skill light industrial labor force—and increasingly this was the case as a glance at the percentages of cotton spinning hours worked by females confirms—were in a sector of manufacturing that was declining in importance relative to high-wage/high-skill heavy industry, which was becoming the new growth engine. The expansion of heavy industry as represented by machinery production and the contraction in textile production is clearly seen in the bottom right-hand portion of

panel C. In short, a new labor market structure was emerging and an old labor market that had much in common with that of late feudal Japan was dying.

But drastic structural change was hardly limited to labor markets. It was also apparent in product and in capital and land markets. Consider the sharp fluctuations in the terms of trade between agriculture and manufacturing: during the late 1920s the rice price and the price level of a general bundle of foodstuffs sinks; and then it soars during the late 1930s. The uncertainty of getting an acceptable harvest had now been replaced by the uncertainty of the income one could secure from that harvest. Among the industrial products declining in price relative to agricultural prices is the output of the chemical fertilizer industry. Note from panel A of table 19 that the prices of nitrogen-based fertilizer fall relative to land prices while wages rise—with some fluctuation—relative to land. A rise in the cost to farming families of labor relative to land brought on by a vigorous expansion in demand for labor within industrial production should encourage households to substitute factors for labor that are becoming, in relative terms, comparatively cheap. And trends of this sort are evident from panel A: fertilizer and machinery inputs are increased (the changing terms of trade encourage this after the early 1930s) and labor input in terms of number of workers is decreased. Because of a secular trend toward improvement in population quality, adult workers are better able to work and hence workdays per worker increases somewhat, but labor productivity increases even faster, each hour of work garnering more real output because of the quality improvements in the labor input and because labor now works with more fertilizer and with more machinery. In short, interwar agriculture was by no means incapable of productivity growth.

But while it was not incapable of generating growth, the returns to investments in agriculture were now, in the new market environment, far less potentially remunerative than those that one might secure from industrial investments. The rapid expansion of the six big cities evident from. panel D is testimony to the feverish activity centered around new heavy industrial enterprises in the major metropolitan conurbations. This is one reason wealthy landlord families—the very households that pioneered the diffusion of best-practice techniques and the construction of social overhead capital in the countryside like roads and drainage ditches—now turned away from rural pursuits and began to invest funds and time and energy in the newly developing industrial sector. Hence in the new market environment landlords had little, if anything,

to offer since they were no longer spearheading the drive for improvements in the countryside; they were not even particularly interested in the problem of how to redress the growing imbalance in entitlements as they saw their fate now tied increasingly to investments in urban industrial enterprises, and moreover their entitlement insurance was hardly needed. Is it surprising, therefore, that their tenants now turned against them?

Continuity and Change in Regional Differentials in Population Quality

Looming over the striking restructuring of Japan's labor market was a growing military crisis; indeed, the military crisis overshadowed and conditioned the economic transformation and played an important role in shaping the proposals for a centralized entitlement program to replace the defunct Tokugawa scheme. The deepening military crisis that saw Japan expand its de facto occupation of the mainland of Asia from its colonial base in Korea to control over Manchuria and portions of China and that brought it step by step into conflict with its great Pacific rival, the United States, conditioned the economic transformation because it sped up the demand for heavy industrial output like chemicals and transportation equipment, for instance, battleships and armed vehicles and airplanes. And it conditioned the economic transformation because it increasingly drew the government into a imperialist strategy that presumed that the colonized areas of Asia would serve as suppliers of foodstuffs like rice and raw materials for the industrial heartland in Japan. And it conditioned the demand for a centralized program of entitlements because the growth in military activity increased the demand for healthy soldiers; that is, it increased the demand for population quality. Hence those sectors of the rural economy concerned about the growing market-driven disparities between urban income and opportunities and rural income and opportunities found a listening ear among the militarists who increasingly directed national affairs as Japan entered the 1930s. And insofar as it was perceived that population quality depended on household investments, which in turn depended on the market opportunities and the entitlements available to households, the problem of redesigning entitlements appeared all the more critical to decision makers in Tokyo.

With the military needs of the central government in mind, let us consider geographic differentials in population quality as measured in

terms of height and weight on military recruitment examinations. After all, these were the figures that the armed forces assiduously collected in order to see which districts were supplying the best potential soldiers and which districts the worst. Had the military planners in the mid-1930s drawn a prefectural map of Japan and shaded in more darkly those districts with the higher proportions of short—stunted—recruits, they would have found the pattern displayed in map 3. As can be seen from a comparison of this map with map 2, many features of the 1918 pattern continued to persist in the interwar period. For instance, the regions with the smallest proportions of short examinees continued to be Hokkaido and the Kinki district, including Osaka, Hyogo, and Kyoto and the great cities of Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto. But the availability of prefectural data for 1934 allows us to pick out some patterns that either did not exist in 1918 or are not evident in 1918 because of aggregation. For example, Tokyo prefecture, which consists of the ward areas of the city of Tokyo proper and its immediate semiurbanized and semirural suburbs, stands out as producing few short examinees within a northeastern region that, relative to southwestern Japan, tended to have a large proportion of short individuals as it had in 1918. Nagasaki prefecture on the southern island of Kyushu, which includes the city of Nagasaki, off of which is Dejima, the island occupied by the Dutch during the Tokugawa period, is also a supplier of mainly nonshort examinees. Now the map is primarily of interest because it gives us useful information about the nature of, and particularly the perpetuation of earlier, geographic differentials in population quality. For instance, it makes clear the superiority of the major urbanized industrial zones relative to the hinterland, especially the northeastern hinterland. But this map is also of interest because it shows us the nature of the social problem confronting Japan's military leaders: How were the areas lagging in population quality to be brought up to the standards set by the high-income industrial districts?

And it should have been clear to the military leaders that relying on the market alone would not help close the gap. Consider table 20. This table gives means and maxima and minima for groups of prefectures classified by proportion of the total labor force in primary industry averaged for the years 1920, 1930, and 1940 (PPI). Group A is the most agricultural and group D is the least agricultural. As can be seen, not only are the per capita income levels far higher in group D than in group A, but absolute increases in per capita income are greater in groups C and D than they are in groups A and B. Moreover, there is a large

Map 3.
Percentage of Males Examined for Military Service Who
Are Short (150 cm or Less) in Each Prefecture of Japan, 1934

disparity in the per capita index of public health and medicine (PHMEDI) for 1927—with group D prefectures far more favored than those in groups A and B—and the disparity also seems to grow larger over time (between 1927 and 1935). Again dependence on primary industry is positively associated with high levels of child/youth labor services. So disparities in all three of the factors that in chapter 2 we found were important in shaping trends in population quality—income (hence gross nutritional intake), public health and medicine, and child/youth labor services—are correlated with each other in the cross section. And as has already been discussed in the context of map 3, and as can be further seen in the right-hand columns of panel A and panel B of table 20, differentials in population quality mimic these differentials in net nutritional intake. Moreover, gains in height, weight, and BMI appear—not dramatically, but slightly—to be greater in the districts with higher levels of population quality. In short, the Japanese military authorities were faced with a serious problem of how to eliminate differentials in population quality between advanced industrial districts and the rural hinterland, especially in the Northeast. And the market was not eliminating these differentials. Indeed, because of the strong economies due to transportation costs, heavy industry was concentrating more and more in the great urban conurbations around Tokyo-Yokohama and Osaka-Kobe-Kyoto; hence if nothing was done in the policy arena, disparities in height and weight for military recruits were likely to increase, not decrease.

For these reasons Tokyo was becoming concerned about the lack of an adequate entitlement program in the countryside. And for this reason alone it is not surprising that the ministries in Tokyo began to consider or experiment with price supports for rice, a two-tier system of governmental purchase of rice under which marginal tenant farmers would receive higher prices than other farmers, a wholesale land reform that would do away with absentee landlordism, and some form of insurance for farm households administered through local rural cooperatives. But the interest of the central government in moving in the direction of erecting a new set of centrally administered and organized entitlements to replace the balkanized system inherited from the Tokugawa period is not simply due to long-run military concerns. It is also attributable to something far more immediate and pressing: the danger of wholesale rebellion in the countryside. With greater salience than any other single sequence of events, the outbreak of rural rebellion during the interwar period demonstrates the great importance of the voicing of

demand for entitlements in conditioning the historical development of population quality within twentieth-century Japan.

Tenancy, Paddy Production, Population Quality, and Agricultural Labor Productivity

Rural revolt in interwar Japan centered around confrontations, at times violent, between tenants and landlords. The institution of tenancy was already well established by the latter part of the Tokugawa period, especially in the commercially advanced Kinki district. However, it was not until 1871 that the government began to issue deeds guaranteeing ownership to the individuals assuming the responsibility for paying taxes on the land. And it was not until 1872 that the formal Tokugawa ban on land sales was actually abolished. In I873 the Land Tax Revision was promulgated, converting taxes from payments in rice to payments stipulated in monetary terms and based on the estimated value of land. Despite the conversion of taxes to monetized payments, however, under the typical arrangement between landlords and tenants rents continued to be paid in terms of a stipulated volume of rice or in terms of a proportion of the rice crop on the land worked under tenancy.

How prevalent was tenancy? Y. Nishida (1986) estimates that in 1874 30.6 percent of cultivable land was in tenancy and that the percentage rose thereafter, reaching 40 percent in 1887 and 45.4 percent in 1912. A similar-story is told by the following figures on the distribution of farm households according to landownership status for 1883-1884 and 1912 (PO/PT stands for part-owner/part-tenant):

In short, over the course of the balanced growth era tenancy grew. Perhaps this growth was due to the fact that the land tax was now collected in a monetized form, and therefore during the Matsukata Deflation of the 1880s when rice prices dropped, many marginal farm households were forced to sell their land. Or perhaps it was due to the fact that reclaiming land for cultivation was an attractive investment opportunity

during the era of balanced growth and therefore enterprising merchants and risk-taking farmers were encouraged to invest in the development of land that they could then rent out to tenants. In any case, because so much cultivated land was farmed under tenancy, by the time Japan entered into the era of unbalanced growth the potential for a major political struggle between landlords and tenants was well developed.

Beginning in the early Meiji period tenants here and there had taken collective action potentially directed at landlords: they formed tenant unions.^[1] The first tenant union was established in 1875, and the number gradually grew after that. However, after over forty years of organizing, in 1917, the total number of unions did not even reach two hundred. But then, all of sudden, the number of unions and their activity proliferated. As can be seen in panel B of table 19, landlord-tenant disputes increased at a fever pitch during the 1920s. Over the course of the interwar period both the quantity and the character of the disputes changed. During the early 1920s tenants appear to have been the main initiators of disputes as the vast number centered around demands for rent reductions. However, during the later 1920s and the 1930s landlords took the offensive in many areas and the proportion of disputes involving continuation of tenancy or compensation due to termination of a landlord-tenant contract soared. Hence it is clear that landlord-tenant conflict became especially pronounced precisely at the time when the balkanized Tokugawa entitlement system was collapsing and a centralized replacement emanating from Tokyo had not yet filled the vacuum. It is my view that the outbreak of rebellion in the countryside was not merely due to conflict between tenant and landlord but rather was the voicing of a demand on the part of villagers for a new system of entitlements to replace the defunct Tokugawa system. Because landlords had once been a source for traditional entitlement insurance, they often bore the brunt of the attack on the old system. But the rebellion in the countryside was only in part a rebellion designed to initiate land reform. It was only part of a much broader demand, namely, demand for a system of entitlements consistent with the realities of a new market environment.

The rural village, especially the poorer stratum of the village represented by the marginal owner and the smaller tenant, was being left behind: the new market was leaving it behind; the government was leaving it behind. That was the fear that fanned rural discontent. With the abolition of feudal classes, upward social mobility became a reality for many poorer but ambitious farmers. In the balanced growth era of the

Meiji period agriculture offered opportunities comparable to those offered by industry; hence the low-income hardworking tenant household, by dint of hard work and a detailed knowledge of farming techniques or by dint of the assistance of a landlord family interested in increasing its own rental income in tandem with its tenant's income, could advance economically and socially. But in the new market environment favoring industry—especially heavy industry—the small farmer and especially the small tenant farmer watched with growing anxiety as the relative agricultural wages and returns on investment fell.

The key point to keep in mind in understanding why rural rebellion exploded during the interwar period is that it was triggered by a sense that the government was abandoning the rural sector to the whims of an increasingly hostile and unpredictable market in which less prosperous farmers expected to experience relative losses of income and status. The decision to commence wholesale imports of rice from the colonies was a symbol of the apparent lack of interest by the central authorities in building up a new system of entitlements to replace those that in the late Tokugawa period had stabilized local rice markets in times of dearth. It is important to stress that relative income and status were at the heart of the matter, not absolute levels of income. For instance, consider the figures in table 21 on household membership and sex composition, relative income per household worker and relative agricultural income per household worker, and growth rates in real income per household worker and growth rates in real expenditure per household member. As can be seen from the figures that compare levels and growth rates for large and small owner households, large and small part-owner/part-tenant households, and large and small tenant households, income was growing in real terms throughout the 1930s for all six groups.^[2] But the gaps between the groups were also slightly growing in most, but not all, of the measures looked at here. In short, even with the terms of trade moving in a favorable direction, rural households, especially marginal tenant households, had a growing sense of insecurity: the tenant household did not enjoy security of land ownership and to this insecurity was added the growing insecurity of the rice market, which was now being affected by conditions of production in distant colonies like Korea and Taiwan.

Central to the concerns over a deterioration in relative incomes was a concern about the long-run—by long run I mean a period of several generations—economic and social status of the ie. For "feedback" of income into expenditures on education, food, and direct health maintenance,

which, by improving population quality, had the potential to enhance future income-generating potential for the members of the family, was important. This is the message of panel B of table 21, where I report on time series regressions for the 1930s of two forms. The first set of regressions gives for each type of farm households estimates from log-log regressions for the elasticities of per-household member expenditures on population quality-enhancing items—on food and drink, on education and health, and on the total of the two—with respect to real income per household worker (where the symbol RYPW here refers to real income adjusted for price changes, not to relative income as it does in panel A of table 21). As can be seen, the elasticities appear to be high. Moreover, as can be seen from the bottom part of panel B where I report on a second set of regressions for each type of farm household in which, controlling for the sex ratio, labor productivity in a given year is regressed against per household member expenditures on food, education, and health and per work hour real expenditure on fertilizer in the previous year, the more a household put into building up its population quality and its fertilizer input, the better off it was likely to be in future years. In short, because of the feedback effect of investments in population quality on future labor productivity, any increase in income disparities was feared by rural households. And it must be remembered that marginal farmers were concerned about two types of income disparities: the gap between urban and rural households, which was growing; and the gap between large owner households and marginal producers, which was not shrinking. And since large owner households enjoyed incomes sufficient to allow them to educate their children in higher echelons of the educational system that opened the doors to employment opportunities in heavy industry, they could escape the "squeeze" arising from the new market environment. But in general tenant households could not expect to escape this squeeze and therefore they sought redress in the form of new government entitlement programs.

A key part of this argument rests on the notion that in relative terms tenant households were suffering a deterioration in population quality. That is to say, even though they were enjoying improvements due to the strong secular trend, their relative position was deteriorating. In regard to this point consider the findings reported in table 22. In panel A I report on cross-sectional regressions using logarithms of all variables for 1927, 1930, and 1935 (the observations used in both panel A and panel B regressions are for the thirty prefectures of Japan whose average level of proportion of labor force in primary industry for 1920, 1930, and

1940 exceeds or is equal to 55 percent). I regress various measures of height for military recruitment examinees (i.e., percentage tall, percentage small, and average height) and the body mass index against the index of public health and medicine per capita, average real income per capita, and the percentages of cultivable acres in the prefecture (multiplied by the PPI variable to adjust for the degree to which the prefectural population was actually engaged in farming) farmed in tenancy, and the percentage of the cultivable acres in the prefecture (again multiplied by PPI) devoted to paddy rice production. As can be seen, tenancy is associated with lower levels of population quality; and in the regressions the elasticities on the tenancy variable are considerable. Moreover, as can be seen from panel B, tenancy was associated with slightly diminished gains in heights between 1926 and 1937 (and with slightly elevated gains in weights and BMIs). In short, lower levels of income were associated with lower levels of net nutritional intake and lower levels of population quality.^[3]

It is also possible to use the estimates in panel B of table 22 to say something about long-run coevolution in rural Japan. Analysis of skeletal remains suggests that the population of Japan was on average taller before the Tokugawa period than during the Tokugawa period. G. Honda and T. Shay (1994: 13) give the following estimates on mean heights (in cm) for males and females in different periods of Japanese history (it goes without saying that the sample sizes on which the estimates are based are very small):

Could the diffusion of rice cultivation during the Tokugawa period have led to a diminution of height due to some long-run coevolutionary adjustment, say, to diet or to working in paddy rice fields? The estimates in table 22—albeit for the twentieth century and, therefore, perhaps of limited relevance for the preindustrial period—do not lend credence to this thesis.

To summarize: after the government opened up Japan to rice imports following the Rice Riots of 1918, marginal farmers and tenant farmers, concerned about a potential decline in relative income and greater instability in income-generating opportunities, brought on by the governmental tilt toward the industrial sector and by the new market conditions associated with unbalanced economic growth, suffered growing anxiety and frustration. This pent-up frustration exploded during the interwar period. And as had the ikki of the late Tokugawa period, it sent a signal to the central authorities in Tokyo to address the plight of the agricultural sector through the creation of a new entitlement system to replace the now-defunct Tokugawa entitlement system. In demanding changes the farmers were expressing concern about more than their own lives. They were also expressing concerns about their children and the long-run viability of their ie lines because of the feedback of labor productivity onto future population quality and future labor productivity that existed in rural Japan. Moreover, the population quality of districts characterized by high levels of tenancy was declining relative to that in the rest of rural Japan. And, since rural districts were declining in relative terms compared to industrial districts, the population quality of areas with high levels of tenancy was declining all the more relative to nonagricultural Japan.

Industrial Regions, Industrial Occupations, and Anthropometric Measures

In the face of the rural crisis, the government continued to pursue reforms aimed at dealing with the breakdown in health-enhancing labor market institutions within the industrial sector. A variety of factors explain the government's intense concentration on promoting reforms in the industrial sector: the pressure of the International Labor Organization, which Japan joined; the momentum gained by the reform-minded liberal wing of the bureaucracy from implementation of the Factory Act in 1916; the growing interest of employers and professional managers in health-enhancing programs because of their potential payoff in terms of improved worker morale and productivity, which reduced resistance to reforms in the business community; and the spread of socialist ideas among a small but growing labor movement in industrial districts.^[4] The Health Insurance Law passed the Diet in 1922, although it was not actually implemented until 1931, the same year a law providing aid to injured workers was passed. And in 1916 the Noshomusho (Ministry of

Agriculture and Commerce) issued directives listing a group of occupational diseases to which special attention was to be paid by factory and mine inspectors (however, silicosis for miners was not included in the original list and was not placed on the list under 1930). Perhaps the most important single factor in this trend was the decline in resistance to reforms in the business community, which seems to have emanated from two sources: from the evidence generated from a variety of industrial health studies that demonstrated that healthier factory workers were more productive; and from the fact that as employees successfully brought the labor boss system to an end, they found themselves increasingly devoting resources to the training of their blue-collar workers, and as their investment in these workers rose so did their interest in keeping them through a host of paternalistic programs.^[5] In short, the new market environment was encouraging a positive attitude on the part of the business community—especially large enterprises—to the creation of a new system of health-enhancing entitlement programs, especially those programs that linked entitlements to labor contracts, giving workers incentives to work hard and to remain with the company.

There was a convergence between market forces and governmental (and military) interest in enhancing population quality that was making the task of building up a new system of health-enhancing entitlements far easier in urban industrial districts than in agricultural regions. That the children of urban households tended to do less physical work than those in villages—the Factory Law of 1911 banned child labor—and that per capita expenditures on public health and medicine were far higher in urban areas than in less densely settled villages were certainly factors. That these environmental factors were playing a role can be seen from table 23, which reports on regressions for the sixteen nonagricultural prefectures of Japan. The dependent variables are, respectively, gains in average height, gains in average weight, and gains in the body mass index for recipients of military recruitment examinations between 1926 and 1937. In short, urban employers benefited from the environments they operated in.

But the improvement of conditions in industrial zones was not simply due to a better environment. As factory owners became more aware of the potential benefits to productivity of reducing pollution on shop floors and as factory inspectors pointed out substandard levels of ventilation and grime, and so forth, and assessed fines, industrial work conditions improved. An excellent test of the hypothesis that factory improvements were important is afforded by a comparison between the

relative height and weight of female textile workers around 1910 with the relative height, weight, and BMI of textile factory workers during the late 1930s. By "relative," I mean relative to students. Consider the figures in panel C of table 24 which we can usefully compare to those in table 18. In making the comparison it is important to keep in mind that female textile workers tended to be drawn from tenant farm households, that is, from households whose relative levels of population quality were in decline. And yet as can be seen from table 25 by simply taking arithmetic differences between the figures for the interwar period and for 1910, the gap in human growth measures between female students and factory girls was decisively closing. More nutritious meals in company cafeterias, regular periods of rest, improved ventilation, and more attentive medical staffs all made a contribution. By late interwar Japan, the large-scale factory—that covered by the Factory Act—was no longer an impediment to the convergence in population quality differentials as it had been during the era of balanced economic growth.

The other tabular material in table 24 is also of interest. The figures in panel A show that the BMI tends to be smallest at the extremes of the height spectrum and that it is largest somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. And the figures in panels C and D show that food intake was greatest for groups whose physical activity was the most demanding; but it also shows that in spite of the greater gross nutritional intake of those doing heavy physical work, heights and weights tended to be greater for those consuming less food and subjecting their bodies to lower levels of physical exertion. In short, these data underline the importance of demands placed on nutrient intake.

The Emergence of Government Welfare Policy in Interwar Japan

During the interwar period, as unbalanced economic growth transformed labor, capital, and product markets, the government found itself increasingly drawn into the problem of building a new system of entitlements to replace the old balkanized Tokugawa system fallen into disuse. Political pressure from workers and especially from tenant unions and marginal farmers played a fundamental role in bringing the government's attention to this issue. And by the 1920s the liberal wing of the national bureaucracy was committed to introducing a program of reform that was inspired by that already introduced in many Western European countries and in the United States. Had the military crisis not

grown over the course of the interwar period, that program, or at least key parts of it, might have been instituted. As it was, a new centralized health-enhancing entitlement system did emerge: the key features of that program were the Factory Act, health and disability insurance for industrial workers, and, in 1938, the creation of the National Health Insurance Law which aimed at creating, with central government assistance, a system of health insurance societies in local communities, especially in agricultural districts.

But the military crisis grew worse. And as it did so, the military found itself caught on the horns of a terrible dilemma. Military spending diverted scarce tax resources and bureaucratic attention and energy away from population quality-enhancing social welfare programs. And yet the military, perhaps more than any other central government agency, was concerned about the perpetuation and even widening of differentials in height and weight and body mass index.

After Japan's surrender, freed from the burden of making excessive military expenditures and from the ideological trammels of fascism imposed by the conservative wing of the bureaucracy (many members of which were purged after 1945), the liberal wing of the bureaucracy was able to decisively complete the program of reform envisioned in the 1920s and 1930s. With bewildering speed the government passed a tough labor standards law governing work conditions and labor contracts, sweeping land reform that did away with absentee landlordism, price supports for rice that guaranteed a minimum standard of living for marginal farm households comparable to that enjoyed by blue-collar households, and a comprehensive national health insurance law. By the early 1960s Japan had joined the ranks of the advanced industrial nations in terms of its system of national entitlement programs.

But passage of this sweeping program of reform, realizing the dreams of the liberal bureaucrats of the 1920s, had to wait until the late 1940s, the 1950s, and the early 1960s. It was hardly uppermost in the minds of the Japanese bureaucrats—it was certainly not uppermost in the minds of the military planners—during the late summer of 1941 as Japan plunged into full-scale war against its great Pacific rival, against the very country that had forcibly opened it up to international commerce during the 1850s, the United States.

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.