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.