1700 27 4 7 150
The figures in the above table are striking not just because of the dramatic population growth – some parts of the archipelago experienced a fourfold increase during a century when most of the world experienced a sharp demographic decline – but because of the simultaneous increases in total land cultivated, harvest yields and urban population. Over 7,000 new villages sprang up during the seventeenth century, many of them on lands brought under the plough for the first time thanks to complex hydraulic engineering projects (153 in 1601–50 and 227 in 1651–1700), while average rice production per village rose from around 2,000 bushels in 1645 to over 2,300 bushels in 1700. These averages concealed some spectacular achievements: thus almost 400 new villages were founded in Musashi province (the area around Tokyo) between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth centuries, and their rice production soared from 3.3 million to over 5.5 million bushels.3
Early Tokugawa Japan also experienced ‘urbanization without precedent in history’: between 1600 and 1650 the number of people living in towns and cities tripled, and between 1651 and 1700 it almost doubled again. Most of this urban population lived in ‘castle towns’, over one hundred in number. Kanazawa, for example, with some 5,000 inhabitants in 1583 when it became the headquarters of the largest domain in western Japan, numbered 70,000 by 1618 and perhaps 100,000 by 1667. Edo (as Tokyo was then known) grew from little more than a fishing village in 1590, when it became the headquarters of the Tokugawa domain, to a metropolis of perhaps one million a century later.4
These unique achievements did not stem from a benign environment: on the contrary, the Japanese archipelago has always been extremely vulnerable to climate change. To begin with, its northern areas are subject both to the Chishima Current, which brings arctic water southwards, and the ‘Yamase effect’, which produces cool air for considerable periods of the summer. Both climatic events can cause crop failures. Furthermore, most of Japan consists of mountains thrown up by the collision of the earth's tectonic plates, which has three adverse consequences. First, the archipelago – like many other parts of the Pacific rim – has an unusual number of active volcanoes, and their eruptions could and did trigger the ‘Yamase effect’. Second, the majority of the Japanese population lived (and still lives) on the coastal plains of three islands – Honshu, Shikoku and Kyushu – and the abrupt gradients that rise from these coastal plains make it harder to bring new land under cultivation. Finally, the pressure to house and heat the rapidly growing population led to ‘clear-cutting’ the tree cover (that is, removing all grades of wood rather than only certain trees) on those steep slopes, which caused serious soil erosion and magnified the risk of frost, flood and drought.
According to Conrad Totman, the eminent environmental historian of Japan, the combination of aggressive cultivation of recently deforested land and the prevalence of ‘clear cutting’ on steeply sloping ground ‘crowded the biological boundaries of crop viability’ and made the transition from relative abundance to ecological overload in marginal lands exceptionally abrupt, and ‘increased the portion of total food production chronically at risk of failure’.5 The archipelago therefore could not escape the effects of the Little Ice Age. During the landmark winter of 1641–2, the first winter snow fell on Edo six weeks earlier than usual; and according to the memoirs of Enomoto Yazaemon, a merchant living near Edo, ‘on New Year's Day, pots and pans full of water froze and seemed likely to burst; and one foot of frost covered the fields. Thereafter I observed seven snowfalls until the spring.’ The prolonged cold weather created ‘the Kan'ei famine’ (named after the Japanese era in which it occurred). The price of rice rose from 20 silver monme in 1633 to 60 in 1637–8, and to 80 in 1642.6 Even in Osaka, the ‘kitchen of Japan’ where in normal years merchants, lords and officials maintained huge stockpiles of food, rice became so scarce in July 1642 that ‘the common man cannot maintain himself, his wife and his children, so that many people died of hunger’. Crowds congregated before ‘the house of the city governor and lamented … begging His Excellency to provide them with some means by which they could stay alive’. To pacify the protestors, ‘the aforesaid governor distributed rice from various storehouses, and from the granary in Osaka castle, to the destitute at a low price. This ended the disturbances.’7
Another revolt, at Shimabara in the southern island of Kyushu, arose from the imposition of oppressive taxes at a time of climatic adversity. According to a Dutch merchant living nearby, when the lord of Shimabara demanded ‘taxes and demands for so much rice that they could not be met’, his agents tied up those unable to pay and dressed them in ‘clothes made of straw’, which they then set on fire. They also humiliated ‘their wives by stringing them up with their legs entirely bare’. Outraged by such atrocities, weary of being asked ‘to pay far more in taxes than they are able to do’, and unable to ‘subsist on roots and vegetables’, the villagers resolved ‘to die one single death instead of the many slow deaths to which they were subject’: so in December 1637 they rebelled. Their defiance encouraged the peasants of neighbouring Amakusa Island, also long abused by their superiors, to kill their magistrate and the soldiers sent to restore order, after which they crossed to the mainland to join the revolt. European missionaries in the region had converted many Japanese to Christianity, including Amakusa Shirō, a 16-year-old boy who claimed to be the reincarnation of Christ; and many converts joined the rebellion. Some 200 discontented samurai (warriors) likewise joined the rebels and offered invaluable military advice. Some 25,000 insurgents, marching ‘under banners bearing the sign of the cross’, now burned down the town of Shimabara, the headquarters of the domain, and collected food and weapons before retiring to the neighbouring castle of Hara, on a promontory surrounded by the sea. For three months, Amakusa Shirō ‘preached and celebrated Mass twice a week’, confidently proclaiming that ‘judgment day is at hand for all Japan’ and that ‘all Japan will be Christian’, until the army of over 100,000 men sent by the central government took Hara Castle by storm and slaughtered everyone within – including Amakusa Shirō.8
The rebellions at Osaka and Shimabara proved a turning point in Japanese history. The first four decades of the seventeenth century had seen some 40 major rural revolts (hōki) and 200 lesser uprisings (hyakushō ikki), as well as almost 80 feuds fought out between the major landholders; but during the next 80 years both revolts and feuds virtually ceased.9 The food riots in Osaka also had no sequel: most Japanese towns remained peaceful for a century or more. Most remarkable of all, the Shimabara campaign proved to be the last major military action in the archipelago for two centuries. Seventeenth-century Japan thus presents a curious contrast with the rest of the world: although initially its experience did not differ markedly from that of other countries, since it suffered from both the Little Ice Age and the General Crisis, in the 1640s it broke free. How?
The Industrious Revolution
The eminent Japanese historian Hayami Akira has identified two paths of escape from the tyranny of subsistence agriculture. The first path, typical of western Europe, is capital-intensive and labour-saving: investing money in agriculture to make production more efficient, thereby creating a pool of cheap labour to fulfil factory demands, and so facilitate an Industrial Revolution. The second path is the exact reverse: a labour-intensive and capital-saving strategy that Hayami christened ‘the Industrious Revolution’ in which peasants escaped from subsistence farming by investing more time and energy, rather than more money, in agricultural endeavour. Although improved farm tools and techniques played their part in Japan's Industrious Revolution, output improved primarily because farming families rationalized production and worked both harder and longer. ‘Self-exploitation’, Hayami argued, is the principal explanation for why the amount of cultivated land doubled, population tripled and output quadrupled in Tokugawa Japan between 1600 and 1868.10
Japanese families also adopted four additional prudential strategies to ensure that demand for basic resources wou
ld not outrun supply. First, many people worked away from home for prolonged periods: in some villages, up to one-third of all adolescents left to work either in a neighbouring community or in a town. Hayami's research revealed that ‘the lower the social stratum, the more people work away from home, and the higher their age upon return to the village to marry’; and that, on average, the daughters of poor Japanese families married five years later than their wealthier sisters. This delay significantly reduced the number of children they could bear.11 Second, those women who stayed home worked long hours in the field, which no doubt both reduced fertility and increased infant mortality (see chapter 4 above). Third, in the absence of animal milk (for few Japanese farmers raised livestock), mothers breast-fed their children intensively, often exclusively, until the age of three or four, a practice that normally suppresses ovulation.
Fourth and finally, as in China, when families faced economic hardship in spite of these prudential strategies, they regularly resorted to abortion and infanticide – procedures significantly termed, in Japanese, mabiki: ‘thinning out’ (as with seedlings). Qualitative data suggest that both practices were common. In 1646 the central government banned the public advertisement of ‘menstrual medicines’ within the capital, and in 1667 made it illegal to carry out abortions there. Nevertheless, 1692 saw the publication of a comprehensive manual of abortion techniques entitled Women's happy plant, and although most of the methods were herbal, the book also described how to insert sticks into the uterus and how to vibrate the womb.12 As for infanticide, in the words of the English merchant Richard Cocks, one of the most astute Japan-watchers of the seventeenth century: ‘The most horriblest thing of all is, that parents may kill their own children so soon as they are born if they have not the wherewithal to nourish them’. Even children's names reflected the determination of Japanese parents to limit family size: some were called Tome (meaning ‘Stop’) and Sue (‘The Last’), while visitors to some temples can still find special plaques placed by distraught mothers in the Tokugawa era to ‘apologize’ to their aborted foetus.13
Besides these ‘negative strategies’ for survival in time of hardship, Japanese villages also implemented certain positive policies that promoted collective survival. Above all, the average community was divided into many holdings of different sizes: one or two large ones, rather more middle-sized ones and a majority of small or very small ones. Although this distribution pattern was true of villages throughout the early modern world, in Japan many farmers included in their households both servants and sub-tenants, while most villagers with no land at all were also attached to one of the landholding households. Documents often referred to the household head as oyakata (‘one who takes the role of parent’) and to the servants and sub-tenants as kokata (or ‘child’: in Japanese, the term ‘orphan’ does not mean ‘without parents’ but ‘without family’). Thus each village was not a collection of autonomous farming units, but rather a cluster of mutually dependent households. Ideally, the oyakata furnished the capital goods needed periodically by the smaller households, while the kokata provided the labour required at certain crucial periods by the larger farms (above all transplanting rice seedlings which, despite the large amounts of water needed to flood each paddy in turn, had to be effected in each field within a matter of hours). Communities also cooperated to perform certain collective functions that exceeded the resources of individual households, such as building or re-thatching a dwelling, repairing communal dikes, or dredging the irrigation channels. Above all, during food shortages, the oyakata were expected to feed their kokata (whether servants or sub-tenants) and not abandon them.14
All these strategies helped to mitigate the impact of the Little Ice Age on early Tokugawa Japan, but two other factors played a greater role. First, although Japan had enjoyed the same benign climate in the sixteenth century as the rest of the northern hemisphere, a century of civil war (known as the ‘Warring States Era’: sengoku jidai) ensured that most of the archipelago was underpopulated rather than overpopulated. According to a European who lived in Japan during the 1580s, which saw the last decade of the civil war,
Much of the land was not tilled, and when the cultivated parts were sown they were destroyed and plundered by neighbours and opposing factions. Men killed each other everywhere. Thus the entire kingdom and the nobles were left in the greatest poverty and wretchedness as regards their dignity and everything else, and the only law was military power. Men chastised and killed one another as they saw fit.15
In the 1590s Japan deployed vast resources in a vain attempt to conquer the Korean Peninsula; and even after that venture failed, huge armies manoeuvred and fought for control of the archipelago until 1615. Second, the ‘Warring States Era’ left a favourable political legacy: the ceaseless power struggle eventually eliminated alternative foci of power until only one remained – the Tokugawa dynasty and their allies. In 1614 Richard Cocks termed Tokugawa rule ‘The greatest and powerfullest tyranny that ever was heard of in the world’, and over the next two centuries the dynasty used its power to coordinate responses that neutralized some of the worst effects of the Little Ice Age and created conditions favourable to rapid economic and demographic growth.16
‘The greatest and powerfullest tyranny that ever was heard of in the world’
Although Japan has always been an empire, by the sixteenth century the emperor exercised no executive authority. Instead political and military power in the archipelago were divided between daimyō (literally ‘great names’) until, in the last three decades of the century, Japan was reunified by three powerful warlords: Oda Nobunaga (d. 1582), Toyotomi Hideyoshi (d. 1598) and Tokugawa Ieyasu (d. 1616). After a series of brilliant military operations that eliminated all his rivals, Hideyoshi (who had risen from peasant foot-soldier to general, and so possessed a unique understanding of the dynamics of Japanese society) imposed a series of measures that promoted social and economic stability. He commanded farmers throughout Japan to surrender all their ‘swords, bows, spears, muskets, or any other form of weapon’: henceforth, farmers could not legally own any weapons and must instead ‘engage completely in cultivation’. Next, Hideyoshi decreed that samurai could no longer be farmers and farmers could no longer be samurai: henceforth magistrates must ‘not harbour anyone who neither performs military service nor engages in [the cultivation of] fields’.17 Although a few samurai gave up their weapons and remained in their community as farmers, most of them relocated with their households to the headquarters of the local daimyō where they became salaried retainers, largely living in the new towns that grew up around their lord's headquarters. As Hideyoshi intended, these measures both separated the samurai from their traditional rural power base and demilitarized the countryside.
To ensure that no one could commit abuses ‘in the collection of annual taxes and thus foment uprisings’, Hideyoshi also commissioned a vast cadastral survey. Inspectors toured the archipelago to measure all land parcels, to identify their purpose (rice paddy, dry field, residential lot) and their quality (from ‘superior’ to ‘very inferior’), and to estimate their potential productive yield according to a standard measurement: the koku (approximately 5 bushels in the case of rice, the commonest but not the only commodity assessed). Land was therefore measured in the number of koku it could produce: the kokudaka. Hideyoshi permitted no exceptions or exemptions to the survey: his officials must ‘pursue a lord to his castle and put him to the sword along with all of his vassals’ and ‘kill all the recalcitrant peasants in a whole district’ if they refused to cooperate.18 Although a few areas had still not been surveyed by 1598, the year of his death, Hideyoshi had created a far more complete inventory of the productive capacity of his country than any other ruler of the early modern world.
Hideyoshi's death without an adult heir in 1598 reopened the civil wars, but two years later Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated a coalition of his opponents and in 1603 secured from the emperor the title ‘Shogun’ (in full, Sei-i taishōgun: ‘Great general
issimo who overcomes the barbarians’). Ieyasu and his immediate family now controlled the major towns and about one-quarter of Japan's arable land, while some 200 daimyō – most of them either his other relatives or long-term allies – held the rest of Japan as fiefs.
Ieyasu levied no direct taxes on the daimyō: instead he requested ‘donations’ for specific purposes (such as building materials and labour to expand and fortify his headquarters at Edo) and ‘invited’ each of his allies to spend prolonged periods with him in Edo, where he could keep them under surveillance. He also continued Hideyoshi's practice of accumulating information that enhanced his power. Thus his cartographers used the cadastral surveys to produce a uniform ‘national map’ of unprecedented detail, size and scope. Measuring 12 by 14 feet, it showed all the provinces and towns, as well as all the sea routes and harbours, the roads and post stations, and the travelling distances by land and sea between the principal centres. The map presented Japan as a seamless unity – it omitted all regional, administrative or social differences – and, since the shoguns allowed copies and prints to be made, the map soon became a logo of the newly unified state. No other government of the day produced (let alone mass-produced) anything like it.19
Ieyasu also invested in a comprehensive communications infrastructure centred on the network of trunk roads known as the five highways (gōkaidō), each with checkpoints where travellers had to show their papers. Whereas the Chongzhen emperor dismantled China's courier system (see chapter 5 above), the new shogun provided post-stations at regular intervals, each one equipped with fresh horses, porters, supplies and lodgings, and linked by relays of professional runners who travelled in pairs (one carrying documents or small parcels and the other with a lantern so that they could travel by night and day).20 The system worked so efficiently that the Tokugawa government could predict precisely how long messages would take to reach their destination. For example ‘on the afternoon of December 21 [1637] an urgent letter relating news of the insurrection in Shimabara arrived at Osaka Castle by messenger boat’. The senior Tokugawa officials there, conscious that ‘in the meantime, the insurrection may have progressed, and that before it could grow bigger it must be quelled’, discussed all their options and then,
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