A History of Economic Thought in Japan

1600 - 1945

Hiroshi Kawaguchi, Sumiyo Ishii, Ayuko Tanaka, Tadashi Anno

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781350150157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This ground-breaking book provides the first English-language survey of economic thought in modern Japan. Significantly, it offers both a detailed study of economic thought from 1600 to 1945 and a nuanced analysis of Western and Asian perspectives on the field of Japanese economic history. Expertly translated from Japanese and written by leading scholars in the field, this exciting study includes: * A novel approach to economic thought which contextualizes the core values of thinkers across the period
* A comparative analysis of Japanese economic history which looks at the continuities across the Meiji divide
* The extensive use of archival sources, many of which were previously unavailable in English A History of Economic Thought in Japan, 1600 - 1945 serves as a case study of how Western economic ideas spread to non-Western regions and interacted with indigenous ideas. It will therefore be of immense value to both scholars of economic thought and those seeking a deeper understanding of the moral, intellectual, and societal forces that shaped modern Japan.

Module 1

The Development of the Theory of Political Economy

In this module, we begin with a brief overview of the social structure and the economy of Tokugawa Japan (Chapter 1). Then, in Chapters 2–4, we will describe the development of the theory of political economy or keisei saimin ron among the samurai class in the early part of the Tokugawa era. With the end of the Warring States period, samurai redefined their role in society from warriors to rulers and administrators. In this new capacity, they began to develop keisei saimin ron, meaning “arguments on how to administer the society and to save the people.” Tokugawa society was based on the separation of the warriors and peasants, not only in terms of status but also geographically. This encouraged the expansion of the role of the market in the economy, which in turn brought about financial difficulties for the samurai class already in the early Tokugawa era. Financial difficulties experienced by the samurai class were one of the central issues that keisei saimin ron sought to address. Yet, the term keisei saimin referred to the need to save “the people” rather than just the samurai class. Thus, the goals of keisei saimin could not be limited to improving the financial conditions of the warrior class. Neo-Confucian teachings, which exerted a great amount of influence in Tokugawa Japan, had popularized the notion that the proper purpose of government consisted in fostering moral persons and moral society. Arguments concerning keisei saimin in the early Tokugawa era thus revolved around how to reconcile such Confucian ideals with the reality of a rapidly developing market economy.

1

The Emergence of an Estate-Based Society

This chapter provides an overview of the structure of Tokugawa Japanese society as a background for consideration of the economic thought of the Edo period in the subsequent chapters. The term “estate” here does not mean landed property. Rather, it denotes status groups into which a country’s population is divided.

1.1 From War to Peace

In 1615, in the twentieth year of Keichō era (1596–1615), through the summer campaign in the siege of Osaka, the Tokugawa clan and its allies defeated and destroyed the Toyotomi clan. With the end of this campaign, the tumultuous Warring States period finally came to an end, and the reign of Tokugawa effectively began. Two months later, the name of the era was changed from Keichō 慶長 to Genna 元和. The arrival of the long period of peace under Tokugawa rule is known as Genna Armistice, or Genna-Embu in Japanese. Embu literally means putting down arms and ending wars.

Japanese history is commonly divided into four major periods: ancient, medieval, early modern, and modern eras. Among these, the medieval and the early modern eras are periods of warrior rule. But naturally, vast changes occurred during this 700-year period (Kamakura, Muromachi, and Edo periods, with the Warring States period covering the last 100 years of the Muromachi period), and the differences between the medieval and the early modern eras are particularly significant. Here two major differences are worth pointing out.

First, warriors (bushi 武士, or samurai) became urban residents in the Edo period. Bushi prior to the Warring States period were often “resident landholders” (zaichi-ryōshu) who lived on their own fiefs which they ruled directly, and where they were also engaged in agriculture. In other words, they did not live in one concentrated area and they were half-warriors, half-farmers.

The separation of warriors and peasants (heinō bunri 兵農分離) brought about fundamental changes to the lives of warriors. This policy was initiated by some warlords to separate the retainers from their fiefs and to concentrate them close to the warlord’s own residence. With the implementation of this policy, individual warriors were separated from their own fiefs, concentrated near the warlord’s residence, and ceased to be farmers-producers, becoming, economically speaking, pure consumers. Since warriors-consumers now lived in one place, that area gradually became a town. Correspondingly, only peasants and other producers were left to live on warriors’ fiefs, resulting in clear geographical separation of warriors and peasants. This system was spread throughout Japan by the Toyotomi and Tokugawa clans, who unified the country. Warriors living in urban areas were a new phenomenon of the Tokugawa era, not seen during the medieval era.

Second, after the Genna Armistice, the possibility of recurrence of large-scale battles became increasingly smaller. As a result, warriors, now residing in cities, effectively ceased to be soldiers. Most people, including warriors, must have welcomed the end of the Warring States period. Yet, if the essence of samurai was their role as soldiers, what were samurai who became mere consumers, deprived of even an opportunity to attain military glory? The more peace became consolidated, the more difficult it got to answer this question.

1.2 Peasants, Artisans, and Merchants

Who provided goods and services to urban-dwelling samurai? After the separation of warriors and peasants, food producers were peasants and fishermen living in rural villages. During the Edo period, areas other than “cities” (machi, machikata) were called “rural villages” (mura, murakata, jikata). Residents of such areas were classified as rural residents (hyakushō)¹ in terms of division of estates. Thus, most of the population were hyakushō, and they were the food producers.

Samurai in the cities, however, could not consume goods produced in the rural areas unless such goods were transported to where they resided. One of the means of collecting goods from the rural areas was imposition of annual tax on hyakushō in the form of rice (nengu). Yet, samurai could not obtain various goods other than rice (shoshiki) through the annual rice tax.

To fulfill such needs, producers and distributers of various goods were needed. They were hyakushō, artisans, and merchants. Hyakushō and artisans produced various goods, merchants distributed them, and samurai bought them. Since samurai received most of their income in rice, they first had to sell rice to obtain money to purchase those goods. For this reason, fluctuation in the price of rice had major impact on the finances of the warrior households (by which we understand the shogunate, daimyō² domains and individual samurai households). In addition, currency in Tokugawa Japan circulated in three different forms (gold, silver, and bronze), each with its own system of denomination (three-coinage system, sanka heiritsusei, see Table 7.1). Complicating the matter even more was the fact that the exchange rate between different types of currency fluctuated on a daily basis. Thus, economically speaking, the lives of samurai in the Edo period stood on a more complicated foundation than is commonly realized.

While the rice tax system constituted the main pillar of the Tokugawa economy, the system was not complete; it had to be complemented by the market mechanism. Goods and services other than rice had to be produced and circulated through the medium of currency. While Edo was the center of politics, Osaka became the center of economic activities early in the Tokugawa era. Osaka’s rice market was the largest in Japan, and a significant portion of rice collected as nengu in various provinces was sent to Osaka for sale. Osaka also developed as a major financial center.

Looking at the entire system in terms of estate-based division of labor, producers in rural areas were hyakushō, those in urban areas were artisans, while merchants in cities served as distributers of goods. These three together were sometimes called “three social groups” (sammin 三民), while the latter two were collectively known as townspeople (chōnin 町人). Switching occupations between hyakushō and townspeople were, if not unrestrained, relatively easy; though such was not the case between the samurai class and three other estates. Samurai were the governors and administrators and stood above the other groups in terms of status hierarchy. Yet, economically, they were dependent on the three social groups. This does not mean, however, that hyakushō or townspeople were autonomous. They did not have the power to rule, and their economic activities (agriculture, handicrafts, and commerce) would have become unstable unless the samurai fulfilled their role. Thus, none of the four estates were really autonomous; each estate played a certain social role and depended on each other, and thereby helped the functioning of the entire system. This structure of interdependence may have also ameliorated any conflict among different estates. Terms such as shi nō kō shō 士農工商 (literally meaning warriors, peasants, artisans, and merchants) or shimin 四民 (four social groups) may sound too simplistic. Nonetheless, they concisely capture the interdependent relationship among different estates in Tokugawa Japan. The estate system constituted the basis for the economic thought of samurai as well as of hyakushō and of townspeople.

Notes

1. 1 In contemporary Japanese, hyakushō is a term roughly equivalent to “peasants,” and it thus denotes farmers living in the countryside. However, in the Tokugawa era, the term referred to rural residents more generally, including those engaged in non-farming occupations such as fishing and forestry.
2. 2 Daimyō 大名 (domain lords) were vassals of the shogun with fiefs producing more than 10,000 koku of rice. During the Tokugawa era, there were approximately 260 daimyō who administered their domains more or less autonomously.

2

Samurai in Time of Peace

After the Genna Armistice, samurai effectively lost their social role as soldiers. Under such conditions, it was natural that some warriors began to inquire about the functions and the meaning of samurai in a new era. The economic thought of samurai during the Tokugawa era initially developed from such an inquiry. In this chapter, we will introduce the ideas of Yamaga Sokō 山鹿素行 (1622–85), one of the prominent thinkers of the early Tokugawa era who pondered on the role of samurai. Sokō defined the occupational duty of samurai from a Confucian perspective and suggested that samurai, as a role model, lead the other social groups by perfecting their moral conduct. The idea that the role of samurai in the new era consists in governance of the society eventually led to the development of arguments regarding governance and administration known as keisei saimin ron. Leaving more detailed discussions of these arguments to later chapters, here, we will briefly look at how the role of samurai was defined for the new era.

2.1 Neo-Confucianism and Japan

Before discussing Yamaga Sokō, however, a brief explanation on Confucianism is in order. Confucianism (jukyō 儒教 or jugaku 儒学) is a system of ethical and social teachings initiated by the Chinese thinker Confucius 孔子 (551–479 BCE), who lived toward the end of the Spring and Autumn period (770–453 BCE). After his death, Confucius’s teachings were developed in a variety of directions. Throughout the ages, the foundation of Confucianism remained the virtue of benevolence (jin 仁). According to Confucius, the core element of benevolence was filial piety (kōtei 孝悌, or respect toward and obedience to parents and elders). While benevolence is an inner virtue, it manifests itself outwardly as propriety (rei 礼), a set of rites and norms considered necessary for building harmonious relationships and for maintaining social order. By focusing on benevolence and propriety, Confucianism sought to build a social order in which people knew their place, and in which a virtuous king ruled through moral suasion (governance through virtue, tokuchi 徳治).

During the Song-dynasty period (960–1279), a new wave of Confucian thought emerged in China, and it later spread to the rest of East Asia. The leading representatives of this new wave, known as neo-Confucianism, include Zhou Dunyi 周敦頤 (1017–73), Cheng Hao 程顥 (1032–85), his younger brother Cheng Yi 程頤 (1033–1107), Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200), and Wang Yang-ming 王陽明 (1472–1529), the last of whom lived during the Ming dynasty era (1368–1644).

The introduction of Confucianism to Japan began already in the fifth or sixth century, and neo-Confucianism, too, was brought to Japan starting in the twelfth century. But in ancient and medieval Japan, Confucianism had only limited influence, which was far eclipsed by the influence of Buddhism. In the early modern era, however, Confucianism gained much greater influence compared with the previous eras. One reason for this may be found in the change in the worldview of the Japanese people. For reasons which need not concern us here, people in Japan had shifted their attention from the next world to problems in this world by the beginning of the Tokugawa era (Kawaguchi 2010b, 54–7). If one were to consider the political, economic, and social problems in this world, leaving the next world out, then, Confucianism provided the most suitable intellectual framework among alternative traditions with which the Japanese at the time were familiar. For this reason, since the beginning of the Tokugawa era, Confucianism became the most authoritative system of thought for many Japanese intellectuals.

This is not to say that Confucian teachings spread rapidly and smoothly in Tokugawa Japan. Japan under warrior rule did not provide an ideal condition for the spread of Confucianism, which called for moral governance by educated, virtuous rulers and civilian officials. Samurai, who saw themselves as warriors, were often uninterested in learning. Moreover, it was difficult for many people to understand classical Confucian texts and commentaries on them, which were written in Chinese. Even among samurai, Confucian education did not spread widely until the second half of the eighteenth century. For most commoners, familiarity with Confucianism is likely to have been limited to som...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustration
• Preface to the English Edition
• Preface to the Japanese Edition
• About the Authors and Translators
• Notes on Style
• Introduction
• Module 1 The Development of the Theory of Political Economy
• Module 2 A Turn toward Economic Pragmatism
• Module 3 Estate-Based Society and Occupational Duty
• Module 4 Reconceptualizing Japan and the World
• Module 5 Modern Japan: Its Birth and Economic Vision
• Module 6 Managers of Modern Industrial Enterprises
• Module 7 Questioning Modernity
• References
• Index
• Copyright