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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Main Argument: Rather than one single subject, this book collects ten articles written by Smith over nearly thirty years of his career, focusing on aspects of the Tokugawa economy and moving into the class motivations of the Meiji Restoration before ending on the early evolution of the industrial labor force in Meiji and Taishô Japan. Through it all, Smith is concerned with asserting the seminal differences of the Japanese experience of the early modern, the modern and industrialization in ways that, however well-hedged, call into grave question several sacred cows of the historiography of the same in Euroamerica.
"Premodern Economic Growth: Japan and the West" (1973) - This article studies one of the formerly puzzling aspects of the Tokugawa period, namely, the progressive de-urbanization of the castle-towns. Rather than being a sign of economic stagnation, however, this de-urbanization is in fact part of the economic growth of the period, in that people were leaving the castle towns to join in the economic development of the countryside, such that the most economically developed domains (han) were by the end of the period those that were the least urbanized.
"The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period" (1958) - Far from being a grievous burden on the peasantry, the Tokugawa land tax was in fact progressively less burdensome, as tax registers were virtually wholly unrevised from about 1700, and had a compoundingly beneficial effect for those peasants who over time were able to increase their crop yields, thus leaving them with a progressively greater surplus in both real and economic terms.
"Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan" (1969) - In this article Smith examined the answers to a survey sent out to all the villages in Chôshû domain prefatory to writing a gazetteer for the han in 1843, which was never completed. The survey answers, however, reveal that in Chôshû, one of the most commercially developed and economically prosperous of late Tokugawa domains (and not coincidentally one half of Satsuchô, the two domains that were key architects of the demise of the Tokugawa regime), by-employments contributed far more than pure agriculture did to farm family incomes, in the most extreme cases at a breakdown of 70-30, and never less than 40-60. The growth of rural industry despite urban depopulation helps to explain the rising prosperity of the Tokugawa period, as well as the comparatively smooth transition to industrialization in the Meiji period.
"Peasant Families and Population Control in Eighteenth-Century Japan" (1976) - In this article Smith advocated the then innovative but now widely accepted conclusion that the reason for the plateau in population growth in the second half of the Edo period was not due to demographic decay but rather to the active control of family size and composition by peasant families, primarily through infanticide. In the village of Nakahara at least, farm families were likely to strive to balance the genders of their children, and to space them for the convenience of the mother.
"Japan's Aristocratic Revolution" (1961) - In this short, incisive article, Smith describes and discounts the prevailing-at-the-time explanations for why the bushi or samurai class not only acceded to the revolution that became the Meiji Restoration, but took a leading role in fomenting it, and finds that two concomitant factors were at work: the first, the fact that the Tokugawa regime had severed the connection between the aristocrats and the land from which they (nominally) received their incomes when it ordered samurai and their families to move to cities at the beginning of the period, and the second, the increasing bureaucratization both of the samurai class and of samurai ideals, such that loyalty came to mean exemplary service to one's lord in the bureaucracy, rather than the personal ties that had bound people at least through the decisive battle of Osaka in 1615. Given that the upper reachers of the bureaucracy remained out of reach to the vast majority of samurai, in favor of patently incompetent grandees, and the fact that land stipends progressively diminished in purchasing power, leaving many samurai facing poverty, their willingness to put paid to the Tokugawa regime when its inadequacies were fully laid bare is justified, for a revolution offered them chances that their nominal "class privileges" never could.
"The Discontented" (1962) - This joint reaction to two books on the Meiji Restoration largely takes the form of arguing that widespread discontent with the Tokugawa regime across classes made the somewhat surprising class alliances that formed the backbone of the Restoration possible.
"'Merit' as Ideology in the Tokugawa Period" (1967) - This article argues that a "meritocratic revolution" swept the samurai class in the two centuries before the Restoration, such that (good) government--the duty of the samurai--came to be identified with government by those best suited for the job in terms of ability, rather than by rank or by wealth. Since the upper echelons of Tokugawa government were reserved, de facto, for those of the highest pinnacles of the samurai class in terms of rank or wealth, leaving the more able middle and lower samurai out of jobs altogether or out of prospects for advancement, this ideology of merit must be seen as a key factor in the change in outlook that made the Restoration so successful.
"Ôkura Nagatsune and the Technologists" (1970) -
"Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan" (1986) - Contrary to E.P. Thompson's conjectures about pre-industrial people in developed countries based on his research with tribal groups in the so-called "Third World," in Tokugawa Japan peasants had a keenly developed, socially constituted sense of time: far from being 'task-oriented,' meaning in Thompson's parlance that peasants simply did tasks until they were finished and then lazed around, Tokugawa peasants were keenly conscious of wasting time, which belonged to the group, and which they were looking to maximize through by-employments and such so that they could make the most money possible in the time allotted. This self-imposed time discipline served peasants well when they went to the factories of Meiji Japan, since they were already accustomed to the time discipline required by the factory.
"The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers, 1890-1920" (1984) - Factory workers in Meiji Japan brought with them the expectations of class justice that had structured their lives as peasants in the Tokugawa period, with the result that early labor actions were structured around reminding owners of their obligations to be benevolent to their employees, rather than adopting the language of "rights," which really only became popular after the post-WWI transformation of Japanese industry in the Taishô period. These less overtly antagonistic labor actions were nonetheless highly effective at satisfying workers' demands.
Critical assessment: These articles are all excellent, and some of them, particularly The Technologists, By-Employments, Time-Discipline and The Right To Benevolence, are classics. Smith has a keen eye for the telling quotation and a militant sense of the boundaries of his own questions: unlike Cicero, when he says that he's not going to address something, he doesn't address it, and he keeps on going. His methodical, probing approach to the evidence that he obtained is a model of careful scholarship married with inspired, though never anything less than well-supported, conclusions. Smith admits that his bias is to pass over in silence the costs of economic growth and the experiences of those who were less fortunate despite increasing societal prosperity, but his bias towards looking for, and explaining, salient differences between Japan and Euroamerica along with his sensitivity to the vitality of tradition in Japan goes a long way towards explaining the core of his scholarship.
Further reading: Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (reread); Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan
Meta notes: Everyone who knew him in my department speaks very highly of Professor Smith, particularly Professor Berry, and it's interesting to read this book and to feel, just below the level at which I could pull out an illustrative quotation, his influence on her writing and scholarship (especially on Japan in Print), both of which she will quite happily confirm via anecdotes. Professor Barshay, the late Donald Shively, and other people and names I know make appearances in the footnotes, and it's impossible to avoid the sense of East Asian studies as something of, well, if not a family, a clan, in that all of us have certain scholarly lineages which we can trace and link up with others', and which have a profound if subtle influence on our scholarship and thought.
Main Argument: Rather than one single subject, this book collects ten articles written by Smith over nearly thirty years of his career, focusing on aspects of the Tokugawa economy and moving into the class motivations of the Meiji Restoration before ending on the early evolution of the industrial labor force in Meiji and Taishô Japan. Through it all, Smith is concerned with asserting the seminal differences of the Japanese experience of the early modern, the modern and industrialization in ways that, however well-hedged, call into grave question several sacred cows of the historiography of the same in Euroamerica.
"Premodern Economic Growth: Japan and the West" (1973) - This article studies one of the formerly puzzling aspects of the Tokugawa period, namely, the progressive de-urbanization of the castle-towns. Rather than being a sign of economic stagnation, however, this de-urbanization is in fact part of the economic growth of the period, in that people were leaving the castle towns to join in the economic development of the countryside, such that the most economically developed domains (han) were by the end of the period those that were the least urbanized.
"The Land Tax in the Tokugawa Period" (1958) - Far from being a grievous burden on the peasantry, the Tokugawa land tax was in fact progressively less burdensome, as tax registers were virtually wholly unrevised from about 1700, and had a compoundingly beneficial effect for those peasants who over time were able to increase their crop yields, thus leaving them with a progressively greater surplus in both real and economic terms.
"Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan" (1969) - In this article Smith examined the answers to a survey sent out to all the villages in Chôshû domain prefatory to writing a gazetteer for the han in 1843, which was never completed. The survey answers, however, reveal that in Chôshû, one of the most commercially developed and economically prosperous of late Tokugawa domains (and not coincidentally one half of Satsuchô, the two domains that were key architects of the demise of the Tokugawa regime), by-employments contributed far more than pure agriculture did to farm family incomes, in the most extreme cases at a breakdown of 70-30, and never less than 40-60. The growth of rural industry despite urban depopulation helps to explain the rising prosperity of the Tokugawa period, as well as the comparatively smooth transition to industrialization in the Meiji period.
"Peasant Families and Population Control in Eighteenth-Century Japan" (1976) - In this article Smith advocated the then innovative but now widely accepted conclusion that the reason for the plateau in population growth in the second half of the Edo period was not due to demographic decay but rather to the active control of family size and composition by peasant families, primarily through infanticide. In the village of Nakahara at least, farm families were likely to strive to balance the genders of their children, and to space them for the convenience of the mother.
"Japan's Aristocratic Revolution" (1961) - In this short, incisive article, Smith describes and discounts the prevailing-at-the-time explanations for why the bushi or samurai class not only acceded to the revolution that became the Meiji Restoration, but took a leading role in fomenting it, and finds that two concomitant factors were at work: the first, the fact that the Tokugawa regime had severed the connection between the aristocrats and the land from which they (nominally) received their incomes when it ordered samurai and their families to move to cities at the beginning of the period, and the second, the increasing bureaucratization both of the samurai class and of samurai ideals, such that loyalty came to mean exemplary service to one's lord in the bureaucracy, rather than the personal ties that had bound people at least through the decisive battle of Osaka in 1615. Given that the upper reachers of the bureaucracy remained out of reach to the vast majority of samurai, in favor of patently incompetent grandees, and the fact that land stipends progressively diminished in purchasing power, leaving many samurai facing poverty, their willingness to put paid to the Tokugawa regime when its inadequacies were fully laid bare is justified, for a revolution offered them chances that their nominal "class privileges" never could.
"The Discontented" (1962) - This joint reaction to two books on the Meiji Restoration largely takes the form of arguing that widespread discontent with the Tokugawa regime across classes made the somewhat surprising class alliances that formed the backbone of the Restoration possible.
"'Merit' as Ideology in the Tokugawa Period" (1967) - This article argues that a "meritocratic revolution" swept the samurai class in the two centuries before the Restoration, such that (good) government--the duty of the samurai--came to be identified with government by those best suited for the job in terms of ability, rather than by rank or by wealth. Since the upper echelons of Tokugawa government were reserved, de facto, for those of the highest pinnacles of the samurai class in terms of rank or wealth, leaving the more able middle and lower samurai out of jobs altogether or out of prospects for advancement, this ideology of merit must be seen as a key factor in the change in outlook that made the Restoration so successful.
"Ôkura Nagatsune and the Technologists" (1970) -
"Not only were the technologists saying, by implication, that men with enough intelligence and enterprise to alter their status and style of life might ignore the limitations placed on them by birth; they were also saying in effect that the pursuit of private interest by enough people would change society for the better by adding to the sum of human welfare and therefore that the good of society was not uniquely determined by the moral quality of the ruler but might in part well up from the selfish strivings of the masses. It is not surprising that these implications were not drawn out, for they were directly contrary to the ideas of the ruling samurai class…" (196-97)
"Peasant Time and Factory Time in Japan" (1986) - Contrary to E.P. Thompson's conjectures about pre-industrial people in developed countries based on his research with tribal groups in the so-called "Third World," in Tokugawa Japan peasants had a keenly developed, socially constituted sense of time: far from being 'task-oriented,' meaning in Thompson's parlance that peasants simply did tasks until they were finished and then lazed around, Tokugawa peasants were keenly conscious of wasting time, which belonged to the group, and which they were looking to maximize through by-employments and such so that they could make the most money possible in the time allotted. This self-imposed time discipline served peasants well when they went to the factories of Meiji Japan, since they were already accustomed to the time discipline required by the factory.
"The Right to Benevolence: Dignity and Japanese Workers, 1890-1920" (1984) - Factory workers in Meiji Japan brought with them the expectations of class justice that had structured their lives as peasants in the Tokugawa period, with the result that early labor actions were structured around reminding owners of their obligations to be benevolent to their employees, rather than adopting the language of "rights," which really only became popular after the post-WWI transformation of Japanese industry in the Taishô period. These less overtly antagonistic labor actions were nonetheless highly effective at satisfying workers' demands.
Critical assessment: These articles are all excellent, and some of them, particularly The Technologists, By-Employments, Time-Discipline and The Right To Benevolence, are classics. Smith has a keen eye for the telling quotation and a militant sense of the boundaries of his own questions: unlike Cicero, when he says that he's not going to address something, he doesn't address it, and he keeps on going. His methodical, probing approach to the evidence that he obtained is a model of careful scholarship married with inspired, though never anything less than well-supported, conclusions. Smith admits that his bias is to pass over in silence the costs of economic growth and the experiences of those who were less fortunate despite increasing societal prosperity, but his bias towards looking for, and explaining, salient differences between Japan and Euroamerica along with his sensitivity to the vitality of tradition in Japan goes a long way towards explaining the core of his scholarship.
Further reading: Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan (reread); Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan
Meta notes: Everyone who knew him in my department speaks very highly of Professor Smith, particularly Professor Berry, and it's interesting to read this book and to feel, just below the level at which I could pull out an illustrative quotation, his influence on her writing and scholarship (especially on Japan in Print), both of which she will quite happily confirm via anecdotes. Professor Barshay, the late Donald Shively, and other people and names I know make appearances in the footnotes, and it's impossible to avoid the sense of East Asian studies as something of, well, if not a family, a clan, in that all of us have certain scholarly lineages which we can trace and link up with others', and which have a profound if subtle influence on our scholarship and thought.
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Date: 2011-02-08 20:02 (UTC)---L.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-02-08 20:37 (UTC)