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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Wigen, Kären. The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.
Main Argument: Using a geographical perspective on history, Wigen makes three principal arguments: that "bringing more self-consciously geographical analysis to the study of Japanese development" is "needed if we are to put together a meaningful picture of Japanese development" (20, xiii); that "both before and during its passage to modernity, the spatial patterns of the Japanese economy were the products of complex social negotiations" (21); and that "the transformation of Shimoina confirms that spatial patterns are more than a passive projection of social process" (ibid). The successful peripheralization of Shimoina and many other places like it, and the re-harnessing and redirection of Tokugawa-period networks that this process entailed, are key to understanding Japan's swift rise to the status of an imperial power on the world stage.
Historiographical Engagement: With a lot of literature on protoindustrialization in the early modern period, as well as historical geography, i.e. DeVries and Braudel.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Wigen looks at the economic and political transformation of the Japanese archipelago from 1750-1920 from the vantage point of the Shimoina valley in the southern Japanese Alps, arguing that "changes within the valley and its mountainous hinterland were both artifact and agent of Japan's nineteenth-century political and economic revolutions. … In essential ways, Japan's modern transformation required that Shimoina--and numerous regions like it--be remade as peripheries of a Tokyo-centered national economy" (1,3). Wigen argues that understanding this process requires a geographical perspective, for it was part of "a larger and opposite metamorphosis: the remaking of Japan as a new and privileged core in East Asia" (3). She explicitly seeks to "reconcile Japan's modern metamorphosis in spatial terms" (ibid) and to do so, situates the book between history and geography and between the modern and early modern. Reviewing the region's history, despite its political division (at one point as many as eight domains controlled portions of the valley) Wigen argues that it had a highly cohesive economic identity, one in which its protoindustrial might ("if by protoindustry is meant the widespread development of rural outwork to produce commodities for distant markets" (8)) led to its increasing integration with national commerce. This process was reversed after the 1870s, when the region's social integration matched its economic disintegration at the conscious hands of the new Meiji oligarchs: Shimoina became a periphery so that Japan might become a core. Wigen applies three geographical "lenses" in her study: environmental analysis, the study of human-land interactions over time; spatial analysis, "the eliciting and (where possible) mapping of spatial patterns in the organization of social life" (15), with particular attention paid to the conflict between the state and economic enterprise; and regional analysis. Regional analysis comprises "an essentially synchronic look at the region as an integrated economic unit" and "a diachronic analysis of how regions change" (17).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter considers "Ina in the Tokugawa Space-Economy: The Making of a Trade Corridor" and is framed by a a suit brought to the bakufu courts in the 1760s over the illegal pack-horse trade running through the valley. Using this suit, and the year-long survey that was ordered in 1763 in order to render a decision in 1764, Wigen analyzes the economic and political development of the region's spatial dynamics. (The packhorse drivers ultimately won official recognition from the shogunate.) She comes to three general conclusions: "first, despite concerted attempts by various levels of government to stabilize it, the infrastructure of trade provided highly elusive of regulation" (66). Second, the Tokugawa space-economy was a political creation, highly contingent on decisions made not only by local daimyo but also by the bakufu. Finally, "constraints on transport capacity--whatever their origin--affected local economic development in critical ways" (68). Most notably, these constraints meant that highland Japan could not be exploited for bulky commodities other than lumber until the late nineteenth century, which forced the uplands to develop local economies focused on lightweight, high-value goods, "precisely the kind of economic development that we have come to think of as characterizing advanced areas" (69).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "The Landscape of Protoindustrial Production as Contested Terrain" and seeks to demonstrate that "the landscape of Tokugawa commodity production was shaped by a surprisingly intricate locational calculus" and that "the sheer geographical mismatch between the bounds of local political authority and the extent of the new commercial networks precluded the former not only from controlling protoindustry but even from taxing it effectively" (71). Having surveyed Shimoina with particular attention to the effects of Iida domain's establishing a monopoly on wholesale paper sales, Wigen concludes that "in Japan as in western Europe, a protoindustrial, protocapitalist economy arose in a pluralistic political landscape. The fossilization of an essentially feudal geography under the Tokugawa regime inspired deliberately competitive mercantilist policies, strikingly similar to those of European principalities […]" (95). Wigen argues that "Iida and its neighbors represent in microcosm the juxtaposition of unequal domains that characterized Japan as a whole" (96). Japan has three critical differences from Europe, however: first, the absence of warfare, which as Wigen notes "raises the question of whether Europe's bloody battles were in fact indispensable to its economic growth" (97); second, "sharp restrictions on foreign trade", which Wigen argues brought benefits as well as its more widely known problems, especially in the area of import substitution (ibid); third, unlike in Europe, "what we find in Tokugawa Japan, then, is the paradox of a central government intervening precisely to enforce decentralization" (98).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores "Spatial and Social Differentiation" as an approach to answering, or at least clarifying, the question of "whether the agricultural, demographic, and commercial developments of the Tokugawa period enriched or impoverished the average peasant" (99). Wigen argues that from a geographic perspective, it can easily be seen that "from one part of the landscape to the next, not only the extent but the very form of social differentiation varied considerably" (ibid). Her survey of Shimoina in the Edo period leads her to conclude that "the range of variation documented here shows how misleading it can be to generalize about demographic processes about an economically diverse region. … More pointedly, the Shimoina data suggest the limits of a diffusion model for explaining spatial variations in Tokugawa development" (117). Wigen concludes that "the delayed-but-parallel model of social change suggested by the terms 'advanced' and 'backward' is not an accurate description of Tokugawa development. Projecting a temporal rhetoric onto spatial variation does not adequately represent the relational nature of economic and social processes across an integrated landscape" (119). Surveying economic opportunities in the region's core, Wigen notes that Tokugawa protoindustries at the least had the common characteristic of labor intensiveness. In Shimoina, "labor demands were highly specific by season and skill, and labor supply was sharply differentiated by gender, age, training, and organization" (126). The protoindustrial complex in Shimoina and in Japan as a whole was broadly typical, in its relation to the merchants that supplied it necessary capital, of the preindustrial world: "they tended to be local, personal, enduring, and markedly unequal, characterized by episodic if not chronic indebtedness on the part of the workers and monopsony privileges on the part of the merchants" (128-29). Although workers were relatively spread out, merchants were relatively concentrated, and by the opening of the port of Yokohama in 1859 merchants in Shimoina had amassed relatively large fortunes. The region as a whole had been knit into a highly differentiated, tightly integrated regional economy.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The second half of the book covers the region from 1860-1920, and this chapter explores "Mobilizing for Silk: The First Quarter-Century." Shimoina in particular and Japan as a whole benefitted from a rather monumentally propitious set of circumstances: just as Japan was forced to (re-)enter the global economy in the early 1850s, with large capital outflows in the form of imported textiles, increased defense spending, and inflation as a consequence of normalizing domestic currency values with prevailing prices, both Europe and China experienced significant disruptions in their supplies of raw silk and silkworm eggs (a silkworm blight and the Taiping rebellion, respectively). Shimoina silk was able to fill this gap. Silk had previously been one among many minor local handicrafts, but with a large influx of cash in the form of foreign and then government loans, sericulture was by 1880 poised to become the region's major economic engine. Wigen explores "how--and where--the people of the region found land, labor, and capital to accommodate the growing silk industry during this quarter-century" (142), since in this period no other sector of the protoindustrial economy contracted. The silk mulberry eventually comprised three distinct niches in Shimoina: in mountainous villages it was planted on marginal upland slopes unfit for anything else; in the middle belt of the valley, it became a major cash crop, displacing persimmons and paper-mulberry; and in the central agricultural core, it began to replace grain crops. Labor requirements were met in three ways: developing late-maturing silkworms, expanding the total pool of workers, and by freeing farm workers from springtime tasks, when the bulk of silkworm production took place, through fertilizers and labor-saving cultivation techniques. Silk production spread out across the valley extensively at the margins as well as intensively in the agricultural core, which contrasted with silk reeling and finance, both of which were concentrated in specific areas. As time went on, capital control became concentrated outside the region via speculation and then investment, principally from parastatal organs and then from national banks, placing the most dynamic sector of the Shimoina economy firmly within central control.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Crisis and Consolidation: The Shifting Locus of Power" explores the effect of the Meiji regime's unifying and centralizing state-building policies on the Ina valley, arguing that "the nature of their [local people's] success as as well as of their failures was such as to enhance Shimoina's dependence on the country's increasingly powerful metropolis" (180). Wigen highlights how what seemed like a rational program of policies from the heights of the metropole seemed from the provinces arbitrary, and brought chaos and conflict. Wigen highlights several themes: that "centralization was by nature a differentiating process; creating a new geopolitical cartography meant designating cores and peripheries, elevating certain places at the expense of others"; that "the formation of the new order was both contingent and contested" (215); that "the paradox of scale" meant that "the implications of redrawing the political map were more ambiguous than a simple inter-regional comparison can suggest" (in other words, the differentiating process of centralization was fractal within regions); and that "regional rivalry was pressed into the service of social order" as "geography emerged as the permissible language of difference in Meiji Japan" (216).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Precarious Prosperity: Industrial Restructuring and Regional Transformation, 1895-1920" explores the fortunes of Shimoina in Japan's first industrial revolution after the Sino-Japanese War, helped along by the completion of the transcontinental railway in the United States and continuing domestic unrest in China, thus increasing demand for Japanese raw silk. Shimoina enjoyed twenty-five years of hand-over-fist prosperity as the region's entire economy reoriented itself around all phases of the silk production and reeling processes. But by 1920, "its environment was degraded, its export base had contracted, its population had become increasingly dependent on imported food, , and even its core communities were steadily losing high-level processing to other areas. On close inspection, the valley's celebrated industrial transformation was surprisingly shallow, concentrated in a single industry and based on intensive use of low-wage labor" (221). Wage repression in particular articulated a stark gender imbalance of power in households at all levels, whether in the form of daughters working in reeling factories, wives and mothers working in cocoon rooms, or of daughters being sold to brothels outright. But men remained firmly in control of family purse-strings, leaving women vulnerable. "The upshot of this process," Wigen writes, "was the remaking of Shimoina as a whole into a periphery within global divisions of labor. Where a semi-autarkic, well-rounded regional economy had been, a very different entity stood by 1920: focused around a single industry, dependent on imported staples, and at the mercy of a capricious international market" (265). However, disadvantaged as Shimoina was within Japan, it benefitted greatly from Japan's privileged position as a whole within Northeast Asia: food and fertilizer imports were extracted from colonies in Korea and China, and after the collapse of the silk industry "desperate villagers were able to escape to the colonies as settlers or soldiers. … In the last analysis, the development of the silk industry played a highly contradictory role in regard to Shimoina's space-economy: while it turned the valley into a clearly subordinate periphery of the Japanese state, that very subordination was critical to the contemporary Japanese state's ability to escape becoming a periphery of the global capitalist system" (266).
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Regional Inverstions: The Shifting Matrix of Production, Power, and Place," presents some conclusions. On some levels, the transition from the Tokugawa into the Taisho periods entailed a total inversion the Shimoina region. Local government was consolidated as an appendage of national government even as Japan's spatial context as a whole was decentralized and destabilized because of its new place in a profoundly unequal global order. These changes went hand in hand with revolutions in the technology of exchange and the relations of production in the export sector. Local people, assisted by external capital, leveraged these changes into Shimoina's transformation around sericulture. No less was Shimoina inverted economically and socially, as seen from "a trio of related changes: a radically expanded scale of territorial specialization, a fundamental reorientation of regional trade, and a new map of social differentiation" (278). The social landscape in particular changed as the demolishment of the Tokugawa status order allowed single individuals to exercise multiple kinds of power, and as Japan's entrance into the emerging global capitalist order as a low-wage power forced Meiji authorities to commit to "bloody Taylorism," forcibly suppressing workers along with worker wages, often along gender lines. At the same time, Shimoina and Japan as a whole benefitted from deep continuities across the Tokugawa period, particularly infrastructural and social investments. The persistence of "traditional sectors" of labor into the era of factory development is a common feature of early industrialized regions; unique to Japan, however, was "the embedding of commodity production in an agrarian matrix," so that "industrialization served, not to uproot rural producers, but to keep them on the land" (288, 89). The comparative labor intensiveness of production remained a constant across the nearly three hundred years here studied, as did significant state intervention in the economy. The upshot is that the Meiji regime was successful because of its singular ability to harness the geography of power it inherited from the Tokugawa regime, and that, as Wigen argues, "first, […] changes occur not only in the scale and organization of circulating capital but in the movement of people and commodities as well, and second, by emphasizing that this process produces regions of a fundamentally new kind" (294-95, emphasis original). The significance of indigenous infrastructures of production and exchange is "not as a basis for industrialization, but as a basis for incorporation into larger networks of power" (296, emphasis original). Thus, "imperial Japan had its roots in a particular spatial formation: a dense, polycentric commercial reticulum, woven during two and a half centuries behind a barrier of effective economic protection", which continued even after the opening of the ports through the bakufu's existence that its own agents act as middlemen between the provinces and the world, handily preventing the direct subordination of those provinces to foreigners, as in India or China, and laying the foundation for Tokyo's emergence as the center of a national economy in the Meiji period. The "geographical revolution" continued in the form of Japan's imperial project.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, interesting, well-written book--"a gem," as professors in the department have described it to me. When we read Wigen's second book, A Malleable Map, for seminar last year, I was given the rather unenviable task of defending it in the face of a number of criticisms, not least being that this book is a stronger work than her more recent effort. Having now read this book, I think that it's very true that The Making of a Japanese Periphery is better, mostly because it is so beautifully constructed, its evidence laid out clearly and concretely. I found one of the best aspects of A Malleable Map to be Wigen's firm grasp of the fact that regions are constructed rather than made, and it's interesting to see in this book her application of that insight to a broader realm than the government/society interactions with which the second book is largely concerned. It's also interesting to note the places where her research in this book undoubtedly led her to start thinking about the questions that inform her second. And I continue to be highly gratified by her attention to the gender dynamics of social and economic power, as well as to the hierarchies of social power across time.
I am quite certain that Wigen is fundamentally correct when she argues that the peripheralization of Shimoina (and countless other comparable regions around Japan) enabled Japan to shrug off its own peripheral/non-participant status in the global economic and political order and become an imperial core, and I would have quite liked an entire other chapter expanding this argument, particularly her fascinating, throwaway assertion that contemporary China's inability to reconfigure its spatial hierarchies was part of its ultimate inability to retain state integrity. Of course, such a chapter would have been well outside the scope of the present study, which obviously deservedly won the Fairbank Prize in 1995.
Further reading: Jan DeVries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; People and Production; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Meta notes: On Earth as it is not in heaven, representing space temporally, or time spatially, is going to lead to some misrepresentations.
Main Argument: Using a geographical perspective on history, Wigen makes three principal arguments: that "bringing more self-consciously geographical analysis to the study of Japanese development" is "needed if we are to put together a meaningful picture of Japanese development" (20, xiii); that "both before and during its passage to modernity, the spatial patterns of the Japanese economy were the products of complex social negotiations" (21); and that "the transformation of Shimoina confirms that spatial patterns are more than a passive projection of social process" (ibid). The successful peripheralization of Shimoina and many other places like it, and the re-harnessing and redirection of Tokugawa-period networks that this process entailed, are key to understanding Japan's swift rise to the status of an imperial power on the world stage.
Historiographical Engagement: With a lot of literature on protoindustrialization in the early modern period, as well as historical geography, i.e. DeVries and Braudel.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Wigen looks at the economic and political transformation of the Japanese archipelago from 1750-1920 from the vantage point of the Shimoina valley in the southern Japanese Alps, arguing that "changes within the valley and its mountainous hinterland were both artifact and agent of Japan's nineteenth-century political and economic revolutions. … In essential ways, Japan's modern transformation required that Shimoina--and numerous regions like it--be remade as peripheries of a Tokyo-centered national economy" (1,3). Wigen argues that understanding this process requires a geographical perspective, for it was part of "a larger and opposite metamorphosis: the remaking of Japan as a new and privileged core in East Asia" (3). She explicitly seeks to "reconcile Japan's modern metamorphosis in spatial terms" (ibid) and to do so, situates the book between history and geography and between the modern and early modern. Reviewing the region's history, despite its political division (at one point as many as eight domains controlled portions of the valley) Wigen argues that it had a highly cohesive economic identity, one in which its protoindustrial might ("if by protoindustry is meant the widespread development of rural outwork to produce commodities for distant markets" (8)) led to its increasing integration with national commerce. This process was reversed after the 1870s, when the region's social integration matched its economic disintegration at the conscious hands of the new Meiji oligarchs: Shimoina became a periphery so that Japan might become a core. Wigen applies three geographical "lenses" in her study: environmental analysis, the study of human-land interactions over time; spatial analysis, "the eliciting and (where possible) mapping of spatial patterns in the organization of social life" (15), with particular attention paid to the conflict between the state and economic enterprise; and regional analysis. Regional analysis comprises "an essentially synchronic look at the region as an integrated economic unit" and "a diachronic analysis of how regions change" (17).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter considers "Ina in the Tokugawa Space-Economy: The Making of a Trade Corridor" and is framed by a a suit brought to the bakufu courts in the 1760s over the illegal pack-horse trade running through the valley. Using this suit, and the year-long survey that was ordered in 1763 in order to render a decision in 1764, Wigen analyzes the economic and political development of the region's spatial dynamics. (The packhorse drivers ultimately won official recognition from the shogunate.) She comes to three general conclusions: "first, despite concerted attempts by various levels of government to stabilize it, the infrastructure of trade provided highly elusive of regulation" (66). Second, the Tokugawa space-economy was a political creation, highly contingent on decisions made not only by local daimyo but also by the bakufu. Finally, "constraints on transport capacity--whatever their origin--affected local economic development in critical ways" (68). Most notably, these constraints meant that highland Japan could not be exploited for bulky commodities other than lumber until the late nineteenth century, which forced the uplands to develop local economies focused on lightweight, high-value goods, "precisely the kind of economic development that we have come to think of as characterizing advanced areas" (69).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "The Landscape of Protoindustrial Production as Contested Terrain" and seeks to demonstrate that "the landscape of Tokugawa commodity production was shaped by a surprisingly intricate locational calculus" and that "the sheer geographical mismatch between the bounds of local political authority and the extent of the new commercial networks precluded the former not only from controlling protoindustry but even from taxing it effectively" (71). Having surveyed Shimoina with particular attention to the effects of Iida domain's establishing a monopoly on wholesale paper sales, Wigen concludes that "in Japan as in western Europe, a protoindustrial, protocapitalist economy arose in a pluralistic political landscape. The fossilization of an essentially feudal geography under the Tokugawa regime inspired deliberately competitive mercantilist policies, strikingly similar to those of European principalities […]" (95). Wigen argues that "Iida and its neighbors represent in microcosm the juxtaposition of unequal domains that characterized Japan as a whole" (96). Japan has three critical differences from Europe, however: first, the absence of warfare, which as Wigen notes "raises the question of whether Europe's bloody battles were in fact indispensable to its economic growth" (97); second, "sharp restrictions on foreign trade", which Wigen argues brought benefits as well as its more widely known problems, especially in the area of import substitution (ibid); third, unlike in Europe, "what we find in Tokugawa Japan, then, is the paradox of a central government intervening precisely to enforce decentralization" (98).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores "Spatial and Social Differentiation" as an approach to answering, or at least clarifying, the question of "whether the agricultural, demographic, and commercial developments of the Tokugawa period enriched or impoverished the average peasant" (99). Wigen argues that from a geographic perspective, it can easily be seen that "from one part of the landscape to the next, not only the extent but the very form of social differentiation varied considerably" (ibid). Her survey of Shimoina in the Edo period leads her to conclude that "the range of variation documented here shows how misleading it can be to generalize about demographic processes about an economically diverse region. … More pointedly, the Shimoina data suggest the limits of a diffusion model for explaining spatial variations in Tokugawa development" (117). Wigen concludes that "the delayed-but-parallel model of social change suggested by the terms 'advanced' and 'backward' is not an accurate description of Tokugawa development. Projecting a temporal rhetoric onto spatial variation does not adequately represent the relational nature of economic and social processes across an integrated landscape" (119). Surveying economic opportunities in the region's core, Wigen notes that Tokugawa protoindustries at the least had the common characteristic of labor intensiveness. In Shimoina, "labor demands were highly specific by season and skill, and labor supply was sharply differentiated by gender, age, training, and organization" (126). The protoindustrial complex in Shimoina and in Japan as a whole was broadly typical, in its relation to the merchants that supplied it necessary capital, of the preindustrial world: "they tended to be local, personal, enduring, and markedly unequal, characterized by episodic if not chronic indebtedness on the part of the workers and monopsony privileges on the part of the merchants" (128-29). Although workers were relatively spread out, merchants were relatively concentrated, and by the opening of the port of Yokohama in 1859 merchants in Shimoina had amassed relatively large fortunes. The region as a whole had been knit into a highly differentiated, tightly integrated regional economy.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The second half of the book covers the region from 1860-1920, and this chapter explores "Mobilizing for Silk: The First Quarter-Century." Shimoina in particular and Japan as a whole benefitted from a rather monumentally propitious set of circumstances: just as Japan was forced to (re-)enter the global economy in the early 1850s, with large capital outflows in the form of imported textiles, increased defense spending, and inflation as a consequence of normalizing domestic currency values with prevailing prices, both Europe and China experienced significant disruptions in their supplies of raw silk and silkworm eggs (a silkworm blight and the Taiping rebellion, respectively). Shimoina silk was able to fill this gap. Silk had previously been one among many minor local handicrafts, but with a large influx of cash in the form of foreign and then government loans, sericulture was by 1880 poised to become the region's major economic engine. Wigen explores "how--and where--the people of the region found land, labor, and capital to accommodate the growing silk industry during this quarter-century" (142), since in this period no other sector of the protoindustrial economy contracted. The silk mulberry eventually comprised three distinct niches in Shimoina: in mountainous villages it was planted on marginal upland slopes unfit for anything else; in the middle belt of the valley, it became a major cash crop, displacing persimmons and paper-mulberry; and in the central agricultural core, it began to replace grain crops. Labor requirements were met in three ways: developing late-maturing silkworms, expanding the total pool of workers, and by freeing farm workers from springtime tasks, when the bulk of silkworm production took place, through fertilizers and labor-saving cultivation techniques. Silk production spread out across the valley extensively at the margins as well as intensively in the agricultural core, which contrasted with silk reeling and finance, both of which were concentrated in specific areas. As time went on, capital control became concentrated outside the region via speculation and then investment, principally from parastatal organs and then from national banks, placing the most dynamic sector of the Shimoina economy firmly within central control.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Crisis and Consolidation: The Shifting Locus of Power" explores the effect of the Meiji regime's unifying and centralizing state-building policies on the Ina valley, arguing that "the nature of their [local people's] success as as well as of their failures was such as to enhance Shimoina's dependence on the country's increasingly powerful metropolis" (180). Wigen highlights how what seemed like a rational program of policies from the heights of the metropole seemed from the provinces arbitrary, and brought chaos and conflict. Wigen highlights several themes: that "centralization was by nature a differentiating process; creating a new geopolitical cartography meant designating cores and peripheries, elevating certain places at the expense of others"; that "the formation of the new order was both contingent and contested" (215); that "the paradox of scale" meant that "the implications of redrawing the political map were more ambiguous than a simple inter-regional comparison can suggest" (in other words, the differentiating process of centralization was fractal within regions); and that "regional rivalry was pressed into the service of social order" as "geography emerged as the permissible language of difference in Meiji Japan" (216).
Chapter 7: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Precarious Prosperity: Industrial Restructuring and Regional Transformation, 1895-1920" explores the fortunes of Shimoina in Japan's first industrial revolution after the Sino-Japanese War, helped along by the completion of the transcontinental railway in the United States and continuing domestic unrest in China, thus increasing demand for Japanese raw silk. Shimoina enjoyed twenty-five years of hand-over-fist prosperity as the region's entire economy reoriented itself around all phases of the silk production and reeling processes. But by 1920, "its environment was degraded, its export base had contracted, its population had become increasingly dependent on imported food, , and even its core communities were steadily losing high-level processing to other areas. On close inspection, the valley's celebrated industrial transformation was surprisingly shallow, concentrated in a single industry and based on intensive use of low-wage labor" (221). Wage repression in particular articulated a stark gender imbalance of power in households at all levels, whether in the form of daughters working in reeling factories, wives and mothers working in cocoon rooms, or of daughters being sold to brothels outright. But men remained firmly in control of family purse-strings, leaving women vulnerable. "The upshot of this process," Wigen writes, "was the remaking of Shimoina as a whole into a periphery within global divisions of labor. Where a semi-autarkic, well-rounded regional economy had been, a very different entity stood by 1920: focused around a single industry, dependent on imported staples, and at the mercy of a capricious international market" (265). However, disadvantaged as Shimoina was within Japan, it benefitted greatly from Japan's privileged position as a whole within Northeast Asia: food and fertilizer imports were extracted from colonies in Korea and China, and after the collapse of the silk industry "desperate villagers were able to escape to the colonies as settlers or soldiers. … In the last analysis, the development of the silk industry played a highly contradictory role in regard to Shimoina's space-economy: while it turned the valley into a clearly subordinate periphery of the Japanese state, that very subordination was critical to the contemporary Japanese state's ability to escape becoming a periphery of the global capitalist system" (266).
Chapter 8: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter, "Regional Inverstions: The Shifting Matrix of Production, Power, and Place," presents some conclusions. On some levels, the transition from the Tokugawa into the Taisho periods entailed a total inversion the Shimoina region. Local government was consolidated as an appendage of national government even as Japan's spatial context as a whole was decentralized and destabilized because of its new place in a profoundly unequal global order. These changes went hand in hand with revolutions in the technology of exchange and the relations of production in the export sector. Local people, assisted by external capital, leveraged these changes into Shimoina's transformation around sericulture. No less was Shimoina inverted economically and socially, as seen from "a trio of related changes: a radically expanded scale of territorial specialization, a fundamental reorientation of regional trade, and a new map of social differentiation" (278). The social landscape in particular changed as the demolishment of the Tokugawa status order allowed single individuals to exercise multiple kinds of power, and as Japan's entrance into the emerging global capitalist order as a low-wage power forced Meiji authorities to commit to "bloody Taylorism," forcibly suppressing workers along with worker wages, often along gender lines. At the same time, Shimoina and Japan as a whole benefitted from deep continuities across the Tokugawa period, particularly infrastructural and social investments. The persistence of "traditional sectors" of labor into the era of factory development is a common feature of early industrialized regions; unique to Japan, however, was "the embedding of commodity production in an agrarian matrix," so that "industrialization served, not to uproot rural producers, but to keep them on the land" (288, 89). The comparative labor intensiveness of production remained a constant across the nearly three hundred years here studied, as did significant state intervention in the economy. The upshot is that the Meiji regime was successful because of its singular ability to harness the geography of power it inherited from the Tokugawa regime, and that, as Wigen argues, "first, […] changes occur not only in the scale and organization of circulating capital but in the movement of people and commodities as well, and second, by emphasizing that this process produces regions of a fundamentally new kind" (294-95, emphasis original). The significance of indigenous infrastructures of production and exchange is "not as a basis for industrialization, but as a basis for incorporation into larger networks of power" (296, emphasis original). Thus, "imperial Japan had its roots in a particular spatial formation: a dense, polycentric commercial reticulum, woven during two and a half centuries behind a barrier of effective economic protection", which continued even after the opening of the ports through the bakufu's existence that its own agents act as middlemen between the provinces and the world, handily preventing the direct subordination of those provinces to foreigners, as in India or China, and laying the foundation for Tokyo's emergence as the center of a national economy in the Meiji period. The "geographical revolution" continued in the form of Japan's imperial project.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, interesting, well-written book--"a gem," as professors in the department have described it to me. When we read Wigen's second book, A Malleable Map, for seminar last year, I was given the rather unenviable task of defending it in the face of a number of criticisms, not least being that this book is a stronger work than her more recent effort. Having now read this book, I think that it's very true that The Making of a Japanese Periphery is better, mostly because it is so beautifully constructed, its evidence laid out clearly and concretely. I found one of the best aspects of A Malleable Map to be Wigen's firm grasp of the fact that regions are constructed rather than made, and it's interesting to see in this book her application of that insight to a broader realm than the government/society interactions with which the second book is largely concerned. It's also interesting to note the places where her research in this book undoubtedly led her to start thinking about the questions that inform her second. And I continue to be highly gratified by her attention to the gender dynamics of social and economic power, as well as to the hierarchies of social power across time.
I am quite certain that Wigen is fundamentally correct when she argues that the peripheralization of Shimoina (and countless other comparable regions around Japan) enabled Japan to shrug off its own peripheral/non-participant status in the global economic and political order and become an imperial core, and I would have quite liked an entire other chapter expanding this argument, particularly her fascinating, throwaway assertion that contemporary China's inability to reconfigure its spatial hierarchies was part of its ultimate inability to retain state integrity. Of course, such a chapter would have been well outside the scope of the present study, which obviously deservedly won the Fairbank Prize in 1995.
Further reading: Jan DeVries, European Urbanization, 1500-1800; Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce; People and Production; William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England; Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West
Meta notes: On Earth as it is not in heaven, representing space temporally, or time spatially, is going to lead to some misrepresentations.