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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Najita, Tetsuo. Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.
Main Argument: Najita argues for a kind of deep persistence of a hidden history of commoner cooperative organizations (kô) from the early modern period into the modern period--although he does not say as much, it is clear that the kô played a vital role in alleviating the rural misery associated with the late Tokugawa and early imperial periods, and thus a key role in Japan's successful transition to industrial modernity. Moreover, albeit in somewhat changed forms, many kô still exist in Japan to blunt the effects of state indifference, a kind of silent citizens' movement.
Historiographical Engagement: In his own words, Robert Bellah, Irwin Scheiner, Thomas C. Smith, Anne Walthall, Sakurai Tokutarô, Irokawa Daikichi, Mori Kahei, and Mori Shizurô
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Najita writes that this book is a kind of sequel to his earlier Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan; whereas that book focused on Tokugawa Osaka merchant philosophy, this book focuses on "the commoners' thinking about commerce, their writing about it for other commoners rather than for scholars, and their strategies for meeting emergencies and reconstructing villages and, indeed, for entering a variety of enterprises, all with an ethical understanding of virtue" (2). These themes are: the relationship between economics and morality; the epistemological premise that nature must serve as the first principle of all knowledge, and the "egalitarian and cooperative ethic that prevailed as an ideology at the Kaitokudô" [the merchant academy in Osaka] (4-5). This ideology in turn led Najita to the kô, the commoner cooperative association. By way of a story about how the building that currently occupies the Kaitokudô site, Japan Life, which originated in the Ômi merchants' trading networks and kô in the late Tokugawa period, Najita argues that "the contrasting images often presented of the modern with the premodern…are misleading because they conceal or suppress a certain kind of history that individuals and institutions shared" (10). Writing about his method, Najita tells us that "this is a social history of a modernity that might best be understood on its own historical terms rather than those of the prevailing narratives of modernization, such as Western progress and economism" (14).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the "commonsense knowledge" of merchants in the Tokugawa period, which was expressed in commoner handbooks and which were circulated amongst merchants as part of an urban/rural intellectual circuit; Najita writes that "commoners writing for commoners was not just an urban phenomenon but one that joined town and country in a shared discourse" (25), as he visited several rural archives of merchant families. The chapter continues exploring the merchant worldview, and concludes with an examination of the thought of Kaiho Seiryô (1755-1817), "who perceived in the commoner world of thought and practice the arguments that caused him to alter the received conceptual categories" (49), as a samurai who abandoned his social status and his training in the Sorai school "to completely rethink the reality of political economy" based on "the epistemology and practices of merchants and farmers" (ibid).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores "the kô as organizational consciousness" and argues that it "sheds light on how people in Tokugawa society organized themselves to manage unexpected crises" via the "ethic of mutual trust and moral promise" instantiated in the moral contracts that bound the cooperative members to each other (60). Moreover, "because they were framed and maintained ethical and economic practices, they were adaptive and persisted into modern and contemporary times" (61). The initial example comes from the Munakata kô, which provided a form of mutual aid cum health insurance that at least one physician archivist argues formed the model for the national health system. Kô proliferated in the Tokugawa period, probably partly as a consequence of the withdrawal of the warrior class from the villages and villagers' concomitant habit of considering themselves independent; not surprisingly, the preference remained into the 20thC for kô to remain outside formal legal structures. Related to "the moral underpinnings of the kô as an organization to save human lives in villages" (90) was the new understanding of "nature as energy and energy as life" in Tokugawa thought, which was best expressed by Miura Baien (1723-89). Thus, the "underlying moral pledge was that no one would be sacrificed in times of emergency and that despite differences in wealth and status, all would be equal in the cause of mutual aid" (99).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "work and ethical practice," first through the life and work of Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856) and the Hôtoku Association in Shizuoka which developed out of his works. The idea of "work as virtue" was central to Sontoku's ideas, with the somewhat ironic result that in the modern period he "was co-opted by the modern state to mobilize Japan's youth" (109). Although Sontoku was recuperated as an apostle of modernization by the proselytizers of modernization theory, Najita argues that Sontoku's thought united economics and morality, and that moreover "illiterate commoners could acquire knowledge without formal education…[and] that they should not rely on religion as a source of knowledge," because agriculture preceded the organization of human society and marked the beginning of history (117). Sontoku advocated the realization of his "human way" through "systematic and long-term planning (shihô);" furthermore, "the steps taken were not natural but required self-conscious human intervention, always undertaken with knowledge of nature and its 'grammar'" (125). The execution of this plan was tied up with bundô, the parcelling out of what Heaven granted in order to "generate a surplus for humans to avoid famine under conditions of extreme deprivation," thus coming "to frame an approach to work and production in the countryside" (127) through (in the words of a disciple) "'the measurement of intake and the control of outflow'" governed by the principle of the mean (128). As the Hôtoku movement spread to multiple villages and then became "a multi village and regional movement" (136), Sontoku promised interest-free loans on five-year terms with a sixth-year share of "thank you money" (reikin) to go back into the association fund, which Sontoku used "to encourage farmers to maintain or expand production in dry fields and to meet the demands of local and regional castle-town markets" (135). As the Hôtoku movement attracted the attention and even participation of daimyo, Najita argues, "the tension suggested between dealing political with the authorities and at the same time demanding organizational autonomy based on ethical principle would be related in the modern late Meiji era" (139).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the attempts by the Meiji government to inaugurate a "modern" (read: German) credit-and-loan program to alleviate the "social crisis" (proposed in 1891, adopted in 1900) and the efforts of government bureaucrats including Hirata Tôsuke and Yanagita Kunio to persuade the Hôtoku association to merge itself into these programs by discarding its "outdated" assertion that morality and economics were inseparable. Hôtoku figures, principally Okada Ryôichirô (1840-1915), insisted that this was the central idea of Hôtoku, and the association did not merge with the Meiji legal structures created. Furthermore, up until the end of the war, small kô were far more popular, with more than a thousand mutual loan kô in Osaka alone versus only a few hundred savings-and-loan unions nationwide.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the "mujin companies--credit-and-loan enterprises that devoured their ethics and methodology from the tanomoshi and mujin kô--which became small regional mutual banks by the end of the Pacific War; although Najita acknowledges that "they always operated in the shadows of the large multiregional city banks," he argues that "they played an important role in nurturing the needs of capital-poor entrepreneurs in the inner cities and regions" (175). For Najita, the mujin company "was an example of the traditional kô's adaptation to modern demands" (177). Although it drew on the ethic of mutual aid familiar from Tokugawa kô, the mujin company did have the goal of making a profit. Although participants remained both creditors and debtors, everyone was free to use the fund for whatever purposes, and dividends were shared to each contributor. According to Najita, "the growth of the mujin company thus must be seen in this broader early Meiji history of commoners resisting and protesting what seemed to them egregious impositions by the new central government" (178). Although rural commoners could not resist all the impositions made by the Meiji government after the ishin [Najita uses this term], they were able to resist the compulsory savings law that the government imposed to expropriate rural wealth for its own budgets. Drawing on James Nakagawa's argument that Meiji commoners survived the Matsutaka deflation of the 1880s via the use of the "weapons of the weak," Najita augments these claims by pointing out the use of kô, which were not tied into the legal structure and thus could be used both to hide assets and to stave off total destruction. The kô joined into a single cooperative after the Matsutaka deflation, which eventually spawned the mujin kô or mujin kasha. These companies were brought under legislative regulation under the auspices of the Ministry of Finance in 1915, after which point they only grew more popular. Although their numbers declined during and after the Pacific War, when they became known as "mutual banks," the value of their holdings did not; what did in many were the high-growth years of the Miracle, when they dropped the term "mutual" and became simply banks. But sixty-eight regional mutual banks remain, not fully of the modern but in it.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples In the epilogue Najita looks at the "fragment discourse" of cooperative activity in the postwar period. For example, much of the rebuilding of Japan's destroyed cities was accomplished through kô; on Okinawa these were known as moyai, although the rules were the same as in other regions, which were both "destitute and capital poor" (212), especially since the large multi region banks "promoted capital-intensive projects and rarely extended credit to medium and small enterprises" (212-13), as had become the norm. In Okinawa, however, 60% of households still take part in moyai today. Najita also looks at the postwar intellectual movement toward cooperative democracy, which took as its patron saint Andô Shôeki as mediated by E.H. Norman, who "was one of the very few who argued that equality was indeed a vital ingredient in Japanese intellectual history" and that "without a grounding in indigenous references, democracy would appear to be totally foreign and, in the long run, seem inappropriate to Japan" (217). Although the Cooperative Party failed, the cooperative logic it espoused "persisted in the critical political thinking of citizen or civil society protest movements" (219). Another key figure in the burgeoning environmental movement was Tanaka Shôzô, whose activities in the Meiji period were finally able to be celebrated in the postwar period, although the Ashio copper mine whose pollution he had tried to stop continued to pollute the area in the 1950s. According to Najita, the work of both Tanaka and Shôeki "brings into furs the Tokugawa legacy of nature as moral and epistemological principle" via the agrarian thinking of one Eto Tekirei, who founded a commune in the 1920s and linked the two earlier figures together. For Najita, "the theme of resistance as an action ethic has been a continuous undercurrent in our perspective on ordinary people weighing economic choices and carrying out carefully laid plans," which "speaks to a certain gritty temperament, konjo, as it is sometimes called" that "is rooted in commoners' widespread understanding that they should take things into their own hands to save one another" (226). Najita's final two examples are an autonomous Hôtoku village cooperative in Hokkaido (which was once known as the land of Hôtoku) and a private cooperative in "inner-city" Tokyo. Najita closes by arguing that these and other spontaneous citizens' aid efforts such as the post-Kobe earthquake volunteer movement "is an expression of cooperative self-governance, and as in other citizens' movements, it emphasizes the absence of hierarchy, permanent authoritarian leadership, professional and permanent membership, and a fixed political ideology" (238).
Critical assessment: This is definitely a final book in that it is much more meditative and much more associative than more tightly written books by younger scholars, but it is also illuminating of a history that has been not so much suppressed as ignored, because hiding in plain sight. I've joined cooperatives in Japan and in the States, and Najita's arguments about the persistence of kô make a lot of sense.
That said, I find Najita's sweeping references to "commoners" to be more obfuscatory than helpful. The four official social orders were status groups, not classes, and some merchants, officially commoners, were far richer than many samurai by the middle of the Tokugawa period if not earlier. By the end of the period, there was a great deal of status mixing at elite levels, and I find that Najita's flattening of those class-based distinctions blunts his analysis, and especially its potential comparability.
Further reading: Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan; Hitomi Tonomura, Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan
Meta notes: At this point I should put my cards on the table and say that I really like comparability.
Main Argument: Najita argues for a kind of deep persistence of a hidden history of commoner cooperative organizations (kô) from the early modern period into the modern period--although he does not say as much, it is clear that the kô played a vital role in alleviating the rural misery associated with the late Tokugawa and early imperial periods, and thus a key role in Japan's successful transition to industrial modernity. Moreover, albeit in somewhat changed forms, many kô still exist in Japan to blunt the effects of state indifference, a kind of silent citizens' movement.
Historiographical Engagement: In his own words, Robert Bellah, Irwin Scheiner, Thomas C. Smith, Anne Walthall, Sakurai Tokutarô, Irokawa Daikichi, Mori Kahei, and Mori Shizurô
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples Najita writes that this book is a kind of sequel to his earlier Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan; whereas that book focused on Tokugawa Osaka merchant philosophy, this book focuses on "the commoners' thinking about commerce, their writing about it for other commoners rather than for scholars, and their strategies for meeting emergencies and reconstructing villages and, indeed, for entering a variety of enterprises, all with an ethical understanding of virtue" (2). These themes are: the relationship between economics and morality; the epistemological premise that nature must serve as the first principle of all knowledge, and the "egalitarian and cooperative ethic that prevailed as an ideology at the Kaitokudô" [the merchant academy in Osaka] (4-5). This ideology in turn led Najita to the kô, the commoner cooperative association. By way of a story about how the building that currently occupies the Kaitokudô site, Japan Life, which originated in the Ômi merchants' trading networks and kô in the late Tokugawa period, Najita argues that "the contrasting images often presented of the modern with the premodern…are misleading because they conceal or suppress a certain kind of history that individuals and institutions shared" (10). Writing about his method, Najita tells us that "this is a social history of a modernity that might best be understood on its own historical terms rather than those of the prevailing narratives of modernization, such as Western progress and economism" (14).
The relentless surge and resurgence in the urban and industrial reconstruction that produces a vast and indiscriminate technological sprawl simply reinforce the process in which, in its constantly changing physicality, the present is thought to be unthinkable as an extension of the distant past. In its urgency to present itself as modern and international, Japan often has abandoned much of the history that ordinary people hustled through. Accordingly, the past is intermixed in this context in ways that, like those of a recessive gene, are subtle, complex, and also embarrassing if too readily visible. (19)
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the "commonsense knowledge" of merchants in the Tokugawa period, which was expressed in commoner handbooks and which were circulated amongst merchants as part of an urban/rural intellectual circuit; Najita writes that "commoners writing for commoners was not just an urban phenomenon but one that joined town and country in a shared discourse" (25), as he visited several rural archives of merchant families. The chapter continues exploring the merchant worldview, and concludes with an examination of the thought of Kaiho Seiryô (1755-1817), "who perceived in the commoner world of thought and practice the arguments that caused him to alter the received conceptual categories" (49), as a samurai who abandoned his social status and his training in the Sorai school "to completely rethink the reality of political economy" based on "the epistemology and practices of merchants and farmers" (ibid).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores "the kô as organizational consciousness" and argues that it "sheds light on how people in Tokugawa society organized themselves to manage unexpected crises" via the "ethic of mutual trust and moral promise" instantiated in the moral contracts that bound the cooperative members to each other (60). Moreover, "because they were framed and maintained ethical and economic practices, they were adaptive and persisted into modern and contemporary times" (61). The initial example comes from the Munakata kô, which provided a form of mutual aid cum health insurance that at least one physician archivist argues formed the model for the national health system. Kô proliferated in the Tokugawa period, probably partly as a consequence of the withdrawal of the warrior class from the villages and villagers' concomitant habit of considering themselves independent; not surprisingly, the preference remained into the 20thC for kô to remain outside formal legal structures. Related to "the moral underpinnings of the kô as an organization to save human lives in villages" (90) was the new understanding of "nature as energy and energy as life" in Tokugawa thought, which was best expressed by Miura Baien (1723-89). Thus, the "underlying moral pledge was that no one would be sacrificed in times of emergency and that despite differences in wealth and status, all would be equal in the cause of mutual aid" (99).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at "work and ethical practice," first through the life and work of Ninomiya Sontoku (1787-1856) and the Hôtoku Association in Shizuoka which developed out of his works. The idea of "work as virtue" was central to Sontoku's ideas, with the somewhat ironic result that in the modern period he "was co-opted by the modern state to mobilize Japan's youth" (109). Although Sontoku was recuperated as an apostle of modernization by the proselytizers of modernization theory, Najita argues that Sontoku's thought united economics and morality, and that moreover "illiterate commoners could acquire knowledge without formal education…[and] that they should not rely on religion as a source of knowledge," because agriculture preceded the organization of human society and marked the beginning of history (117). Sontoku advocated the realization of his "human way" through "systematic and long-term planning (shihô);" furthermore, "the steps taken were not natural but required self-conscious human intervention, always undertaken with knowledge of nature and its 'grammar'" (125). The execution of this plan was tied up with bundô, the parcelling out of what Heaven granted in order to "generate a surplus for humans to avoid famine under conditions of extreme deprivation," thus coming "to frame an approach to work and production in the countryside" (127) through (in the words of a disciple) "'the measurement of intake and the control of outflow'" governed by the principle of the mean (128). As the Hôtoku movement spread to multiple villages and then became "a multi village and regional movement" (136), Sontoku promised interest-free loans on five-year terms with a sixth-year share of "thank you money" (reikin) to go back into the association fund, which Sontoku used "to encourage farmers to maintain or expand production in dry fields and to meet the demands of local and regional castle-town markets" (135). As the Hôtoku movement attracted the attention and even participation of daimyo, Najita argues, "the tension suggested between dealing political with the authorities and at the same time demanding organizational autonomy based on ethical principle would be related in the modern late Meiji era" (139).
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the attempts by the Meiji government to inaugurate a "modern" (read: German) credit-and-loan program to alleviate the "social crisis" (proposed in 1891, adopted in 1900) and the efforts of government bureaucrats including Hirata Tôsuke and Yanagita Kunio to persuade the Hôtoku association to merge itself into these programs by discarding its "outdated" assertion that morality and economics were inseparable. Hôtoku figures, principally Okada Ryôichirô (1840-1915), insisted that this was the central idea of Hôtoku, and the association did not merge with the Meiji legal structures created. Furthermore, up until the end of the war, small kô were far more popular, with more than a thousand mutual loan kô in Osaka alone versus only a few hundred savings-and-loan unions nationwide.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the "mujin companies--credit-and-loan enterprises that devoured their ethics and methodology from the tanomoshi and mujin kô--which became small regional mutual banks by the end of the Pacific War; although Najita acknowledges that "they always operated in the shadows of the large multiregional city banks," he argues that "they played an important role in nurturing the needs of capital-poor entrepreneurs in the inner cities and regions" (175). For Najita, the mujin company "was an example of the traditional kô's adaptation to modern demands" (177). Although it drew on the ethic of mutual aid familiar from Tokugawa kô, the mujin company did have the goal of making a profit. Although participants remained both creditors and debtors, everyone was free to use the fund for whatever purposes, and dividends were shared to each contributor. According to Najita, "the growth of the mujin company thus must be seen in this broader early Meiji history of commoners resisting and protesting what seemed to them egregious impositions by the new central government" (178). Although rural commoners could not resist all the impositions made by the Meiji government after the ishin [Najita uses this term], they were able to resist the compulsory savings law that the government imposed to expropriate rural wealth for its own budgets. Drawing on James Nakagawa's argument that Meiji commoners survived the Matsutaka deflation of the 1880s via the use of the "weapons of the weak," Najita augments these claims by pointing out the use of kô, which were not tied into the legal structure and thus could be used both to hide assets and to stave off total destruction. The kô joined into a single cooperative after the Matsutaka deflation, which eventually spawned the mujin kô or mujin kasha. These companies were brought under legislative regulation under the auspices of the Ministry of Finance in 1915, after which point they only grew more popular. Although their numbers declined during and after the Pacific War, when they became known as "mutual banks," the value of their holdings did not; what did in many were the high-growth years of the Miracle, when they dropped the term "mutual" and became simply banks. But sixty-eight regional mutual banks remain, not fully of the modern but in it.
Epilogue: Argument, Sources, Examples In the epilogue Najita looks at the "fragment discourse" of cooperative activity in the postwar period. For example, much of the rebuilding of Japan's destroyed cities was accomplished through kô; on Okinawa these were known as moyai, although the rules were the same as in other regions, which were both "destitute and capital poor" (212), especially since the large multi region banks "promoted capital-intensive projects and rarely extended credit to medium and small enterprises" (212-13), as had become the norm. In Okinawa, however, 60% of households still take part in moyai today. Najita also looks at the postwar intellectual movement toward cooperative democracy, which took as its patron saint Andô Shôeki as mediated by E.H. Norman, who "was one of the very few who argued that equality was indeed a vital ingredient in Japanese intellectual history" and that "without a grounding in indigenous references, democracy would appear to be totally foreign and, in the long run, seem inappropriate to Japan" (217). Although the Cooperative Party failed, the cooperative logic it espoused "persisted in the critical political thinking of citizen or civil society protest movements" (219). Another key figure in the burgeoning environmental movement was Tanaka Shôzô, whose activities in the Meiji period were finally able to be celebrated in the postwar period, although the Ashio copper mine whose pollution he had tried to stop continued to pollute the area in the 1950s. According to Najita, the work of both Tanaka and Shôeki "brings into furs the Tokugawa legacy of nature as moral and epistemological principle" via the agrarian thinking of one Eto Tekirei, who founded a commune in the 1920s and linked the two earlier figures together. For Najita, "the theme of resistance as an action ethic has been a continuous undercurrent in our perspective on ordinary people weighing economic choices and carrying out carefully laid plans," which "speaks to a certain gritty temperament, konjo, as it is sometimes called" that "is rooted in commoners' widespread understanding that they should take things into their own hands to save one another" (226). Najita's final two examples are an autonomous Hôtoku village cooperative in Hokkaido (which was once known as the land of Hôtoku) and a private cooperative in "inner-city" Tokyo. Najita closes by arguing that these and other spontaneous citizens' aid efforts such as the post-Kobe earthquake volunteer movement "is an expression of cooperative self-governance, and as in other citizens' movements, it emphasizes the absence of hierarchy, permanent authoritarian leadership, professional and permanent membership, and a fixed political ideology" (238).
Critical assessment: This is definitely a final book in that it is much more meditative and much more associative than more tightly written books by younger scholars, but it is also illuminating of a history that has been not so much suppressed as ignored, because hiding in plain sight. I've joined cooperatives in Japan and in the States, and Najita's arguments about the persistence of kô make a lot of sense.
That said, I find Najita's sweeping references to "commoners" to be more obfuscatory than helpful. The four official social orders were status groups, not classes, and some merchants, officially commoners, were far richer than many samurai by the middle of the Tokugawa period if not earlier. By the end of the period, there was a great deal of status mixing at elite levels, and I find that Najita's flattening of those class-based distinctions blunts his analysis, and especially its potential comparability.
Further reading: Najita, Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan; Hitomi Tonomura, Community and Commerce in Late Medieval Japan
Meta notes: At this point I should put my cards on the table and say that I really like comparability.