ahorbinski | Entries tagged with z: smith thomas c

Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959.

Main Argument: In the Tokugawa period across Japan, cooperative farming was displaced by individual family arming, and the individual family "clearly emerged as the center of production organization and economic interest" (ix). The most important cause of this was the growth of the market, which was disruptive. In general, these changes show that Japanese agriculture is dynamic, not sempiternally fixed, and that changes in farming during the Tokugawa period were the very opposite of regressive.

( Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan )

Critical assessment: Tom Smith, ladies and gentlemen. Tom Smith. Fifty-five years on and this book has barely aged--some of the details are sketchy, and see my comments for the question of rural immiseration in the Meiji period and after, but all in all, working mostly from sketchy and unevenly published documents cited in other people's works, he laid it out, and got it right.

Further reading: Vlastos, Peasant Protests and Uprisings in Tokugawa Japan; Smith, Nakahara; Smith, Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization

Bibliographic Data: Smith, Thomas C. Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717-1830. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1977.

Main Argument: Demographic data from a pseudonymous village in Tokugawa Japan strongly indicate that villagers routinely practiced fairly rigorous family planning, including infanticide, as a means of maximizing the family's economic potential as a corporate unit. Japan's modern prosperity, therefore, had premodern roots in that its low premodern birth rate positioned the country well for industrialization, comparable to many regions of western Europe.

Historiographical Engagement: Arguing against the mostly unnamed previous generations whose habits of thought were in service to their preconceived notions, not struggling against them.

( In which the Edo period is not a dystopia )

Critical assessment: It's something of an odd experience to read a book whose conclusions are so fundamental to your previous education that it can be a shock to remember that those conclusions once had to be proven. This is probably the most enjoyable book I've read about historical demography in a long time, if not ever, and I really appreciated getting to watch Thomas C. Smith strike a serious blow against the classism of modernization and development theory.

Indeed, it's a tribute to Smith and his co-authors that the work here is now fundamental to our understanding of Tokugawa Japan and--as my copy of The Great Divergence attests--to our understanding of Asian history as a whole. For all that his conclusions are revisionist, if not revolutionary, I also appreciated, as always, the economy and grace of Smith's prose as well as his punctilious refusal to make more assertions than he can prove, a trait not shared by all scholars. This is, on the whole, a brilliant little book.

I do wonder, however, why Smith et al. felt the need to give "Nakahara" a pseudonym. Reading what he writes about the town and five minutes on Google maps reveals that it's almost certainly modern Wanouchi in Gifu city. Their reason for doing so is almost the only thing left unclear in the entire text.

Further reading: Farris; Hanley and Yamamura

Meta notes: It's amazing how far not being classist and presentist can get historical inquiry. Or not.

Bibliographic 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.

( The vitality of tradition; the roots of the present in the past )

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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Cognitive Resonance

the ironic imagination

Book review: Agrarian Origins

Book review: Nakahara

Book review: Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920

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