Everyday things in premodern Japan: the hidden legacy of material culture 9780520204706, 9780520218123, 9780520922679

Table of contents :
Frontmatter
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (page ix)
PREFACE (page xi)
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION (page xv)
1 The Level of Physical Well-Being in Tokugawa Japan (page 1)
2 Housing and Furnishings (page 25)
3 A Resource-Efficient Culture (page 51)
4 A Healthful Lifestyle (page 77)
5 Urban Sanitation and Physical Well-Being (page 104)
6 Demographic Patterns and Well-Being (page 129)
7 Stability in Transition: From the Tokugawa Period to the Meiji Period (page 155)
8 Physical Well-Being: A Comparative Perspective (page 176)
GLOSSARY (page 199)
INDEX (page 205)

Citation preview

Everyday Things

- ~ in Premodern Japan

BLANK PAGE

Everyday Thingsin © ~ Premodern Japan The Hidden Legacy of

Material Culture |

Susan B. Hanley ;

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS - Berkeley / Los Angeles / London

| University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 1997 by | The Regents of the University of California First Paperback Printing 1999

, Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data |

| Hanley, Susan B., 1939- , ;

p. cm. |

Everyday things in premodern Japan : the hidden legacy of .

material culture / Susan B. Hanley.

Includes bibliographical references and index. —

) ISBN 0-520-20470-0 (alk. paper)

O-§20~-21812-4. (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Material culture—Japan. 2. Japan—Social life and customs.

. CIP ,

3. Japan—History— Tokugawa period, 1600-1868. 4. Japan—

| History—Meiji period, 1868-1912. I. Title. :

GN635.J2H35 1997 - ) , 306’.0952—dc20 96-33421

Printed in the United States of America

| 08 O07 O06 OF O4 03 O24 OL OO | 9876§432

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements

of ANSI/ NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper). :

, To the memory of my mother, Frances Alden Hanley, who encouraged me to

follow any career I wanted, and to.my , aunt, Susan McCallum Haskins, who has

i not only shown me what a woman can achieve in life, but who has fully supported my academic career from my student days and made my study of Japan possible.

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; , |4| | Contents |

| LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS | ix

| PREFACE | Xl NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION XV

| The Level of Physical Well-Being in Tokugawa Japan I

| Housing and Furnishings 25 :

|3| 2

A Resource-Efficient Culture | 51 :

A Healthful Lifestyle 77

67 ,oe,

Urban Sanitation and Physical Well-Being 104

, Demographic Patterns.and Well-Being 129

to the Meiji Period | 155 Stability in ‘Transition: From the Tokugawa Period

, Physical Well-Being: A Comparative Perspective 176

“GLOSSARY 199

INDEX | 20§

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; Illustrations Figures 1. Nineteenth-century formal room with shoin elements | 32

living room with trorz 64. 3. Women wearing kosode _ 69

2. Nineteenth-century house with kamado in the doma and —

4. Wooden bath | 98 | 5. Drainage in a town street 117

6. Nineteenth-century toilets | 123

Tables : 1. National population data by region 132

| 2. Life expectancy for sample areas in Tokugawa Japan | 134

3. Life expectancy estimates 136

4. Percentage of women married, by age group | 142

the childbearing ages , 144 6. Sex ratios of last-born children 147 5. Percentage of households containing married women in

7. Number of shops in Tokyo, 1881, 1891, and 1900 _ 165

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| — Preface I became interested in history as a child because I was fascinated with how people lived in past times. If the material conditions of life were different, how did this affect people’s thought and behavior? When I

began to study Japan in college in the early 1960s, two ideas were im- | pressed upon me. The first was how different the Japanese were from Westerners, despite the fact that both Japan and Western nations experienced feudalism and industrialization. The second was that Japan had. been a very poor nation in the nineteenth century, one far behind the West in its standard of living. Over the years I find that these ideas have not been dispelled, nor have they been connected to the study of either the material conditions or the culture in Japan in premodern times.

By the 1960s scholars in Japan and the West, however, were begin- | ning to question the extent of Japan’s economic backwardness in the nineteenth century and to provide evidence of a growing economy dur-

, ing the entire span of the Tokugawa period. My first major research project was to pursue the puzzle of why, if the economy was growing, : the Japanese were widely practicing abortion and infanticide as demographic scholars claimed. My eventual answer was that Japanese were

' controlling their population growth, not for reasons of abject poverty, but in an effort to maintain and improve their standard of living. They achieved this in part through drastic methods such as abortion and infanticide and, more importantly, through nearly universal social controls such as permitting only one son per household to marry, delaying marriage in periods of economic recession, and preventing the establishment in farm villages of new households without a specified amount

| XI

| xii PREFACE | : | of land sufficient to support a family. These findings were published in Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 : (Princeton University Press, 1977), coauthored by Kozo Yamamura. My demographic research led me to ponder the question of what life

: was really like in the Tokugawa period. How did people live who made , the demographic decisions I could see in the village household registers I used as sources? If the economy was growing, how did life change in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Was the material culture im-

, proving? If so, why do we think of life prior to the Meiji Restoration as backward compared to that of the West? In terms of daily life, how

did Japan compare to the early industrializers, especially England and | the United States? And what difference did the answers make? Daily life is difficult to study, as I quickly learned. Only rarely do diarists and historians chronicle ordinary, everyday life; it is unusual to discover the journal of a public official who wrote down everything he

ate when traveling or the diary of an urban housewife who noted every time the family bath was heated. Because such finds are rare, sources from all over Japan must be used in studying daily life, and for that reason they do not form a good, solid body of evidence for any one

region. But partly because the study of daily life proved so difficult, I , found it particularly fascinating. Like every other author, I would like to imagine that I have produced : a work all of my own, on my own. I was very sure when I started this study that the ideas were mine, growing out of my earlier research. And then I discovered that people all over the world were researching vari-

ous aspects of daily life, from Fernand Braudel of the Annales school , | to the American archaeologist James Deetz, to mention two Westerners : whose work I much admire, and numerous Japanese and other scholars

mentioned here and in my notes. Research and concerns of one gen- : eration lead to the questions the following generation tries to answer, and, in many cases, each scholar independently comes to ask similar questions pondered by fellow scholars.

So that although I like to think that this study is my very own, I

would also like to fully and gratefully acknowledge all the help I have | _ received from many sources. My American mentor who first suggested

: I study the Tokugawa population encouraged me to do research on material culture and asked me to write a chapter in The Cambridge History of Japan, volume 4, titled “Tokugawa Society: Material Culture, Stand- — ard of Living, and Life-Styles” (Cambridge University Press, 1991). I

| am deeply grateful to Emeritus Professor John W. Hall of Yale Univer-

ascholar. PREFACE X11

sity for his guidance, encouragement, and the example he set for me as

My first mentor in Japan was Professor Hayami Akira, under whom _

I studied historical demography and the reading of the shumon-

avatame-cho, the primary documents I used for studying Tokugawa population. I now realize how much he and his research group at Keio | University influenced me to begin the study of seikatsu-shi, the history

of everyday life. I owe a special debt to Professors Wakita Haruko and Wakita Osamu,

who helped me in my research on material life from the outset. They went far beyond the role of advisors, not only guiding me to various sources and then helping me read them, but also taking me on numer-

ous site visits throughout western Japan and putting me up in their home countless times. They were responsible for the initial version of = this book being published by Chi6koronsha as Edo jidai no isan (The

| Tokugawa legacy) in 1990. I would like to thank Mr. Iwata Gyo, my _ editor at Chiiokoronsha, for his help and his faith in my work. And above all, J am grateful to the translator of the Japanese version, Professor Sashi Akihiro, whose superb translation is largely responsible for Edo jidai no isan winning in 1990 the Joseph Roggendorf Prize given by Sophia University for a work furthering East-West understanding.

This study would not have been possible without the kindness of hundreds of colleagues, friends, and acquaintances, only a few of whom I can name here. I am grateful to Professor Yasuba Yasukichi of Osaka University, who helped me formulate and temper my position on the

premodern standard of living by engaging me in friendly academic ar- , guments. Ms. Nakano Setsuko of Kanazawa University helped me puz-

zle my way through original sources of the Tokugawa period, primarily .

diaries not meant for others to read, much less a twentieth-century :

American. ,

I would like to specially thank Professors Ishige Naomichi, Hirai Ki-

} yoshi, Okawa Naomi, Kitd Hiroshi, Kuwahara Minoru, and Shiraki Kosaburo, and Ms. Koizumi Kazuko. These and many others in Japan

have guided me through historical sites and their own houses; have led . me to historical sources I would not have found on my own; have ex-

plained menus, types of plants used for food, and historical artifacts; and provided over the years various kinds of help that they may not even remember but that have been crucial to my research. I cannot thank enough Mrs. Tanaka Ayako, who has helped me try to understand Japan ever since the week I first arrived in the summer of 1961.

xiv PREFACE | I would like to acknowledge the following publications that have | published various parts of this research as I completed it over the years:

} “A High Standard of Living in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Fact or Fantasy?” The Journal of Economic History 43, no. 1 (March 1983); “The

Material Culture: Stability in Transition,” in Japan in Transition from Tokugawa to Metz, ed. Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Prince- |

_ ton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and “Urban Sanitation in Pre- | | industrial Japan,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. t (sum} mer 1987). Some of the tables in chapter 6 are from my Princeton book, Economic and Demographic Change, which is now out of print. The students in my graduate history class critiqued the manuscript,

| saving me from numerous inaccuracies and inconsistencies, and to all of them I am grateful: Sue Duvall, Jeanne Farrar, Stacey Holmes, Sue

Sunmi Kim, Peter Lee, Ethan I. Segal, and John H. Sagers. Amy Williams Middleton kindly took time from her own work to do the illustrations. I am also grateful to two anonymous readers for the University of California Press for their suggestions, and it has been a pleasure to work with my editors, Sheila Levine, Scott Norton, and Carolyn

Hill. oO | |

Special thanks go to Martha Lane Walsh, managing editor of The

Journal of Japanese Studies, who from the beginning of this study has edited and critiqued my work, and to date she has received more argument than thanks from me for the improvements she has made. Finally, I must mention my husband, Kozo Yamamura, who has served as my severest critic, thereby slowing down my progress at many points, but who in the end has helped me produce much better work than I would

have otherwise. ,

| Note on Transliteration Macrons have been omitted from common place names, recent reign names, and Japanese words that appear in English-language dictionaries | (except in the Glossary). Japanese names appear in Japanese order, with family name first, with the exception that the names of authors of works in English follow the order given in the publication and the author’s preference for use of macrons.

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CHAPTER ONE , | : The Level of Physical Well-Being in Tokugawa Japan ~

The Argument | How well did the Japanese live prior to their industrialization in the late nineteenth century? The most widely held view is that Japan was a poor, backward country with a low standard of living, and

when it began to industrialize, it had a lower standard of living than

did Western countries when they began this process. However, though _ . this view is held by most historians and economists, this view is rarely shared by the scholars who study the lifestyles and material culture of

the Japanese.’ A reassessment of how well Japanese lived by the time : they began to modernize their economy and the implications for industrialization are the subjects of this study. During the period just prior to Japanese efforts to industrialize, the

Tokugawa period (1600-1867), cities grew to include at least one in every ten Japanese, developing into cultural and economic centers from , 1. As Kelley and Williamson say, “the model most often employed to analyze early Japan is one where labor-surplus conditions prevail. . . . [which] implies that none of the benefits of modernization accrue to workers in the small ‘modern’ sector. What is the historical evidence? Was extreme austerity the vehicle by which peasants and laborers in the ‘traditional’ sector contributed to Japanese progress?” Allen C. Kelley and Jeffrey G. | Williamson, Lessons from Japanese Development: An Analytical Economic History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 22-23.

|]

| 2 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN - | which ideas, knowledge, and products were diffused throughout the

| country. The first urban commoner culture in Japan, which flourished in the late seventeenth century and again in the early nineteenth century, was possible because of the rise in urban income, and the steady transmission of culture and goods throughout the countryside was a result of the rise in rural income. Largely a population of self-sufficient

cultivators in the early-seventeenth century, the Japanese by the mid- | nineteenth century were able to buy books, furniture, sweets, fresh fish, hair ornaments, and all sorts of small luxuries even in remote villages.

As early as the beginning of the eighteenth century, members of the samurai elite were complaining that the commoners were living above themselves, imitating the lifestyles of their samurai betters. A dramatic

increase in consumer goods among the general populace was also found ! in seventeenth-century England, just prior to industrialization.’ In light of all that has been written on the positive developments

} during the Tokugawa period, it is puzzling that some economists con- , sider the standard of living to have been low, particularly since they have found that other preconditions for industrialization existed prior to the Restoration—such as high agricultural productivity, commerce — on a nationwide basis, and institutions and practices essential for industrialization (a monetized economy, banklike money-exchangers, and

the like). If Japan had all of the other necessary preconditions for in-

dustrialization—except for the new technology, which it could bor- , row—then I find it unlikely that it had a very low standard of living, : particularly in light of the evidence that life expectancy in Japan in the

mid-nineteenth century was higher than that of the industrialized countries at the onset of their industrialization and was similar to West-

ern life expectancy in the mid-nineteenth century. , | The problem is that determining the standard of living is difficult in , most cases and virtually impossible when there are no reliable data or gross domestic product. Japan before the Meiji Restoration was an example of the latter, a country where many daily goods were not traded. Even had they been, it would have been difficult to compare their prices with prices in other countries because the material cultures were so different. It is essentially impossible to make a comparative study of Japan’s living standard using prices and quantities of goods consumed. 2. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policy and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society

in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). .

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 3

| More significantly, economists may be using the wrong measure, or an insufficient one, in focusing on their concept of standard of living. For economists, a low standard of living signifies a low saving rate since

the poor consume a very large proportion of their income. Savings are important because they enable the investment necessary to industrialize, and since the Japanese industrialized rapidly and without borrow-

| ing significant amounts of foreign capital, it would seem logical that — they had the necessary standard of living.’ In general the rate at which families save is determined by how high their incomes are, and the standard of living as defined by economists is usually indicative of how well people lived or how much they were saving. But this does not mean that

we know how healthy they were.. |

Scholars of the West have argued for decades whether the Industrial

, Revolution brought with it an immediate rise in the standard of living. That is, did the Industrial Revolution improve the lives of the populace while the process was ongoing, or did the lives of urban factory workers

deteriorate? Recent research reveals that the answer may not be simple. Costa and Steckel have found convincing evidence that in the United States in the nineteenth century, income increased prior to the Civil War but health declined, whereas improvements in health outpaced in- | creases in income in the twentieth century.* Exactly why health declined

| is open to speculation, but clearly some economists now realize that | standard of living cannot be used as the sole measure for how well peo-

, ple live, even taking income distribution into consideration. : However, income, or the amount of goods and services one can pur-

chase, is not a sufficient measure for how healthy or productive people , are. It does not tell us how well educated or alert the populace is, nor

how capable people are of working long hours at various tasks that require both physical and mental stamina. In other words, it does not tell us how suited the population is for the various occupations involved in

a modern industrial economy—from installing and running factory equipment to the tasks involved in setting up and maintaining the in-

coe, 1961). :

3. For the importance of savings with regard to Japan’s industrialization, see Henry Rosovsky, Capital Formation in Japan, 1868-1940 (New York: The Free Press of Glen-

4. Dora L. Costa and Richard H. Steckel, “Long-Term Trends in Health, Welfare, and Economic Growth in the United States,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Mass., NBER Working Paper Series on Historical Factors in Long Run Growth, Historical Paper 76, November 1995. © Dora L. Costa and Richard H. Steckel.

, 4 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN

_frastructure to support them: bureaucracies, transportation and communications systems, and the like. Badly malnourished and illiterate — people will be effective at none of these jobs. Economists have become

, aware that in dealing with people as labor, they must consider quality as well as quantity. The kind of labor needed to run a modern factory,

even in the nineteenth century, is very different from what was required to run a farm. The workers not only need a variety of skills but also the ability to work continuously for long hours and be mentally alert

at the same time. As societies industrialize, they need not only a sup- , ply of labor for modern economic activities, they need to invest in their human capital. Forms of investment in human capital include school-

ing, medical care, and on-the-job training,® all of which improve oo the quality of labor either physically or in terms of people’s skills. Ex-

economy. |

- amples do not exist of a population eking out a subsistence living in agriculture suddenly and directly establishing a modern industrial | The aim of this study is not to offer still another quantitative “guesstimate” of Japan’s standard of living for the mid-nineteenth century, using questionable data and procedures debated even among economic

historians, in order to estimate how much capital Japan had to invest ! in modern industry. Rather, it is to attempt to answer the question of

| how well the Japanese lived in a broader sense, including aspects other , than income, so that we will have better knowledge of the quality of

Japan’s labor force at the onset and during the early years of its industrialization. Because other studies make clear that Japan had a sufh- —_ , ciently educated labor force by the 1870s,° and one that became increasingly well educated during the Meiji period (1868-1912) and beyond, I attempt to assess the level of physical well-being, which is based on income but also evaluated on the basis of many other indicators and

considerations. , | 5. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis, with Special Reference to Education, 2d ed. (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1975),

. % Economic historians are generally agreed that it is necessary to have a 40 percent literacy rate in order to successfully industrialize. Japan had roughly this rate by the Meiji

: Restoration, and the percentage rose quickly during the Meiji period. See R. P. Dore, oo Education in Tokugawa Japan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), and Susan B. Hanley, “La relacién entre educacién y crecimiento econdmico en Japon,” in La maldiction divina: Ignorancia y atraso economico en perspectiva historica, ed. Clara Eugenia

Nufiez and Gabriel Tortella (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1993). ,

. PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 5 The level of physical well-being encompasses many of the elements

that today are discussed under quality of life.” However, quality of life , is an amorphous concept that has taken on broad, philosophical connotations in recent academic discussion, including subjectively measured as well as objectively measured elements.® In contrast, the general

level of physical well-being, though a more awkward term, broadens the scope of inquiry and can still be objectively measured. Thus this concept has a double advantage: it gives not only a better measure of how well people live, but also it can be more readily evaluated than can the standard of living in premodern societies. For Tokugawa Japan, I base the evidence for the level of physical well-being on the material

| culture, which reveals the patterns and characteristics of consumption, : which in turn determines the physical well-being of the population. By studying these aspects of premodern Japan, we will not only better an- ,

- swer the economists’ questions, but also learn a great deal more about | what life was like in.the Tokugawa period. In this chapter I first present my argument why the standard of living alone is insufficient as an indicator of how well people live, insufficient for analyzing the preconditions of industrialization, and certainly insufficient for making cross-cultural comparisons. I present my alterna-

tive, the level of physical well-being, and show how it can be defined | narrowly enough to make it an important measure. Then I explain my

- sources—the material culture—and how analyzing consumption enables us to better estimate both the standard of living and the level of | physical well-being. I end the first half of the chapter with my hypothe-

sis about the level of physical well-being in Tokugawa Japan and its significance. In the second half of the chapter, I present preliminary

, evidence for the Tokugawa period to support this argument and sum-

-. marize the contents of the remaining chapters. , | 7. Lam grateful to Ann Waswo of Oxford University for suggesting this term. Physical has been included here because the concept of well-being encompasses happiness as well as physical conditions, and I am making no attempts to measure subjective feelings toward life.

| 8. Amartya Sen initially discussed the standard of living as the concept was developed in economics, and later he added an analysis of the quality of life, which includes not only

: how much money people have, but also life expectancy, health care, education, the kind : of labor they do, political and legal privileges, freedoms, family and other relations—an almost endless list that describes what makes people feel happy and fulfilled. See Amartya Sen et al., The Standard of Living (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

| The list of items is from p. 1 of the latter.

6 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN ,

| The Argument and Its Significance | Standard of living is a term used by economists to refer to the quantities of goods and services available for consumption; it is

expressed in monetary terms and is a measure of per capita income. To calculate it for a nation, the gross domestic product (GDP),’ which is the total value of goods and services for a nation, is divided by the , population. Thus per capita income is an average income derived from two aggregate statistics: total income and total population. Crude as it

is, this measure is found useful in modern nations because it is statistically possible to obtain it from data normally collected and because it gives information needed for policy making as well as to make interna-

| tional comparisons of economic performance. Economists will readily admit that as an indicator, the standard of

living is only as good as the data used to calculate it. It depends on an | accurate count of the population. If there is a considerable amount of undercounting, the standard of living will appear higher than it actually is. But of more concern in most modern nations is the calculation of GDP. Even in today’s advanced countries with all of their administrative capacities, some portion of income goes unreported, either because that income is not readily measurable or is impossible to measure or because it is underreported or not reported at all. For example, it is impossible to calculate implicit income since no one would think of reporting or even calculating the value of vegetables grown in a home garden or the value of exchanging a plumbing repair with a neighbor for homegrown apples. The value of unpaid housework and other services provided within the family are never calculated into GDP; only when a family has to pay for child care and housecleaning is the value — , of this work counted as income. And income is often underreported to avoid or evade taxes—people hide tips and cash payments, and firms “cook” their books in myriad ways. In short, every society has an underground economy, the income from which never reaches GDP figures.

The size of the underground economy in the industrialized nations of today is far from negligible. 9. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the sum of all goods and services produced within , a country, whereas gross national product also accounts for international trade and capital ,

concept to use here.

, flows. Since the Tokugawa economy was largely a closed one, GDP is the most appropriate

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 7 If these are problems in calculating the GDP for an advanced indus-

trial country, it is clear that it is impossible to derive reliable estimates for a preindustrial country that not only did not calculate its gross do, mestic product, but could not because the economy was not fully mone-

| | tized and because the government lacked the political and administra| tive capabilities of modern governments. The Tokugawa government had difficulties in accurately assessing the rice yield, its staple crop, and did not even attempt to regularly tax commerce, initially for practical and philosophical reasons, and later because it was politically, and most

! likely administratively, incapable of doing so.

Problems in calculating the standard of living are compounded | when trying to make comparisons between countries, and even more

| so when completely different cultures and historical periods are involved. Even if accurate estimates of the standard of living could be obtained for Japan and, say, for England, either for the mid-nineteenth

: century or at comparable stages in their industrialization, how can a comparison be made? During the ‘Tokugawa period, there was no exchange rate, which could provide a basis for a rough comparison, because Japan carried on no significant international trade; its economy was so closed that by the mid-nineteenth century the ratio of silver to gold was § or 6:1, compared to a 12 to 15:1 ratio in the West. Even today

| in countries with fairly similar consumption patterns, international ex| change rates do not reflect accurately the differences in the standard of living among nations. To determine what income is worth in another country with another currency, one has to construct market baskets of goods and services and do elaborate estimations.

A further problem with using per capita income as a measure of the | standard of living is that it tells us nothing about the distribution of

income. The Marxists are correct in criticizing neoclassical economics , for often ignoring the importance of income distribution. For neoclassical economists, income distribution is determined by the contribution all economic actors (entrepreneur, provider of capital, and labor) make in producing the total value of goods and services they jointly produce, _ and thus these economists have little to say about how changing income distribution might benefit society as a whole. If an economy is growing,

: it is thought that the income generated from this growth will filter down to all income levels and everyone will benefit at least to some extent. Thus, growth is the central concern in neoclassical analysis, in

| contrast to distribution in Marxist analysis. , This is to say that economists, eschewing normative judgments, are

: 8 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN | preoccupied with growth and not the “fairness” of distribution within an economy, and as a result, they are more interested in the amount of savings (capital available) than the patterns and characteristics of con- sumption. Because the rich tend to save more than the poor, a skewed income distribution may help increase the amount of capital within an economy in contrast to the case in which income is more evenly distrib-

uted. Therefore it is not surprising to find many economists interested: in the pattern of income distribution only in relation to capital formation. For such economists, income distribution and consumption (and the living standard that determines the level of income and consumption) are important only in determining savings and not for their effect on the level of physical well-being. But the Marxists falter on this as well, because their disaggregation is by class; their analysis falls short

when applied to what seem clear and rigid class lines that nonetheless , | no longer reflect economic status, a situation that occurred during the

latter half of the Tokugawa period. , | Though important, the standard of living is insufficient for measur, ing how well people live. It tells us only how much income people have

, on the average, and this includes only income that is known or can be | estimated. It does not tell us what their nutritional level is, how sanitary or hygienic their living conditions are, the prevalence of disease, or how well they use their natural resources. The usual assumption is that the higher the standard of living, the more advanced the economy, and the

| better off people are. However, the correlation is not this simple. It is possible for a population to have had a higher level of physical well-

| being at an earlier historical period when the standard of living was lower, because by the later period the standard of living may have risen

but the problems associated with early industrialization were encoun- : , tered, such as pollution, crowded urban living quarters, and an unbalanced diet.

It is even possible for the correlation in the change of standard of living and the level of physical well-being to be negative. A society can | experience a rise in income and yet face an increased risk of disease or poorer sanitary conditions and, therefore, more unhealthful living con-

ditions. In Japan in the late-nineteenth century, more people could af- | ford to buy polished white rice, and they substituted this more expensive staple for the cheaper brown rice. Their incomes had risen, and therefore, by definition, so had their standard of living, but these same people now faced a vitamin B deficiency and were subject to beriberi.

Even members of the imperial family are reported to have died of beri- |

| PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 9 beri during the Meiji period, which meant that those with the highest

| standard of living faced malnutrition and disease that did not affect the lower-income Japanese eating mixed and semipolished grains. Similarly, | in the United States after World War II many people could afford to eat expensive, well-marbled beef, and the incidence of heart disease rose. A high standard of living does not necessarily translate into a simi- —

larly high level of physical well-being. , The preceding are not isolated examples. A long list could be drawn

up of circumstances in which a rise in income subsequently led to a deterioration in physical well-being. When the water closet, or flush toilet, was invented in England, it seemed to raise the level of sanitation

: for those families who could afford to have the system installed. But they were consequently subjected to noxious gases until the system | could be perfected, and everyone, rich and poor alike, suffered from having sewage flushed into the Thames, which served as London’s water

supply. Another example is the high fashion of the nineteenth century. Women who could afford the corsets and restrictive clothing may have been the envy of those who could not, but the difficulties they had in merely moving and breathing led to physical problems and many of the

| famous “women’s complaints.” In any society, people may be pulled to

ing conditions. , | the cities by the attraction of higher wages, but those who earn more by doing so may be living in crowded, unsanitary, and unhealthful liv-

Yet it is possible for a small rise in the standard of living to bring |

about a larger increase in the level of physical well-being, or to reallocate

resources so that a higher level of physical well-being is achieved with- : out any increase in the standard of living. Planting sweet potatoes in place of grain in part of a family’s upland fields can lead to a more nutritious diet. When fuel is expensive, shifting from an open fireplace to an enclosed stove that requires less fuel will free income for other ~ uses. The diffusion of new carpentry techniques may enable an even higher-quality house to be built of lower-quality, and hence lower-cost, ©

| materials. All of these occurred during the Tokugawa period. Economists might counter that these considerations of health and

} well-being are not what is important in the measure of the standard of living. If one is concerned with the questions of how and why a society industrializes, then what is important is attaining a certain level of in-

, come (and one that is preferably growing) that will enable this society | to save and create wealth. The well-being of the population has only belatedly become a consideration of economists such as Robert W. Fo-

10 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN

gel and his group at the University of Chicago. When economists | moved from a concern with quantifiable measures to quality, most did

not go far enough, but limited their consideration to levels of skills." I argue that in order to industrialize, it is necessary to have not only a sufficient supply of labor, but also a labor force that is both healthy

enough and educated enough to staff the new factories, deal with the new technology, serve in the administration, become bankers and communications experts, and handle all the matters relating to the creation of an industrial economy. Economists have too often talked of labor in

terms of measurable units and considered Japan to have had a labor surplus into the early-twentieth century. However, if the number of workers available was the only thing that mattered, it would not have made sense for a dual structure of wages—in which higher wages went

to the skilled and better-educated employees of large firms in contrast to less-skilled employees of smaller firms—to have developed in Japan

during its industrialization. ) Since we cannot calculate the standard of living accurately and since

, the standard of living doesn’t tell us how healthy the Japanese were or how well they lived, I propose a new measure: level of physical well-being. The level of physical well-being is defined here as the standard of | living plus “quality factors” that can be positive or negative. Note that I am not rejecting the concept of standard of living. Rather I am in-

| corporating it into a new measure, one that will give additional information and is easier to estimate. What I call quality factors are elements . in an environment or society that are not captured when income is calculated but that must be considered when evaluating the level of physical well-being."* Though there is some overlap between the term quality

| factor and the economist’s externality, a quality factor is a measure broader than that of standard of living and, unlike externalities, some : 10. When economists began to use what is known as the “growth equation” to analyze

: the contributions made by capital, labor, and technology toward the growth of industrial economies, they found that the contribution of labor was underestimated. This could be corrected only by “adjusting” the labor data to consider human capital—that is, the con-

oo tribution resulting from education and skill levels. a1. In the 1985 Tanner Lectures, Amartya Sen questioned whether the concept of the standard of living could capture how well off people were when one person might have a slightly higher income than another, and therefore be able to buy and consume more food, but actually be in poorer health because of a higher metabolic rate and a parasitic

disease. Sen, The Standard of Living, p. 15. The concept of the level of physical well-being ) attempts to make this distinction; the second person would be considered to have a higher level of physical well-being though a lower income and therefore lower standard of living.

- PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN iT

quality factors can be evaluated by the market. Similarly, there is an overlap between quality factors and nonmarket transactions (goods and

, services not traded, thus not included as a part of measured GDP per |

capita),

| Because some quality factors can be measured, though not in terms of income, I have not used the word qualitative, which implies some-

. .. thing that cannot be quantified. One can measure a negative quality factor such as a polluted water supply, or a positive one such as fast-run-

| ning rivers with little contamination. Other examples of quality factors are the quality and level of nutrition, incidence of disease, level of general health, number of children per family, the percentage of dependent

, persons (too young or old to work), the size and quality of housing, the kind of heat available, and the many other aspects of life that affect

— our physical well-being. | These quality factors are affected by and related to income, but in determining the level of physical well-being what matters is the net ef-

, fect of the positive and negative factors. If the positive quality factors | in a society outweigh negative ones, then the level of physical well-being a will be higher than the standard of living, and if the reverse is true,

| then the standard of living will be higher than the level of physical well-being. I believe the former to be true for the Tokugawa period. My argument is as follows: As income rises over time, so does consumption, but not to the extent that income does because as incomes rise, people tend to save a larger percentage of their incomes. However, if resources are used efficiently and housing and sanitation facilities are

constructed so that people are less likely to come into contact with disease-bearing bacteria, and if the diet becomes well balanced, then the increase in the level of physical well-being may be greater than the increase in income over time. And if in another society, as incomes rise,

people switch to a more unhealthful diet, then the rate of growth in

| the level of physical well-being may be less than that of the growth in income. This can occur when people are already getting sufficient protein and fat in their diet but continue to substitute meat and dairy prod-

, ucts for vegetables, creating an unhealthy nutritional balance. Also, the concept of well-being of a people presumes that the majority are better off, since it refers to the well-being of an entire society, whereas a society may experience a rise in the standard of living because a few magnates or plantation owners become extraordinarily rich. In the second case, the standard of living as a statistic will show an increase, but the people as a whole will not be better off. We are led astray when we think,

12 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN |

as we often do, in terms of the mean, ignoring the measures of disper- |

sion, that is, distribution of income. , | The evidence used in this study is the material culture of the Tokugawa period. Material culture is here defined as the physical objects that

people use or consume in their everyday lives, most of which are either , made or else natural objects put to specific use by people.’” I concentrate ~ on what are considered the basics: food, clothing, and shelter, and concomitant aspects such as hygiene and sanitation. The artifacts of daily life reveal use of resources, the level of technology, how people cooked, what kind of houses they lived in, and levels of comfort, sanitation, and health—in short, how people lived. This is not primarily a quantitative

study; for the most part the information that exists does.not lend itself to quantification. However, this kind of evidence is well suited to making comparisons, either over time or across cultures. The diets in two countries may be very different, but analysis of content reveals nutri-

| tional similarities and differences, and when there is sufficient information, it is possible to estimate caloric intake. But when quantitative evidence, such as population statistics, is available, health can be evaluated

, by comparing life expectancy and the pattern of mortality between two

periods or two societies. ,

The material culture yields evidence on each independent variable in the equation determining the level of physical well-being: the standard

, of living and both positive and negative quality factors. For the economist, the standard of living is equal to income, and income is equal to . | consumption plus saving, so by studying material goods we are looking at the consumption and saving side of the equation. The material culture, being made up of the goods people consume, represents their con-

sumption in terms of material objects, but it can also give a fairly accurate indication of the services they receive as well because, for ex- , ample, large houses and complicated kitchen equipment may require

| servants. And because a house is the most expensive item owned bya | , family, it is equivalent to much of a family’s wealth and is usually in 12. Although material culture can be defined as “the study through artifacts of the , beliefs . . . of a particular community,” as by Jules David Prown in “Mind in Matter: An

__ Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” in Material Life in America,

| 1600-1860, ed. Robert Blair St. George (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), p. 18, the term is so widely and generally used that I prefer it to Braudel’s “material life.”

The problem I have with the term that Braudel has made famous is that it is so all-

encompassing. Nor do I have the vision or model of structure that Braudel has. See , Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, —

Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century (New York: Harper and Row, 1981). :

, oe ' PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 13 keeping with its total wealth. Therefore, housing that is owned represents past saving.

By looking at the consumption and saving side of the equation instead of income, we do not have to estimate unreported income, implicit income, and services supplied outside the market or resolve the numerous problems that plague those trying to calculate the standard of living through income. Whereas the standard of living can be calculated using either income or consumption and saving, the level of

physical well-being can be assessed only through the kinds of evidence , used to analyze consumption and saving, that is, through the material

culture. The amount of income and savings used to pay for a house a reveals only information about cost, whereas data on housing itself tell

us how much space people had, the quality of the building, what re- | sources were used, and what facilities were for cooking, heating, and sanitation, as well as how expensive it was. I am not arguing that this kind of evidence should be used in place of good modern quantitative data but that it is better than making “guesstimates” based on numer-

ous and possibly unwarranted assumptions. In addition, it gives us in- | | formation pertinent to economists who should be considering but have ignored this kind of data in their quest for quantification. _ Based on an analysis of the material culture, I argue that the standard of living and the level of physical well-being continued to rise through-

out the Tokugawa period, during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, though not at constant rates and not at necessarily the same rates. This rise was the result of the growth of the economy; the dif-

: _ fusion of technology, significant new foodstuffs, and various improve-

- ments in clothing and housing; stabilization of population growth in | the early-eighteenth century; and the installation and regulation of | | water supply and waste removal systems by government in urban centers. Because income rose more quickly for the commoners than the

| samurai, income came to be more evenly distributed over time. By the eve of the Meiji Restoration, the Japanese standard of living was at a

| similar level with that of England on the eve of its industrialization a century earlier. Although the average income of the Japanese in the

| 1860s was not quite as high as that of the English in the eighteenth | century, I argue that the level of physical well-being was at least as high as that in England in the nineteenth century, at a time when Japan

, had not yet begun to industrialize and England was already an indus-

, _ alize. ; :

trial nation, and certainly as high as when England began to industri-

14 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN , a Because of Japan’s isolation during the Tokugawa period, it developed a material culture and lifestyle that were in many ways distinctive from those of any other country and most certainly from that of the Western industrializing countries. I believe that the preference of the Japanese for their traditional lifestyle throughout industrialization, en-

, hanced in part by government regulations to limit imports of consumer goods, enabled both political and economic change to proceed more smoothly than would otherwise have been the case. The Japanese had

| a stability in their daily lives that helped them through the turbulent Meiji transition years when government, social systems, the economy,

and much of public life seemed to undergo continuous change. , - However, the material culture of the early Meiji period not only provided for an adequate level of physical well-being, but the type of hous-

ing and some of the material infrastructure, such as disposal of sewage, | were still in use a century later. The level of physical well-being was | high enough that Japan had a relatively healthy labor force and one suf- | ficiently literate upon which to build an industrial nation. The preference for the established lifestyle meant that the country could use its resources and scarce foreign currency for the purpose of building a modern economy, and at the same time this preference kept native in-

dustry vibrant. And the social and economic developments that had : tended toward the leveling of incomes, at least between class lines if not among them, led to a more homogeneous material culture and life-

style than one would ordinarily expect in a country with such theoreti- Co cally rigid class lines. This in turn led to a social mobility that aided in

the creation of a modern state and economy. |

| Preliminary Evidence a The preliminary evidence offered here first covers the standard of living, both because this is an important aspect of the level of physical well-being and because it is not treated separately elsewhere

, in the book. Scholars have long agreed that the seventeenth century in Japan was one of unprecedented economic growth prior to industriali-

zation. When peace prevailed and economic growth continued follow- oe , ing the establishment of a stable regime over Japan by the Tokugawa house in the early seventeenth century, the innovations in technology,

agriculture, and systems of human organization—which developed ,

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 15

during the prior century of civil strife—were diffused throughout the country. New engineering techniques were used to complete major irrigation, flood control, and land reclamation projects, adding large

| amounts of arable land. New “contracts” worked out between the rulers and cultivators resulted in increasing control by the latter over their land

and crops, and this, combined with the gradual freeing of persons in _ indentured servitude and serflike statuses, gave cultivators increased in-

centive to raise productivity and output. In addition, the absence of , | war, major famine, or destabilizing political crisis during the seventeenth century led to a concentration on economic growth almost certainly unparalleled in previous centuries.’*

The growth in the agricultural sector made it possible to feed an increasing rural population and at the same time support a rapidly growing urban population. Government measures to control the samu- _ , rai encouraged urban growth, so that by 1700 the urban population is estimated to have been at least 10 percent of the total population.'* This provided the basis for the increasing commercialization of the Japanese economy. Urban affluence led to a cultural flowering centered in Kyoto

and Osaka at the end of the. seventeenth century. Although Marxist

| historians have argued that both the economy and population stagnated during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most scholars studying the Tokugawa period now find convincing evidence of continued economic growth, though at a slower rate than in the seventeenth century. If the economy was growing, and at a rate faster than the population,

then by definition the standard of living rose, meaning that on the average people had more income. This is particularly true for the eight-

| eenth and nineteenth centuries when the national population surveys __ 13. See Kozo Yamamura, “Returns on Unification: Economic Growth in Japan, 15501650,” in Japan before Tokugawa, ed. John Whitney Hall, Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yama-

| mura (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 327-72; Nagahara Keiji and Kozo | Yamamura, “Shaping the Process of Unification: Technological Progress in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan, The Journal of Japanese Studies t4., no. 1 (winter 1988): 77109; Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford Uni-

| Press, 1977). :

versity Press, 1959); and Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demograplic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton: Princeton University 14. These measures included the sankin kotai system of alternate attendance of the

: daimyo in Edo and limiting each daimyo to only one castle for his domain. Gilbert Rozman, Urban Networks in Clring China and Tokugawa Japan (Princeton: Princeton

| University Press, 1973), p. 6, estimates Japan to have been Io percent urban, whereas Seki_ yama Naotaro, Kinsez Nihon no ginko kozo (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1958), p. 239,

considers 12 percent of the population to have been urban. .

16 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN

undertaken at the direction of the Bakufu show a commoner population fluctuating around twenty-six million, from 1721 when the survey

was first undertaken, to the last in 184.6."° If during the second half of | the Tokugawa period the population was not rising, then even a very

small rate of economic growth would still have led to a rise in the stan- | dard of living. And the information we have on both income and consumption attests to its continued rise.

| Though the data that exist are local or regional and limited to certain periods, taken together they provide strong evidence for a rising real income.'® Hayami Akira, who examined the wages of certain employ-

ees, the hokonin, in Kanto villages, concluded that from the early-seven- : teenth century to the early-nineteenth wages rose more than the prices of goods.'’ Sano Yoko found that the real wages of carpenters in Edo rose between 1830 and 1894, despite the various fluctuations to be expected from such events as the multiyear crop failures in the 1830s and

, the rebuilding of Edo in the late 1850s following the Ansei earth- | quake.’® Sait6 Osamu found that the rise in wage levels with the growth of commerce and manufacture led to a decline in the effective rents on

a land.’? This meant ‘that real income rose for wage workers and cultiva- tors alike, and evidence shows that this was not just in the most ad-

, vanced areas such as the Kinai, but also in the most backward, such as Tohoku in the north. People living in the Tokugawa period were well aware of rising incomes; a headman in what is now Akita Prefecture wrote in 1825: “Every family in the village without exception works at sericulture in the intervals of farming, thereby earning more income.””° The evidence that exists on the consumption side of the equation

, provides equally strong support for a rising standard of living throughout the Tokugawa period. Some of the most illustrative evidence on 15. See Sekiyama, Kinsezt Nihon, pp. 137-39, for the Bakufu compiled figures. 16. I cannot repeat here all of the evidence. See Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and

, Demographic Change, especially chapters 4 through 7. :

| : 1968), pp. 165-66. | | |

17. Hayami Akira, Nihon keizat-shi e no shikaku (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shimpdsha,

18. Yohko Sano, The Changes in Real Wages of Construction Workers in Tokyo, 18301894., English Series No. 4, Institute of Management and Labour Studies, Keio University,

Tokyo, 1963. |

19. Saito Osamu, “Tokugawa koki kara Taisho zenki ni itaru nogy6 chingin no choéki-

} teki stisei,” Shakat keizat shigaku 39, no. 2 (June 1973): 170-89. , 20. Thomas C. Smith, “Farm Family By-Employments in Preindustrial Japan,” The :

Journal of Economic History 29, no. 4 (December 1969): 709.

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 17

the changes in what was bought and used in daily life comes from the , domain of Okayama, one of the more economically advanced areas in western Japan. During the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth, the rural population bought what it needed from peddlers who

~ hawked their wares from village to village. In 1655 the domain govern- , ment prohibited these sales on the basis that cultivators were spending too much money on articles they did not need. Total prohibition proved

, unsatisfactory, however, and so peddling was licensed and the number | of goods limited—in 1666 to only eleven items: fishing nets, dried fish,

-. galt, dried seaweed, tea, rapeseed oil, kindling, wooden water dippers, , basket tops, oars, and farm tools. As demand—and undoubtedly open | violation of the decree—grew, additional goods were added to the permitted list. By 1705, there were thirty-one, including pottery, cotton,

pans, rice pots, straw mats, paper, fans, and rulers.”' | By the mid-eighteenth century, demand in Okayama had increased

to such an extent that major changes took place in rural marketing. Whereas the early peddlers had been based in the castle town, the surrounding towns had now grown to the point that they not only supplied the needs of the rural villages but even began to get a foothold in the

markets of the castle town. By the late-eighteenth century, villages’ de- , mand for goods was sufficient to support shops of their own. In 1813, one shop in the village of Oi sold ink, paper, writing brushes, pots, needles, pipes, tobacco and pouches, teapots, various containers and dishes, vinegar, soy sauce, bean paste, salt, noodles, kelp, sake, cakes, | : tea and teacups, senbez (rice crackers), grain, oil, candles, hair oil, hair strings and hairpins, cotton cloth, towels, tabz (socks), footgear includ-

ing zori, geta (wooden clogs), and waraji (straw sandals), funeral req- oo , uisites, and “other everyday necessities.” Other shops in the village sold various kinds of food and farm necessities, such as tools and fertilizers.”

Evidence of the rising standard of living for a large majority of people is also evidence of a more equal distribution of income. Samurai were increasingly unable to offer competitive wages to their employees, merchants complained that high wages alone were insufficient to retain staff, and the larger landowners in the countryside complained about being unable to obtain daily farm laborers because other options were

pp. _ 22.125-28. Ibid., p.| 95. 21. Ando Seiichi, Kinset zatkata shogyo no kenkyu (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1958),

18 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN } more attractive for workers. Kozo Yamamura has shown that the samu- — rai serving the Bakufu were able to maintain a steady real income during the Tokugawa period, largely through the aid of various Bakufu meas-

ures, but the samurai serving the daimyo by and large became much | worse off over time as domain finances weakened and the daimyo “bor-

rowed” from their retainers’ stipends. However, neither group enjoyed a rise in real income, and because many samurai households were not

able to afford to pay the rising wages servants could command, at the very least they faced a lowered quality of life. By the end of the Toku- , gawa period many samurai and commoners alike were working in the same lower-echelon staff positions within the daimyo’s castle, and a large proportion of samurai of low status were engaged in cottage in- |

dustry and other kinds of employment.** |

While the income of the samurai—who constituted no more than 7 to Io percent of the population—either held steady or deteriorated, most of the rest of the Japanese enjoyed a rising standard of living.”4 That most Japanese shared in the growing total output is evidenced both by the widespread sale of daily goods over time and theoretically by what is known as the wealth effect. It is obvious that a shop could not have been established in the rural villages had there not been a demand by most of the residents for the goods sold on a scale to make the shop profitable. A major study of the food industry in modern Asia - reveals that “trigger points” in income—that is, a leap in the average income per person—occur before people switch to the consumption of a new type of good. This is obviously more pertinent for expensive

consumer durables than for an inexpensive product such as candy, but :

it can be traced for basic food products.” | If the Japanese economy continued to grow throughout the Toku-

| gawa period, giving rise to an increased standard of living for a population that was stable or only very slowly growing from the eighteenth century on, why are the more reliable estimates of Japan’s per capita income on the eve of industrialization so low? Minami Ry6shin’s esti-

7 mates for Japan’s per capita GNP at the onset of industrialization (1886) 23. Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 131-33.

. 24.. The proportion of samurai in the population differed by domain, ranging perhaps

: as high as one-quarter in rare cases, but the usual estimate lies somewhere between 7 and , to percent. Shinmi Kichyi, Kakyu shizoku no kenkyu (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1965), pp. 63-64. 25. The Economist, December 4, 1993, p. 15.

, | PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 19 are only 60 percent of England’s at a similar stage of development (1765-1785 ).°° According to Angus Maddison’s estimates, Japan’s per capita GNP in 1870 was just one quarter that of the United Kingdom’s in the same year and 36 percent that of the U.S.”” Nishikawa Shunsaku is extremely critical of the efforts to estimate per capita income for Ja-

pan for the nineteenth century even using the concept of purchasing power parity (PPP), a method adopted by economists making interna-

* tional comparisons of living standards.** Although using the PPP | method. is superior to trying to estimate per capita income using the exchange rate alone, extrapolating backward using PPP is seriously flawed because the base used is twentieth-century prices and mix of goods. Even applied to present-day economies, the real per capita income deviates from the estimate to the extent that there are nontraded goods in the international market. And this method does not attempt

| to deal with cultural preferences or changing tastes within a culture. I remain extremely skeptical about all of the estimates made. First, : as already noted, Japan had an economy that was essentially closed to

the world market until the late-nineteenth century, certainly in terms | of goods in daily use. Second, the goods used on a daily basis were very

different from those in the West and also quite different from those in use by the 1960s and 1970s. Third, many goods and services were not traded and therefore cannot be factored into an estimate. This being the case, such calculations are an interesting exercise, but what they can tell us is far from adequate in indicating how well people lived. This is especially the case because the estimates vary so widely depending on

believe.”’ | |

the method used that one can find credible whichever one wants to An example of a tenant farmer’s budget for the 1840s shows how

} 26. Estimated using Kuznets’s method. Minami Ryoshin, The Economic Development | of Japan: A Quantitative Study (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1986), p. 13.

27. Angus Maddison, Economic Growth in Japan and the USSR (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1969), p. xvi. . 28. Nishikawa Shunsaku, Nihon keizai no seicho-sht (Tokyo: Toyo Keizai Shimpdsha,

1985), pp. 217-21. ,

29. If forced to choose among the estimates of Japan’s per capita GNP at the onset of industrialization compared to that of other natioris at the same stage, I would agree

with Yasukichi Yasuba that “all_in all, the Japanese standard of living may not have been | much below the English standard of living before industrialization.” “Standard of Living - in Japan before Industrialization: From What Level Did Japan Begin? A Comment,” The

Journal of Economic History 46, no. 1 (March 1986): 224.

20 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN

complex it is to analyze even one person’s income and expenses.*° Al-

: though a tenant, this farmer was running a large operation for Toku-

a gawa times, and this is undoubtedly the reason for his keeping detailed records. Of the rice this farmer grew, part was consumed, part was sold, and part was used as a means of exchange. Cash income was denomi-

nated in gold, silver, and copper, and the relative values fluctuated from , year to year and season to season.*! His business expenditures in his budget were mixed with those for the household, since both were considered a unit. This farmer’s main crops were rice, barley, and daikon (large, white radishes).*” The yield from his one hectare of paddy was approximately 102 bushels of rice, of which a quarter was paid to his landlord as rent, and another quarter paid the land tax. From a half-

hectare of dry fields he harvested twenty-five thousand daikon, which | he sold, making considerable profit even after paying for fertilizers and

transportation to market. |

| If the farmer’s cash income is converted into gold, it amounts to about twelve ryo, which is roughly half the income of a carpenter in _ Kyoto for whom we also have income and budget figures. Of the cash income, the farmer spent two 7yd on salt, tea, and oil; one for firewood; two for farm implements and household furnishings; one and a fifth for clothing; two for social obligations such as festivals and funerals; one and a fifth for daily labor; and one for unexpected social obligations.

Very little was spent on food because the family grew its own vegetables , and these were not entered into the farm books. There were no cash

_ expenditures for rent. a

: From this information we know a lot about how this farmer lived,

but we do not know his real income. We know that although he grew his own food, he was heavily involved in the market economy. Although - , a tenant farmer, he had sufficient cash income to spend one quarter of it for social obligations, and he hired labor. It is highly likely that he lived on a vegetarian diet, obtaining protein from soybeans and grains,

since he is not reported as spending income on fish and he had to use | cash to obtain sufficient firewood, which means he did not have suf30. Ryuso zappitsu, cited in Ono Takeo, Edo bukka jiten (Tokyo: Tembdsha, 1980), pp. 132-36.

31. See E.S. Crawcour and Kozo Yamamura, “The Tokugawa Monetary System: 1787-1868,” Economic Development and Cultural Change 18, no. 4, pt. 1 (July 1970).

| 32. For the information on this farmer’s budget presented in this paragraph and the following one, see Ono, Edo bukka jiten, pp. 132-36. }

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 21

ficient access to woodlands to obtain protein in any other form. By the

, 1840s he was buying clothing and spending cash on farm equipment and household furnishings as well. This was no subsistence farmer! Income and expenditure summaries do not really tell us much about how well people lived. We have to turn to the material culture, where’ there is an abundance of information, though most of it is not quantitative. Evidence on how people lived can be found in house plans and

surveys of housing, the physical artifacts of daily life, diaries and journals, and various government documents. Travelers’ letters and journals can be very useful, as they often record details of daily life that are not

noted by the inhabitants of a place because they seem too ordinary and unnoteworthy. All of these kinds of evidence must be used with caution, just as with any kind of historical evidence, as they may be biased, inaccurate, or idiosyncratic. But they offer a wealth of information with

, which to supplement the information we now have on income and the , standard of living, and they will lead to more accurate international

comparisons.

Various kinds of evidence on housing indicate that it clearly im- , proved during the course of the Tokugawa period, as is discussed in detail in chapter 2. Houses were better built, and the scattered evidence

: we have indicates that for the most part they became larger. One of the | key indicators that people built better housing is that more Japanese 7 were able to install flooring, instead of leaving floors of pounded earth, and by the mid-nineteenth century, many villagers had tatami (rush-

mat flooring) and nearly all had at least wooden floors in their houses. | Irregularly shaped, rather primitively built one- or two-room houses were no longer the norm, although they did not disappear. The evidence reveals that not only could people afford to spend more on daily con-

sumption goods that became increasingly available over time, but | whether village heads or tenant farmers, they also saved and built better

houses..

From the style of housing, clothing, food, and forms of luxury, we know that the Tokugawa material culture was resource-efficient. The new styles of housing that originated with the samurai and were copied by commoners made housing more healthful and comfortable. At the same time they used fewer nonrenewable resources, such as huge logs, and more that were readily renewable, such as rush-matted flooring and boards and posts sawn from secondary growth. Clothing took a minimum of material, certainly compared to Western dress, used an entire

22 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN | length of cloth with no waste, and could readily be adapted for anyone without resewing a garment. Japanese also used far more wild plants and life from the sea as foodstuffs than did people in Europe. And luxury was found not in abundance, as in the West, but in the use of a few flowers or display of a single art object. All of this is elaborated in chapter 3. The result was that the population achieved a higher level of physi-

cal well-being using fewer resources and with the need for less income | than was required in the West for the same level of physical well-being.

, The Japanese had a relatively high level of physical well-being be| cause their lifestyle was comparatively healthful. Though few ate meat, and fish was not a daily part of the diet for most, they obtained protein from plant sources, notably soybeans and grains. Most people could not afford to eat much polished rice, and so the rice and other grains they

did eat had more of the nutrients left in them than a staple of white rice would have provided. Grain was supplemented with sweet potatoes | , and a variety of vegetables and would seem to be a diet preferable to that of workers and their families in English mill towns, one that consisted largely of bread and margarine. The few existing figures that enable estimation of calories indicate that Japanese in the mid-nineteenth century had sufficient nutrition for their body stature, although height © is partially determined by nutrition. But the Japanese lifestyle was also _ healthful because it was hygienic, certainly compared to either Europe or the U.S. in the mid-nineteenth century. Bathing was a regular part of life by this time, people customarily drank their water boiled in the form of tea, and they carefully collected their bodily wastes to be used as fertilizer. In the cities, the water supply systems and waste removal were regulated by government, and people had little incentive to dump

: night soil where it would cause contamination, because they could sell it to farmers for cash. The healthful and hygienic lifestyle of the Japanese is discussed in chapters 4 and 5. How healthy the Japanese were in comparison to the people in already. industrialized England or industrializing America might remain a matter open to argument were it not for the fact that demographic

records exist that enable us to compare mortality. On the basis of the demographic records, it can be argued that the Japanese prior to industrialization lived as long as did the English a century after they beganto _ industrialize. These same records indicate that the rise in physical well-

, being during the Tokugawa period was not coincidental; people were clearly acting to form their families in a way that would maintain or enhance their standard of living. The evidence is provided in chapter 6.

PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN 23

The major reason for wanting to ascertain the standard of living and the level of physical well-being of the Japanese prior to industrialization is to compare it with life in Japan during and after industrialization and

| with life in other countries that industrialized in the nineteenth century. The final two chapters, 7 and 8, make these comparisons. Chapter

- 7 argues that despite the fanfare over importations from abroad, the | lifestyle and material culture remained similar from the late Tokugawa through the Meiji period. The major changes during these years were

in the continued diffusion of what had been aspects of the samurai culture during the Tokugawa period, the most important example of which is housing: This is important because it means that the Tokugawa lifestyle provided a good basis for continued use during industrializa-

tion and was capable of absorbing change. | Chapter 8 compares the level of physical well-being during the Tokugawa and Meiji periods with that in the West during the same centuries

and at the onset of industrialization for each. The conclusion reached in both comparisons is that the Japanese level of physical well-being was higher than we have been led to think it was, whereas the level of physical well-being for the majority in the West was lower than would be expected by a comparison with Japan. When one compares the ma—, terial culture, level of physical well-being, and use of resources of Japan with other industrialized nations at the onset of their industrialization, there is no surprise that the Japanese were able to industrialize as readily

as they did. Nor, given the historical path that Japan followed, should one be surprised at the lifestyle and material culture in Japan in the

post-World War IT years, when the Japanese adopted many Western as- | pects of life but also retained traditional ways. And many of the problems the Japanese face today in terms of lifestyle and material culture, such as the lack of modern sewer systems and inadequate housing, are - the results of the Tokugawa legacy, sometimes, ironically, because the premodern systems were so good that modernizing was not a necessity.

: These too are traced in chapter 8. : The physical aspects of life form the background for everything we , do. Our environment, both natural and artificial, is so much a part of everyday life that few people think about it in terms of how it molds

| our lifestyles, affects our social relations, determines how we allocate | our time, forms our view of the world, and influences our behavior.

From everyday lives come many of the determinants of history, and } when these are ignored by historians, whatever they write will be distorted, or, at best, one-sided. For how people cope with their physi-

2.4 PHYSICAL WELL-BEING IN TOKUGAWA JAPAN cal environment has determined the outcome of battles, what kind of

: economy is developed, and whether a people is decimated by famine

and epidemics or prospers and undergoes economic or population - , growth. Learning more about the physical aspects of life in the Toku- , gawa and Meiji periods will enable us to better understand Japanese history as a whole. Few historians even note the crop failures of the last years of the Tokugawa Bakufu or the earthquake in 1855 that destroyed

at least fourteen thousand buildings in Edo. No one I know of has analyzed how traditional lifestyles contributed to Japan’s national welfare in the Meiji period or how it relates to Japan’s social and economic | development in the twentieth century. This study does not claim to find

' conclusive answers to the larger questions of Japanese history, but I , hope it will provide useful and significant clues for discovering answers to the questions raised in this chapter, while telling the interesting story of how Japanese once lived and how their traditional material culture and lifestyles developed.

~ CHAPTER TWO , Housing and Furnishings

| The oldest house in Japan that can be dated exactly was built in 1607, and there are only a very few others in existence from the

seventeenth century.’ Even in districts where we would expect to find older houses, there remain no more than one or two built before 1700. In a country that had a population of from fifteen to eighteen million in 1600, why are there so few houses that are three and four centuries old, and none any older than that? Medieval houses can be found all over Europe, and though some of these are made of stone, huge multistoried apartment buildings with timber frames are still occupied in - many towns and.cities in Germany and other countries. The traditional answer has been that because of Japan’s rich vegetation, houses were built of renewable resources and tensile materials,

| such as wood, bamboo, and thatch, and that in a country subject to earthquakes, fires, and the ravages of a damp climate, houses were not built to last. It has even been suggested that the Japanese think of their houses as they do furniture: consumer durables rather than permanent assets.” However, many wooden temples built centuries earlier, such as the Horyut-ji whose buildings date from the early eighth century and are among the oldest in the world, remain in good condition. 1. Okawa Naomi, “Minka,” in Kinsei I/ Kindai, vol. 5 of Nihon no kenchiku, ed. It6 ,

: : 25

Nobuo et al. (Tokyo: Daiichi Hoki, 1976), p. 80. 2. Fujimori Terunobu, “Traditional Houses and the Japanese View of Life,” Japan

| Echo 17, no. 4 (winter 1990): 72. “Zaisan de wa naku shdhizai de aru” are Fujimori’s

(1990): 79. |

, words in the original Japanese version, “Dent6 kaoku saiken,” Kokusai koryu, no. 53

26 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS ©

The real reason lies not in the nature of the Japanese climate or building materials but rather in the transformation of Japan’s economy, society, and technology that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Without national statistics, it can be difficult to document changes in national and personal wealth, economic growth, and the standard of living, but one very good measure is housing. Housing

is the most expensive item most people own or use; it can be modified | only at great expense of time, labor, and capital; and more reliable information exists on housing than the other elements of the material culture of the Tokugawa period.

| Thus housing provides the best evidence for the increase in wealth during the Tokugawa period and, as a corollary, the rise in the level of physical well-being. The seventeenth century is the firstin which houses were built to last from one generation to the next and of a quality still appreciated and usable in the late-twentieth century. Changes in building techniques combined with a rise in wealth led to this construction

of permanent houses for people who were not in the governing elite. , As housing improved, people began to acquire more furnishings and , other goods, the most significant of which was bedding. Much of the evidence for this acquisition of belongings comes from information on how people began to store their possessions. This chapter examines

| housing and furnishings as indicators of a rise in personal wealth and the level of physical well-being for Japanese of various classes from the

seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. | During the first century of the Tokugawa period, major changes were seen in nearly all facets of daily life. Peace, combined with new

| agricultural techniques and the growth of commerce, resulted in economic growth and a rise in the population. The relative value of land rose while that of labor fell.* In an effort to make the swelling number of cultivators bear some of the risks of farming, indentured servants were made into tenant cultivators and given small plots of land to farm. These people were now free to marry and have families. Not only was there a proliferation of small houses, especially in the warmer western ~ regions of Japan, but the population increased at possibly an unprecedented rate throughout the rest of the century.* Trade flourished, cities 3. Kozo Yamamura, “Pre-Industrial Landholding Patterns in Japan and England,” in , Japan: A Comparative View, ed. Albert M. Craig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 285. 4. Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 43-45.

: HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 27 were built, and a whole new urban and artisan-merchant class culture grew from the new mass of commoners clustered in the cities with wealth they had never before experienced.°

, Most of these new ways of life had their origins in the fifteenth and , sixteenth centuries, partly in the new material culture of the elites in the Muromachi Bakufu and partly in the technologies, inventions; and materiel developed for the waging of war and growth of military, political, and economic power by the Sengoku daimyo and the unifiers. Ironically, warfare is often the stimulus for developments that benefit humanity—witness the boon from the invention of the tin can for food

| preservation to feed Napoleon’s armies—and this was no less true for Japan in the sixteenth century than for other societies. But the material

culture of the Muromachi elites and the benefits of Sengoku develop- , ments arising from the needs of the warring daimyo benefited only the

few until the peace and the growing economy of the Tokugawa period | enabled these to be diffused among the common people, the vast majority of Japanese. Though economic historians continue to debate the level of development of the economy, the rate of economic growth, and the amount of economic development in the Tokugawa period,° researchers into topics pertaining to Japan’s material culture find evidence

demonstrating that life in Japan changed because of an increase in - wealth from the seventeenth century on.’ Because Japan was not at the standard of living Europeans were in the mid-nineteenth century and, more importantly, because Japan had not started to industrialize, we tend to undervalue the level of living that Japan reached during the Tokugawa period. Commoners’ houses, called minka, provide evidence for an impor-

tant historical trend in the rise in the level of wealth and standard of 5. For works providing evidence for this in English based on Japanese sources, see

Thomas C. Smith, The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford: Stanford University. : Press, 1959); articles by E. S. Crawcour, John W. Hall, and Thomas C. Smith in Studies in the Institutional History of Early Modern Japan, ed. John W. Hall and Marius B. Jansen (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968); and Kozo Yamamura, “Returns on Unification: Economic Growth in Japan, 1550-1650,” in Japan before Tokugawa, ed. John Whitney Hall, Nagahara Keiji, and Kozo Yamamura (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981). For the most comprehensive source in Japanese, see the eight-volume series Nihon keizai-shi, edited by Umemura Mataji et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1988-1990). 6. For the basic argument and works in English see chapter 1 of Hanley and Yama-

mura, Economic and Demographic Change. , 7. Miyazawa Satoshi, “Kinsei minka no chiiki-teki tokushoku,” in Kenchiku, ed. Amakasu Takeshi et al., vol. 7 of Koza Nihon gyutsu no shakaisht (Tokyo: Nihon Hyoéronsha, 1983), p. 1543 Okawa, “Minka,” p. 81.

28 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS | living for the general population. Minka were built in styles and tech- | nologies developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which were diffused throughout the countryside as families increased their wealth. and could afford the building materials, the tools, and the specialized

carpenters to construct larger, better-quality dwellings. The oldest

did. , :

minka may well have been atypical at the time they were built, but they were forerunners of the main style of housing in the Tokugawa period

and of the construction techniques used in later centuries, and thus

| _» they were not only built to last but people treated them so that they What may have been the most important new method in house con-

, struction was the use of foundation stones. Earlier Japanese houses relied on posts for support, not walls, and until the seventeenth century, posts were set directly on the ground, where they would rot in the damp

climate. The innovation was to rest them on foundation stones, pre-

| venting direct contact with the earth but at the same time keeping the framework flexible since the posts could move during a moderate earth-

quake without breaking. Though this seems like a logical and very simple step, it required suitably shaped stones, which became widely _ available only after the technology used to build the great castles of the ,

sixteenth century was developed. , Other innovations in house construction during the seventeenth century were the use of thicker and higher-quality materials, braces placed between posts, and walls covered with mud plaster or boards. Increasingly doors were made of wood rather than split and woven bamboo, and they were built to slide laterally in frames rather than to

lift upward. Wooden floors gradually became more common than earthen.® In short, houses became sturdier and were not only of a higher

, quality but also more comfortable because people sat on floors and not

on the earth. These innovations increased the level of physical well- , being, but they also represented a rise in the standard of living, since the new or improved materials and techniques either cost more or re-

quired new tools or both. , : ‘Houses built from the seventeenth century on were more symmet8. Numerous descriptions of the new methods of construction exist in Japanese, including volumes 4 and 5 of Ito, Nibon:no kenchiku; Hirai Kiyoshi, Nihon jutaku no rekishi

, (Tokyo: NHK Books 209, 1986); Shiragi Kosabur6, Sumaz no rekisht (Tokyo: Sogensha, | 1978); Kuwahara Minoru, Jikyo no rekishi (Tokyo: Gendai Kogakusha, 1979). In English — see Teiji Itoh, Traditional Domestic Architecture of Japan (New York: Weatherhill /Heibonsha, 1972) and Chuji Kawashima, Minka: Traditional Houses of Rural Japan (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1986).

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 29 rical in shape than their predecessors. A few houses built in the seventeenth or early-eighteenth century were built on sites of former houses, a fact that became apparent when the houses were renovated or moved from their sites. The earlier house was constructed with the posts set . directly on the ground and was usually smaller than the later building. But what is surprising is the uneven shape of the earlier dwelling, judged from the location of the posts. Prior to the development of the Tokugawa minka, houses with posts set at uneven intervals with a resulting irregular layout seem to have been common. The later houses, however, all have right-angle corners, equal distances between the posts,

| and the various features we associate with the minka and other tradi-

tional kinds of Japanese housing.’ | |

The seventeenth-century mznka are clearly the products of an advanced technology that swept through the country in that century but was developed during the Sengoku period. Historians have tended to ignore until recently the technological progress that went along with the economic development that made the politico-economic system of the sixteenth century possible.’° In order to build their castles, mine

the ore needed for weapons, and dam rivers to create irrigation systems to supply their fiefs, the Sengoku daimyo supported and actively en- | | couraged innovation in technology. The advances in mining and in _ stonecutting that enabled the construction of stone castles in the sixteenth century made it possible for the local elites, and not just the rulers, to use foundation stones for their houses in the seventeenth century. The developments in transportation, sleds, flat-bottomed boats for heavy cargo, and techniques in carrying rocks made it possible for foun-

} dation stones to be used widely. — Among the most significant developments in technology inthe Sengoku period that applied to the construction of wooden buildings were a new construction method called kiwari, the importation of large saws (aga or ogalikt) from China, and the innovation of a plane made of an

iron blade mounted on a large wooden base (daikanna)."' Although ! the kiwart method was extremely complex, put simply, the diameter of 9. See the examples from Kyoto and Kanagawa shown in Miyazawa, “Kinsei minka no chiiki-teki tokushoku,” p. 167. 1o. The eight-volume series Koza Nihon giutsu no shakat-shi, Nagahara Keiji and Yamaguchi Keiji, general editors (Tokyo: Nihon Hyéronsha, 1983-1985), marked a new appreciation for the history of Japanese technology. ur. The technological developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are summarized in Nagahara Keiji and Kozo Yamamura, “Shaping the Process of Unification: Technological Progress in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Japan,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 14, no. 1 (winter 1988): 77-109.

30 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS , _ the main post was the basic value for the calculation of the other major portions of the structure. This method of construction required a considerable amount of calculation, familiarity with the lumber to be used,

: and the technology to cut and finish lumber. A guide to these techniques, developed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was first published in 1608,!2 which meant both that the method had evolved to the point it could be set down and that there was a demand for a guide so that the method could be more easily disseminated. These methods of construction enabled the development of a new style of housing for the samurai elites and, for commoners, the development of houses requir-

ing exact measurements and straight boards and posts. There is evidence that these techniques were widely used in some locales in the construction of housing in the sixteenth century. The castle town of Ichijodani in Echizen (Fukui Prefecture) was burned

down by Nobunaga in 1573. The area was subsequently turned into fields, but when excavated after World War II, it was discovered that

, most houses had stone foundations under the main posts, which were © | square pillars, and the spacing of the posts was regular. No tile was used, but there were numerous metal fittings, such as for sliding doors, _ nails of various sizes, locks, latches, and door stops. The room decora-

tions that survived revealed excellent craftsmanship.'* In contrast, a Bakufu survey of housing in villages—most of which would have been in central Japan—under its direct administration revealed that as late as 164.4 many houses still had no stone bases under the posts.“

_ The diffusion of the new kinds of housing construction generally . _ followed the progress of economic development within Japan. Thus, the minka built using these new methods were to be found in the Kinai in the mid-seventeenth century, and in the Chubu, Kanto, Chugoku,

and Shikoku regions in the latter half of the century. From the late-

seventeenth century into the early-eighteenth, minka began to appear | in both the Tohoku region and Kyushu.** The minka took on characteristics of their regions, as the result of climatic differences, differences _ 12. This treatise, entitled “Shomyo,” was written by Heinai Yoshimasa and. his son Masanobu. See Nagahara and Yamamura, “Shaping the Process of Unification, pp. 90-91.

| _ 13. Asakura-shi Iseki Chosa Kenkyijo, Ichijodani (Fukui: Asakura-shi Iseki Chésa

Pp. 34-35. | , | Kenkyujo, 1981), especially pp. 33 and 47.

14. Oishi Shinzaburd, “Kinsei shakai no seiritsu,” in Tochi setdo-shi 1, ed. Kitajima

Masamoto, which is vol. 7 of Tatket Nihon-shi so (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1975), 15. Miyazawa, “Kinsei minka no chiiki-teki tokushoku,” p. 154..

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 31

in the building materials available, and cultural variations. However, there was a surprising uniformity to the types of minka built in the various regions from the seventeenth century on, no doubt because the new tools and carpentry techniques were to a great extent imported from the continent and subsequently diffused throughout Japan rather than indigenously generated. However, architectural historians who emphasize regional differences in roof styles, floor plans, and beamwork often overlook or undervalue the common points of this housing found

in far-flung parts of the country. By the late-sixteenth century, the floor plans of houses indicate the house was divided into two major sections: the living space and the work space. The work space, even in the grandest houses of the elite, usually had an earthen floor—the doma."° The living space originally was in the same room as the work space; only as houses grew large enough to make a distinction was there a demarcation between the two sections in the dwellings of the common people. The very poorest lived on earthen floors, separating the living section from the work area with a low divider and putting hulls and other materials, covered by straw

| mats, into the living section to make it comfortable for sitting and sleeping. With the passage of time, more and more people added floor-

ing, first wooden boards or slats made of split bamboo, and as they | could afford it, tatami. In the early Tokugawa period, while the well-to-do commoners were building minka, the samurai were constructing houses based on the shoin style of the late Muromachi period—though both styles were made possible by the same technological developments of the sixteenth century. The shoin style was developed by the warrior elites and temples from the palace-style architecture of the Heian and Kamakura periods.” In addition to the shoin, the built-in desk from which this style

took its name, buildings in the shozn style included tokonoma (an alcove for displaying art objects), chigatdana (staggered shelves for decorative purposes), genkan (a formal entry), tatami (rush-mat flooring), fusuma

16. In mountain villages where wood was plentiful, there tended not to be doma in . houses; almost none are to be found in Shirakawa-mura; for example. Okawa, “Minka,”

85. ’ _ See Hirai, Nihon jutaku no rekisii, and in English, see Hashimoto Sumio, Architecture in the Shoin Style: Japanese Feudal Residences, trans. and adapted by H. Mack Hor- .ton (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1981), and Itd Teii, “The Development of ShoinStyle Architecture,” in Japan in the Muromacli Age, ed. John Whitney Hall and Toyoda Takeshi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

cE | | a —— el ee 0 32 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS

a ee Ne ESSlee= {| ee | TT gee _

-Nineteenth-century formal room with shoin elements. | (sliding wall panels), and shoji (sliding doors). Gardens were an integral feature of the shoin style, and so there was usually an engawa (narrow

wooden veranda) combined with shoji and amado (sliding wooden

outer doors) to enable rooms to be opened up to the garden on fine , days but protected in the rain. , The shozn style fulfilled the samurai need for formal meeting and re, _ ception rooms and their desire to live in the increased comfort this style provided. It came to encompass both the formal and the domestic

| architecture of the ruling class in the Tokugawa period with its widespread adoption during the first half of the seventeenth century. Resi- | , dences were more often patterned after the less rigid style of the teahouses, termed swkiya, but they still adhered to the principles of the _ shoin style, usually containing all of its major features. This style of

| housing was in marked contrast to the early minka, which were well | enclosed to protect the inhabitants from the elements as well as possibly from wild animals and human marauders. It made more use of boards

, instead of whole logs for posts and beams, and thus used less wood. Also, the use of ceilings, sliding doors, and built-in decorative elements

required precision carpentry. The design of shoim architecture also meant that while skilled labor was necessary to build it, it required fewer

hard-to-replace natural resources, such as old-growth trees. Just as the minka were larger than their predecessors, so too were

- HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 33 | the houses of the ruling class larger in the Tokugawa period than in earlier periods. By the seventeenth century, rooms in the houses of the elite were connected so that houses were all part of one floor plan inside, rather than a series of rooms connected by corridors, as in the earlier shinden style. Large houses under one roof were made possible by the innovations in construction, but I also suspect that incentives for this

_ development were efficiency in space, building materials, and possibly , heating. Evidence for this comes from the fact that after the Meireki fire of 1657 in Edo, daimyo residences were rebuilt in the form of large _.

and small shoin rooms set next to each other instead of in the previously a

. prevalent style of a reception room and a shoim under two separate roofs. | Furthermore, buildings more commonly contained a single row of formal reception rooms rather than the former double row of rooms."® | _ This new style of architecture could readily be adopted and adapted by samurai of all status and income classes, who were now gathered in cites

| and castle towns and could not readily build in the earlier shinden style,

| had available? |

which required vast amounts of space that only the highest court nobles We know that samurai were building in the new sukzya style not only from extant houses throughout Japan, but also from at least one survey

, of samurai housing made in the domain of Tsugaru (Aomori Prefecture) in the mid-eighteenth century. A total of 1,189 houses in the castle town of Hirosaki were included in the survey, though only 797 have complete descriptions including a plan of the lot, the floor plan, and the names of all of the rooms. Also noted were the location of gates, privies, the well, fences, what the house fittings were—shoji, tatami, the various decorative elements, whether there was a built-in sink, and a number of other details. Of the 797 houses for which we have details,

80 percent had a zashiki (the most formal guest room); 66 percent had a iivoma (guest room); and 53 percent had a genkan. Only 18 percent

| of the houses had no formal rooms at all, and these must have belonged , to the lowest-status samurai who had neither the need nor the funds for receiving formal guests. The larger the house, the more formal rooms it had, which is logical because status and income were directly correlated among the samurai. Although the shoin style had been formalized over a century earlier, in this regional capital, the only decorative ele18. Hirai, Nihon jutaku no rekisht, p. 162. 19. For a detailed study on samurai housing, see Sato Takumi, Kinset bushi jutaku

(Tokyo: S6bunsha, 1979). }

34 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS “ment found in most guest rooms was a tokonoma. By this time, how- — ever, tatami was clearly standard in all samurai houses in this domain.”° |

The problem of space in premodern towns and cities in which the | , major method of transportation was by foot led to the development of compact housing for urban commoners as well as for samurai. Medieval

| scrolls reveal small shops and houses lined up next to the road without any space between the houses or between the road and the house,” and

: this tradition was carried on into the Tokugawa period. Since frontage on main streets was of prime importance for merchants, the typical _ pattern for urban housing was blocks of buildings, with the merchants on long narrow lots facing a major thoroughfare, and laborers and the

like renting small, usually one-room, apartments in long buildings called nagaya, which are the Japanese equivalent of tenements. The merchant houses, whether large or small, typically had a shop (muse) in

the front where trade or business was conducted, with family (and em- , _ ployee) quarters behind the shop, and storage areas at the rear. The | Kyoto pattern was for the earthen-floored kitchen area to be located in a side passage leading to the rear, called a toriniwa, but in the city of Edo there was typically no such passageway. In these buildings too the

methods of construction and the design elements were those used in minka, and increasingly as townspeople imitated the samurai, those used in the swkiya as well. There were a number of major differences

among cities in terms of housing, including the layout of residential areas, average size, and standard size of tatami but all houses had common elements.” Thus, by the Genroku period of prosperity at the end of the seven20. Habuka Hisao, “Horeki-ki ni okeru Tsugaru-han Hirosaki joka no buke jutaku

no omotemuki ni tsuite,” Sezkatsu bunka-shi, no. 12 (1987). ,

| 21. See Fujishima Gayiro, Nihon no. kenchtku (Tokyo: Shibundo, 1966), p. 114, and Wakita Haruko with Susan B. Hanley, “Dimensions of Development: Cities in Fifteenthand Sixteenth-Century Japan,” in Hall, Nagahara, and Yamamura, Japan before Tokugawa.

22. Among the hundreds of books on the configuration of Tokugawa towns andon townhouses, see Nishiyama Uz6, supervising editor for the Kank6 Shigen Hogo Zaidan, : Rekishi-teki machinami jiten (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shobd, 1981); Koizumi Hiroshi, Edo 0 horu (Tokyo: Kashiwa Shob6, 1983); Jinnai Hidenobu and Itakura Fumio et al., Tokyo no machi o yomu (Tokyo: Sagami Shob6, 1981); and CDI (Communication Design Institute), ed., Kyoto shomin seikatsu-shi (Tokyo: Kagoshima Shuppankai, 1973).

For one view of differences between Osaka and Edo housing, see Miyamoto Mataji, “Kydju kara mita Osaka to Edo,” in Osaka no kenkyu, ed. Miyamoto Mataji (Osaka: Seibundo, 1967). The best way to see what housing in Edo was like in the mid-nineteenth century is to visit the Fukagawa Edo Museum in Tokyo.

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 35 | teenth century (1688-1704), there were at least three distinguishable __ trends in housing. First, the houses of commoners were becoming permanent, well-built structures made to precise measurements and with "a quantum jump in quality resulting from the new tools and techniques made available throughout most of the country. Second, the samurai were increasingly building in the swkiya style, the epitome of which is

, — the Katsura Detached Palace built in the early years of the Tokugawa Bakufu. This style signaled a new, open, and light architecture thatin the late-nineteenth century formed the model for modern Japanese house styles. Third, urban dwellings became compact. Even the mansions for the well-to-do were under one roof rather than spread out as in earlier periods. Most commoner houses were long and narrow be-

, cause of the high cost of frontage, and lower-status samurai lived in : similar housing. In an effort to build larger houses on small lots, second and third stories were added when permitted, and even when not, ingenious methods were used to create more than one story of usable

, space. Despite these trends, many Japanese still lived in simple houses or huts similar to those of the medieval period, but there was a distinct trend for better-quality housing in all classes of society, made possible by the developments in architecture and technology in the late medieval period and by the growing economy and rising living standard of the

seventeenth century. | |

Coincidentally, it was also during the seventeenth century that farm housing in Japan began to differ most clearly from that found in Europe and England.** Primarily constructed of wood, houses in medieval England and houses in Japan through the Tokugawa period were divided into two sections, living and service areas, with a hearth in the center

of the living space. In both types of housing, smoke from the fire | drifted up to the roof and out through the thatch or holes in the gable ends. Because houses were built for protection from the elements and wild beasts, and given the lack of glass or other appropriate materials to cover windows, houses had only a few small apertures to let in light and air and thus tended to be dark inside. ‘The floor was usually at the ground level and earthen, or it might be raised off the ground, a few feet in the living area in the case of Japan, and in England, three feet

if it covered a byre or storage area sunk into the ground under the 23. M. W. Barley, The English Farmhouse and Cottage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 3-20.

36 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS house. In both parts of the world, people had lived in sunken housing in earlier times. Thus, a medieval Japanese would have understood the

use of a farmhouse in medieval England and the principle of having } the hearth in the center of the building. Even the small size of ordinary

| houses in medieval England—one room for the poorest people, two for

have seemed natural. | most of the rest—and the scarcity of furniture and other goods would — Although Japanese housing improved over time, it could be argued that the principles changed less than in the West. People continued to

sit on the floor, even when they could afford to install first wooden floors and later tatami, instead of switching to chairs. And the fireplace, |

when present, continued to be centered within the house, with the | ! smoke still vented through the gable ends of the roof. In Europe, however, the major innovation was “the containment of fire and smoke in a fireplace and chimney, which permitted a second floor to be installed

above the great hall and partitioned for use as bedrooms.””* All of this is oversimplified, but we tend to emphasize the differences in lifestyles | in Japan and the West in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and we do not compare them in earlier times when there was no contact

more similar. | :

between the two parts of the world but when life was, in fact, much ,

On the one hand, there is a tendency to think of the Tokugawa period as one monolithic era of two and a half centuries because the same government remained in place and because the major social and economic institutions set up in the seventeenth century could still be found in the nineteenth. On the other hand, Marxist economic historians have divided the period into two: rapid growth of both the economy and population in the seventeenth century followed by stagnation in both for the next century and a half. However, viewed from the vantage point ~~ of the material culture, the Japanese continued to grow more prosperous in the second half of the Tokugawa period, though the growth and rate of change were almost certainly not as rapid as in the first half. This. last view is confirmed by the research of economic historians using modern economic analysis.” 24. Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 109. 25. In the past few decades numerous studies confirming this view have been published. Representative is Iwanami Shoten’s Nihon keizai-shi series. See volume 1, Keizaz

Shoten, 1988). |

: shakai no seiritsu, 17-18 seiki, ed. Hayami Akira and Miyamoto Matao (Tokyo: Iwanami

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 37

Two houses in Hida (now part of Gifu Prefecture) exemplify the

changes and improvements in housing between the seventeenth and , eighteenth centuries. The house of the Nokubi family is typical of houses built from the end of the sixteenth century into the beginning of the seventeenth and has a very closed-in feeling. It has few windows except for small holes about one foot square. The house is large for its period and has two zrori or fireplaces on the earthen floored area. The sleeping room and guest rooms have wooden floors; there are no tatami in the house. In contrast, the house of the Wakayama family, built in 1751, has a ground floor constructed by carpenters; the rest of the house

was built by villagers. The house has several rooms with tatami flooring, ,

| and most of the rest are of wood. It is of a grand style even for minka, four stories high to enable the family to raise silkworms in the upper

| stories, and with a bath inside the house and a special room for the Buddhist altar several inches higher than other rooms. Even if the families that built these two houses are not comparable in terms of wealth, clearly both the style and quality of housing changed in the century and a half between their construction.”° Housing continued to improve during the second half of the Toku-

| gawa period. From the second half of the eighteenth century into the first half of the nineteenth, there was remarkable development in the minka in every area of the country.’” Sumptuary regulations of the

, Bakufu and various daimyo with regard to the size, style, and decora- | tion of the houses of the commoners were increasingly ignored as people who could afford larger houses or rooms in the shoin style built them. Japanese retained the open fireplace, or replaced it with stoves for cooking but not heating, and increasingly installed tatami for flooring, while for the most part eschewing large items of furniture. Houses

diverged further and further from the European pattern in terms of

use, though from the outside minka looked even more like the farm- | houses of Switzerland, Germany, and other parts of Europe than they

had a century or two earlier when functionally they were in fact more

alike.“

. Houses were certainly growing larger, and though our information oe comes from scattered sources, our knowledge of floor plans indicates 26; Both houses are today located in Hida Minzoku-mura in Takayama, Gifu Prefec- | ture, and are described in Hida Minzoku-mura, ed., Hida no minka (Takayama: Hida Minzoku-mura, 1987), pp. 45-46 and 3-8, respectively.

27. Okawa, “Minka,” p. 81. ,

28. Bruno Taut, Houses and People of Japan (London: John Gifford, 1937), pp. 105-7.

38 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS an increasing number of rooms and more total floor space. By the late Tokugawa period, the average house size was larger than in the seventeenth century, though the trend was not one of steady, gradual increase

everywhere. What happened in the village of Kosugaya in Owari Prov- | | ince (Aichi Prefecture) during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may in many ways be typical.”” Here the number of houses increased

between 1646 and 1684 from fifty-six to sixty at the same time that average house size grew from 7 to 8.3 tsubo.°° But between 1684 and

: 1734, average house size fell to 7.4. tsubo, while the number of houses in the village rose to seventy. Of five years for which data have been analyzed, this is the only year in which average family size was over five people. It is likely that conditions in 1734 were not indicative of a drop

in the standard of living, but rather that the drop in the number of live-in servants or employees, the smaller average house size, and the increase in the number of households all resulted from the trend toward letting servants become tenants and establish their own homes. This trend produced in an increase in houses, a rise in the birthrate, and the

| crowding seen only in this one segment of the Tokugawa period. | — Kosugaya is a very small and isolated sample, but it indicates that house size varied greatly by economic position and that the average , house was very small by modern standards. Other evidence that seven-

, teenth-century houses were often small comes from restrictions on building sizes. In 1656, in a newly reclaimed area in Musashino Province

| (near Edo), the magistrate in charge of the area issued specifications on the kind of housing newcomers could build. The size of house per- , mitted depended on the size of the family. A couple could build a house of only seven tsubo, whereas a family with four to five members was

a allowed a house of eleven tsubo.*! . Though it is difficult to draw conclusions from our information on nineteenth-century housing, it is clear that houses not only contained more rooms and living space, but the number of members per family decreased. In Okayama, the average household size fell from seven 29. Hayami Akira, “Kinsei Chita chiho no jtikyo to kazoku keitai” (paper presented | at the fifty-second annual meeting of the Shakai Keizai Shigakkai, 1983), pp. 7-9. 30. One tsubo is 3.954. square yards. A tatami mat is roughly one yard by two yards in size, the exact size depending on the region of Japan, and therefore a tsubo is two tatami ' Mats 1n size. 31. Kimura Motoi, “Nomin seikatsu no shoso,” Sezkatsu shit 2 (Tokyo: Yamakawa Shuppansha, 1965), pp. 207-8.

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 30 people in the early-eighteenth century to five by the turn of the nineteenth century. The most important reason for this drop was a decrease in the average number of children people had, down to three or four.*” But because of the changes in family size over the life cycle of each family, it would have been impossible to regulate house size by the num-

ber of members for more than the year in which the house was built, and it is unlikely that this was attempted frequently. The Bakufu issued regulations on houses, exhorting commoners to make theirs simple in style and conform to their status. In contrast to the general prohibitions of the Bakufu, those of the various domains tended to be more specific, though with large variations by domain. In

the domain of Aizu (Fukushima Prefecture), the size of the dwelling | (as measured by spans) was determined by the assessed output of the farmland owned. In the Murakami domain in Echigo (Niigata Prefecture), a 1740 regulation prohibited farmers from building wings onto their houses. Though farmers needed a large doma in which to do farmrelated work, it wasn’t considered necessary for them to have a zashzk1,

and so these were often forbidden for anyone not a village headman. The easiest way to get around the regulations was to build a house that looked like a working farmhouse from the road, and inside install a room for guests in the sukiya or a modified samurai style.*? Commoners proved to be clever at circumventing regulations. The distance between the main posts holding up the roof of a house was _ usually limited by statute,** but farmers could build enormous houses just by incorporating into the house the space that was technically un-

der the overhang of the roof. Since most roofs were high, whole rooms — were added in this way, while keeping the size of the house within the letter of the law. City regulations often decreed that houses be no more than one and a half stories high, but townspeople circumvented this clause by building houses that were one and one-half stories at the front with a steep rising roof that slanted up from the street front. In the — 32. Susan B. Hanley, “Family and Fertility in Four Tokugawa Villages,” in Family and

Population in East Asian History, ed. Susan B. Hanley and Arthur P. Wolf (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1985). |

author in 1984), pp. 4-5. | |

33. Shiraki Kosaburd, Nihon no minka: sono ketset to densho (privately published by the

34. The motives behind these statutes range from a desire to protect scarce resources, such as old-growth forests, to a desire to maintain status differences between the classes and maximize tax revenues by making the lower classes focus on production rather than consumption.

4.0 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS middle and to the rear of these houses, rooms on the second floor were

of full height. Houses of this type can still be found in the city of Kanazawa, the post town of Kiso Narai on the Nakasendo, throughout the Kyoto area, and in countless other towns and cities in Japan.*® The authorities must certainly have been aware of mass flouting of regulations, but the existence even today of so many Tokugawa houses that did not meet the statutes at the time they were built is evidence that

| the growing commerce and rising incomes led the officials to ignore anything but the most flagrant violations. Some of the best information we have on changes in housing over the last two centuries of the Tokugawa period is from a Bakufu survey _ on houses in Tochigi Prefecture. When the shogun paid a visit to Nikko,

the large retinue that accompanied him had to be housed along the way, and in order to determine which villages might be suitable for putting up the shogun’s men, surveys were carried out on the village housing. Surveys remain for thirteen villages, mostly around Utsunomiya, _

but two from near Imaichi. The surveys contain the actual floorplans , of the houses, with notations as to size, use of rooms, and flooring.*°

| The Tochigi data clearly demonstrate how dangerous it is to draw | historical conclusions, from the models put forth by architects and others to depict historical changes in housing, from the samples of houses -

that end up in house museums, or even from samples from just one

| village. These surveys indicate that one cannot safely extrapolate regional trends from a sample of thirteen villages. One village, Tanaka,

had a higher percentage of one-room houses in 1823 than did two out of the three village samples for 1712, over a century earlier. There were : still residences composed of two separate buildings—with the work space and kitchen under a separate roof—in Nozawa village in 1823, though these were by no means as prevalent as in the three early-eight-

: eenth-century samples. Though building a residence as two independent buildings was once quite common throughout western Japan and 35. For examples in the city of Kanazawa, see Kanazawa-shi Kyoiku Iinkai, ed., Kyuto no kuruwa (Kanazawa: Kanazawa-shi Kydiku Iinkai, 1975), especially pp. 86 and 90; Toyoda Takeshi, editorial supervisor, Kanazawa zu-byobu (Tokyo: Bun-ichi Sogo Shuppan, 1977), especially pp. 84 and 143; and Kanazawa-shi Kyoiku Iinkai, ed., Kanazawa no rekishi-teki kenchiku, Kanazawa-shi bunkazas k1yo, no. $7 (1986): 51-54. For examples in Kiso Narai, see Narai Kokuritsu Bunkazai Kenkytjo, Kiso Narai: Machinami chosa hokoku (Nagano: Nagano-ken Kiso-gun Narakawa-mura, 1976). 36. Tochigi-ken Kyoiku Iinkai Jimu-kyoku Bunka-ka, Tochigi-ken no minka (Tochigi-

ken Kyoiku Iinkai, 1982). , :

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 41 the Pacific side of Honshu, it eventually was retained only in the remot-

| est areas of the country.*” Despite these caveats, it is possible to posit certain trends in housing

over the course of these two centuries in Tochigi Prefecture. First, on | the average, houses grew larger over time. In the three earliest samples,

| there were one-room houses and numerous two-room houses in every village. Between 12 and 47 percent of the housing was in these two | | categories. However, in the later samples, only in Tanaka in 1823 were there any one-room houses, and in three of the villages, there were no

| one-, two-, or three-room houses by 1823; all had at least three rooms plus doma. The average house size in these villages was twenty tsubo, larger than the seventeenth-century examples, though still small by most standards. If population trends were the same in this region as in most of Japan, families were growing smaller while houses were grow-

ing larger. |

A second trend was for households to be housed under one roof rather than two. In the early-eighteenth-century surveys of Tochigi - Prefecture, the larger houses were under two roofs, usually with the

doma separately housed. In none of these samples was there a four-room plan under one roof. In the samples after 1750, however, only Nozawa in 1823 had any houses with the doma under a separate roof. Houses in the cold and snowy regions of Japan tended to be large, with the house

and barn often under one roof or continuous roofing, and houses in the warm parts of western Japan often had a separate work and cooking area later in the Tokugawa period. But in the mid-portions of the country, the shift was from small houses of one or two rooms for those with lower incomes and large houses under two roofs for the well-to-do to larger houses for all, with all rooms under one roof. As the standard of

living in the countryside improved, four-room houses (four equal-sized : , rooms in the shape of a square) with the doma at one side were diffused

throughout the country.*° ,

Although the size of most commoner houses was small by modern

. standards, there is little reason to believe that Japanese houses were , smaller than housing for farm laborers and urban workers in England

| in the same period or the homes of colonial settlers in the seventeenth - , | century and the log cabins of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

38. Okawa, “Minka,” p. tot. . 37. Kawashima, Minka, pp. 165-66.

) 42 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS in the U.S. The dwelling of an American pioneer was typically a oneroom cabin, or at most two rooms with a loft. In England, rural laborers in the eighteenth century lived in one-room cottages, some with leantos attached. By the nineteenth century, many English workers could expect to live in semidetached houses with two rooms on the ground

floor and two above. An ideal gardener’s cottage consisted of two rooms, with total dimensions of 22 by 9.75 feet, but many low-income people still lived in one room with mud floors in the mid-nineteenth century.°?

Not only did the Japanese build more expensive and durable houses during the Tokugawa period than previously, but the quality in terms of the level of well-being improved as well. Flooring is one of the best

| indicators of this change in quality. Again, there are few quantitative

| studies, but one that does exist is a. detailed Bakufu survey made in Bitchi Province in 1865 for the purpose of determining houses suitable | for quartering soldiers. Of eighty-six houses surveyed, thirty-three were found suitable for quartering soldiers. Those considered unsuitable had no tatami, only straw mats spread on the floor; undoubtedly most were too small as well. By the Bakumatsu years, every household in this village that owned land yielding two or more koku of grain (ten or more bushels) had tatami in its house; even some farmers with less land had ‘tatami, but those with no land of their own had none. Thus, all but the lowest-income families had six or more tatami mats in their houses, and it is clear that this kind of flooring had become standard in farm houses.” What is significant in terms of the standard of living is that increasing numbers of people could afford this relatively expensive new hous-

ing that required not only more costly materials but carpentry work of

a higher quality than was needed to merely build a crude dwelling to provide shelter. Commoners were not only constructing their houses to be more comfortable and durable during the Tokugawa period, they were also imitating the styles of the samurai elite. A document from

Kyoto dated 1729 noted that thirty years earlier people had earthen floors in their houses and spread mats of straw or other materials for sleeping and sitting, but nowadays they were not only using wooden 39. John Woodforde, The Truth about Cottages (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 15, 35.

7 40. Fujisawa Shin, “Bakumatsu-ki ndson ni okeru kais6-betsu jiitaku k6z6 ni tsuite,” , Okayama Daigaku Kyotku Gakubu kenkyu shuroku, no. 21 (1966).

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 43

floors, but putting in ceilings and tatami in imitation of the samurai.4!

The highest authorities and Confucian scholars alike complained about | commoners mimicking their betters—by equipping their houses “with shoji, covered ceilings, karakami partitions, tatami mats and mosquito nets.”*” The numerous regulations against building houses in the samurai style found throughout Japan from the mid-Tokugawa period on are testimony to the fact that many commoners were building houses be-

yond their station in life. |

Just as commoners and samurai were building new, more expensive types of housing in the Tokugawa period, they were buying more con-

sumer goods of all kinds. Because the style in nineteenth-century Japan | was not wall-to-wall furniture as it was in Victorian England and because traditional Japanese interior decor emphasizes built-in decoration

| and a minimum of furniture, we can forget just how many things tra_* ditional Japanese houses did contain by the nineteenth century and how few Western ones did in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.**

Evidence for a proliferation of goods during the Tokugawa period inthe homes of commoners, and not just the very rich ones, comes from _ the development of methods of storage: tansu (chests) for clothes, storehouses for goods of all sorts, and oshire (built-in cupboards for bedding). The need for containers in which to store household items and the fact that these became ordinary items found in the homes of all but the lowest-income people by the end of the nineteenth century indicates that the average Japanese owned an increasing number of

| items that had to be stored. This need and the number of objects de-

: here. : |

veloped for storage provide good evidence for a rise in personal wealth and the standard of living, and thus considerable detail will be given

41. Miyamoto Tsuneichi, “Minshii seikatsu yoshiki no hensen,” in Iwanami Koza Nihon rekisht, vol. 23, ed. lenaga Saburo et al. (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1972), p. 127. 42. J. R. McEwan, The Political Writings of Ogyu Sorat (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- : versity Press, 1962), p. 44. In 1788, the high-ranking Bakufu official Matsudaira Sadanobu issued a decree banning luxuries for peasants who had become forgetful of their status. Kodama K6ta, Kinset nomin setkatsu-sli (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kobunkan, 1957), p. 185. 43. For example, a survey of probate inventories in Wethersfield, Connecticut, for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals a clear increase.in furniture. In the 1640s,

| the average house did not have a single chair in it,.but by the 1790s, the average house contained nearly sixteen chairs. Kevin M. Sweeney, “Furniture and the Domestic Environment in Wethersfield, Connecticut, 1639-1800,” The Connecticut Antiquarian 36

(1984): 10-39. |

44 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS | Tansu developed toward the end of the seventeenth century and were popularized in the eighteenth.** This development coincides with the first major peak of economic prosperity and indicates that a growing

number of people owned more clothing than they could wear at one

: time, dishes and serving utensils that needed to be stored when not in use, and numerous small items, such as writing utensils, business papers,

, sewing equipment, cosmetics, and the like. There were also storage trunks, trunks meant for carrying goods from place to place, trunks to fit on ships, and others. This does not mean that there were not storage

containers in previous times—chests known as itsu had been used for ,

a centuries—but the development of huge wheeled tansu or large tansu designed to fit under a stairway indicated a new level of wealth among , farmers and townspeople. In fact, people had so many items to store that numerous varieties of storage chests developed, all with different names: sho-dansu, cha-dansu, temoto-dansu, tsho-kasane-dansu, kusuridansu, cho-dansu, oshiive-isho-dansu, and so on.*° One of the most popu-

lar were huge chests on four wheels, known as nagamochi kuruma, which were kept near the entrance of a house so that when fire threat- , ened, the valuables could be wheeled away. The Meireki fire that burned

in Edo for three days in 1657 was observed by a member of the Dutch East India Company, Zacharias Waganaer. So many people were trying to flee with these huge chests on wheels that they clogged the streets,

: and Waganaer and the members of his mission ended up having to clam-

ber over chests and roofs in order to escape the fire.*°

When commoners began to own so many goods that a few chests would not hold them all, they began to build storehouses. These were particularly necessary in cities where fire often destroyed whole sections | of town; a storehouse properly constructed might survive the fire and protect the valuables of a household. Storehouses were nothing new; the ShdsGin is probably the most famous, but even in the Nara period 208 storehouses were listed in Suruga alone. By the sixteenth century

the rich all owned storehouses, but so did many other people. These :

Shuppankyoku, 1979). | ]

44. Koizumi Kazuko, Kagu to shitsunai isho no bunka-slt (Tokyo: Hosei Daigaku 45. These are, respectively, chests for storing written materials, chests for tea cere-

mony utensils, small chests for samurai women, stacked chests for clothing, medicine | chests, account chests, and clothing chests to store in the closet. 46. Ty and Kiyoko Heineken, Tansu: Traditional Japanese Cabinetry (New York:

Weatherhill, 1981), pp. 21-23. ,

- HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 45 were used not only to store documents for monasteries and businesses such as pawnbrokers and wholesalers, but they held decorative seasonal goods for individual households. Itoh argues that it was the develop-

ment of the storehouses that made the Japanese-style house possible: , houses in which interiors are kept nearly bare and furniture and other furnishings are brought in as required, enabling the occupants to change

the function of the various rooms as needed or desired.*” Clearly, to , live this kind of lifestyle there must be someplace where goods are

stored when not in use. | :

There is considerable indirect evidence that the number of store- _ houses was increasing during the Tokugawa period, especially in the seventeenth century. Plasterers were among the lowliest laborers in 1500, but their status advanced as they played an important role in building castles and became indispensable in the Tokugawa period in

| building storehouses. In Edo, by around 1730, plasterers working on | the new type of storehouses, which were much more fireproof than | earlier types, were paid three times the fees of the carpenters. Storage in Edo along the banks of rivers and canals became such a problem by

] the mid-sixteenth century that the government encouraged the building of storehouses and issued blanket permission for their construction.

They prevented timber and other goods stored in the open from becoming a fire hazard, and a line of storehouses in itself often acted as a firebreak. Not only are storehouses frequently mentioned in stories of the great

fires in Edo in the seventeenth century, but they were even more frequently built thereafter in an attempt to deal with fire. One philosophy

, was that city buildings were going to burn down anyway; one might as well be resigned to this fact, build flimsy houses, and put all of one’s

money and valuables into a good storehouse and into a new stock of timber kept in the suburbs for rebuilding after the inevitable fires. Store-

houses were not only built for protection against fire and theft and as | , a place to store inventory and articles not in use, but they were a major status symbol in the Tokugawa period. As Saikaku put it: “First, sacks

7 of rice; second, a two-story house; third, a three-story storehouse.”* | 47. Teiji Itoh, Kura: Design and Tradition of the Japanese Storehouse, abridged ed. (Seattle: Madrona Publishers, 1980). See pp. 16, 27, 76, 82, 75, and 38 for material cited

48. Ibid., p. 38. |

: in this section. ,

4.6 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS Japanese houses were traditionally built without interior storage cupboards, just as they were in the West. But whereas Westerners slept in beds and kept the bedding on them year round, the Japanese slept on

the floor. Today bedding is put away in the daytime in the oshizre, but | : what did people do before these storage cupboards were built into their houses? The answer seems to be that they had little bedding to store. | People slept with their garments spread on top of them, and so they —

wore their “bedclothes” in the daytime. When commoners began to partition their houses, they made one corner, that farthest from the door and with no window, into a combination storage room and sleep- | ing room, usually called the nando. Strange—and cold—as it seems to

us today, it appears that most people didn’t use what we.think of as bed- | clothes until well into the Tokugawa period. The zando had a wooden . floor, was surrounded by walls on three sides, and had a high sill on the fourth where there was a door. The room was usually the smallest in the house, and a number of people crowded into such circumstances at

night would have meant that body warmth went a long way toward keeping them comfortable. People put straw and other field wastes—in some places, seaweed—on the boards for warmth and comfort, and

| when it was really cold, people in the Toyama-Niigata area in 1835 slept in their clothes by the fire or slept in straw bags, one couple to a bag.”

When cotton began to be widely used in. the seventeenth century, , more references to bedding appeared.°® With the introduction of proper bedding for those who could afford it, there arose a need for a place to store it in the daytime. Much of the early bedding was for guests and important persons who would not have slept in a crowded

nando, and guest rooms or sitting rooms were used for general purposes : during the day.°! It was not practical to lug bedding out to a storehouse,

and hence storage areas were needed within the house itself. Thus, houses of the well-to-do gradually began to include oshire during the

| latter half of the Tokugawa period. The first of these were chests built into the wall of the nando or sleeping room; later these storage areas 49. Ogawa Koyo, Shinjo to shingu (Tokyo: Yuzankaku, 1973), pp. 170-71. 50. The terms yogi (bedclothes) and futon (quilt) didn’t become general terms until

the first half of the seventeenth century.

sr. Although Westerners had a tradition of putting beds in parlors and rooms for general use, the Japanese had neither a tradition of beds nor would this have been practical with their small houses and use of tatami. The introduction of beds in contemporary Japa-

| nese homes has taken place only with the adoption of Western-style rooms.

, HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 47 were incorporated into the floor plan of the house at the time it was built. Normally they are the size of one tatami mat, with a shelf in the middle to divide it into half, and entered through fuswma, which means that it can be difficult to tell whether a cupboard or another room lies

: beyond the sliding doors. Although oshiire are a part of what we now consider traditional housing, they were in fact a relatively late develop-

: ment that came only when Japanese had thick quilts and other items to

: store.

An economic historian interested in quantitative data in order to precisely assess the changes in the standard of living from the earlyseventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth would be most unsatisfied with the evidence presented here. But taken as a whole, this evidence,

partial and anecdotal as most of it is, substantiates the hypothesis that the Japanese increased their personal wealth, and with it their standard of living, over the course of the Tokugawa period. This, of course, corroborates the economic historians who on much better evidence have effectively argued that the Japanese economy grew, not only during the seventeenth century, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth as well.

What is surprising is that specialists in Japanese architecture and fur- | nishings, none of whom is trained in economic history and whose work lies outside the debate on whether and how much the ‘lokugawa economy grew, are convinced that the changes they observed during the Tokugawa period were caused by the growth of the economy and a

corresponding rise in personal wealth. Miyazawa Satoshi stated that the , minka began to appear from the end of the sixteenth century into the seventeenth because of changes in lifestyles accompanying the rise in productivity in the farm villages, the diffusion of architectural techniques, and the establishment of the ze or Japanese family system. The development of mznka in each region of Japan followed the economic

| progress of that region, and thus the first mznka were seen in the most advanced area around Kyoto and Osaka.”

Okawa Naomi saw a remarkable development of the minka in size | and construction methods during the three hundred years from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, taking place against “a background of an accumulation of wealth and improvements in life for

the masses.”°? Shiragi Kosabur6 believed the biggest reason for the es- | 52. Miyazawa, “Kinsei minka no chiiki-teki tokushoku,” p. ! 54. 53. Okawa, “Minka,” p. 81.

48 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS | tablishment of a new living environment in the developed regions around Osaka from the middle of the Tokugawa period on was that the strength of the economy had advanced beyond both an exchange and barter system and a feudal system, and this enabled the well-to-do mer-

, chants to flout the restrictions against building in the swkiya style. Ac— cording to him, the minka have to be understood in terms of the economic strength of the commoners.°* Koizumi Kazuko, an expert on Japanese furniture and furnishings, saw a pattern that whatever belonged to the privileged classes of one period in Japanese history becomes sought after and finally attained by the ascendant class in the next... . By the end of the eighteenth century . . . the merchant townsfolk were enjoying a life of comfort such as they had never known. . . . The cus-

tom of making bridal furnishings even passed down to ordinary common- |

, ers, especially in western Japan. ... These furnishings ceased to be the showpieces of upper-class weddings, but now met the everyday needs of a

| lifetime, from marriage on. Typical items included chests, trunks, hampers, mirrors and mirror stands, clothes racks, cosmetic cases, and sewing boxes.°°

In short, during the Tokugawa period the balance shifted from the preponderance of income and wealth being held by the samurai and a relatively small number of others to a more even distribution, with commoners in the large urban centers and larger landowners in the countryside possessing wealth and incomes equal to or greater than

those of many samurai.°° Though many Japanese were poor by nearly | any standard at the end of the Tokugawa period, even an overview of the developments in the material culture offers good evidence that not only was the wealth of Japan as a whole increasing, but it was increasingly being shared by the commoners. In looking at. the consumption side of the equation, we see that the quality of housing rose in: terms of size, materials, carpentry, and furnishings, and this means that the standard of living rose because people had more money to spend on

housing. As the evidence on housing and furnishings makes clear, not only were Japanese building better-quality houses with more furnishings and

other goods, but the changes made life in general more healthful.

| $4. Shiraki, Sumazi no rekisht, pp. 9-10. — ,

| 55. Kazuko Koizumi, Traditional Japanese Furniture (Tokyo: Kodansha Interna- ,

tional, 1986), pp. 164, 172, 173. | | 56. Kozo Yamamura, A Study of Samurai Income and Entrepreneurship (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 120-33.

HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS 4.9

Raised flooring put people above the damp, cold ground and allowed : air to circulate under the floor. Flooring of split bamboo and boards laid with spaces between them was cooler and more comfortable in the

hot, muggy climate of western Japan in the summer. The new techniques of construction opened up the houses to the sun in the winter and fresh air year round, highly desirable especially in the milder and

‘more humid regions of Japan. Instead of closed houses with few open- — ings other than the door, the residential style adapted from the shoin style substituted sliding doors for immovable walls. As Morse put it, “the whole side of a house may be flung open to sunlight and air.”°” The trend toward raised floors and the new style of open houses did not benefit everyone. Only the well-to-do could afford houses with shoji, engawa, fusuma, and the other features of the sukiya style that created the open, airy houses Morse refers to. But whereas the earthen floor was the norm in Japan in the early-seventeenth century, by the nineteenth, it was not. In the village of Nishikawa in Bitchi-no-kuni

, (Okayama Prefecture), all of the houses had flooring by the Bakumatsu period, though the farmers with the least amount of land could still not afford tatami.°® The lower-income families had sharply slanted roofs

without eaves and consequently had plastered walls with no openings in the rear. Such houses were ill-suited for circulation of air and sunlight because the backside without the door was virtually sealed. The higher

, the income group, the larger the rear door, the more rooms the house had, and the more healthful the environment. Similarly, in the ‘Tochigi sample of thirteen villages dating from 1712 to 1842, as houses grew

larger over time, they tended to have not only flooring but tatami, as , did virtually all of the houses with four or more rooms. By the time Edward Morse visited Japan in the 1870s, he expected all houses of the middle classes—that is, houses belonging neither to the rich nor poor— ~ to have tatami in all but the kitchen and bathroom. The increase in furnishings is an indication not just of a rise in the | standard of living but in the level of physical well-being. This is especially true for bedding, which meant that people slept warmly in winter. Those who were ill could be better cared for and did not have to huddle 57. Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886; reprint, Rutland,

Vt.: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), p. 7. This was also noted by others, including Henry T. Finck, Lotos-Time in Japan (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1904), p. 45.

58. Fujisawa, “Bakumatsu-ki ndson ni okeru kaiso-betsu jitaku k6zO ni tsuite,” pp. 37-55.

50 HOUSING AND FURNISHINGS next to others to obtain minimal warmth, thus spreading their diseases. Bedding not only made life a good deal more comfortable but on the margin must have extended life expectancy as well. As the Tochigi and other samples show, the improvements in the standard of living and level of physical well-being did not benefit everyone or occur at the same

, | pace over time, but a comparison of housing and furnishings in the , seventeenth century with the mid-nineteenth clearly shows that on average people became wealthier and the material culture more healthful.

CHAPTER THREE

A Resource-Efficient Culture

The Westerners who visited Japan shortly after it was opened in the nineteenth century found a lifestyle totally different from

the one they were accustomed to. Some, like Edward Morse, were charmed by it; others found it extremely uncomfortable. Hugh Wilkinson, who visited Nara in the 1880s, found his hotel “only a thin framework house of wood, with sliding screens of thinnest wood and paper for walls... . The furnishing of the place could certainly have cost but little; nor can it be said to be in accordance with our ideas of comfort. There are no chairs, or tables; neither beds, washstands, chests of drawers, basins, nor looking-glasses encumbered the rooms.”' Morse com| mented: “An American finds it difficult indeed to consider such a struc-

, ture as a dwelling, when so many features are absent that go to make up a dwelling at home,—no doors or windows such as had been familiar

with; no attic or cellar; no chimneys, and within no fire-place, and of course no customary mantle; no permanently enclosed rooms; and as for furniture, no beds or tables, chairs or similar articles,—at least, so _ it appears at first sight.”” Nor did Westerners find the food to their taste. A meal that the shogun sent to Lord Elgin’s mission to Japan included what to Laurence Oliphant “seemed to be pickled slugs.” Oliphant tasted everything sent

SI ,

1. Hugh Wilkinson, Sunny Lands and Seas: A Voyage in the S.S. “Ceylon” (London: J. Murray, 1883) as quoted in Hugh Cortazzi, Victorians in Japan (London: The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 249. 2. Edward S. Morse, Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings (1886; reprint, Rutland, Vt: Charles E. Tuttle, 1972), p. 7.

52 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE

in, “an experience from which I would recommend any future visitor to Japan to abstain.”* There are also humorous and complaining accounts about problems with baths, bedding, footgear, and just about every other aspect of Japanese life. The Japanese were well aware of how different life was in Japan from the West and the problems Westerners

| encountered. Inoue Jukichi, writing in 1910, noted that “our rooms look very bare to foreigners and appear to lack comfort to those who have lived in European apartments; but from the Japanese point of view,

rooms furnished in the approved European style suffer from excess of furniture and partake too much of the nature of a curiosity shop or a

museum.”* , |

What occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century was a clash of cultures, two different traditions whose material cultures were further apart than at any other time from the medieval period to the present. Western Europeans and Americans were undergoing industrialization, and the ability to produce goods cheaply for mass markets had created the fashion for houses filled with furniture, objects of art, and other furnishings so that no spot remained unadorned. Dress was elaborate, with yards of cloth in women’s skirts, and the food, at least

in England and the U.S., centered around a diet of meat and was heavy ,

in starches, root vegetables, and dairy products. , In strong contrast, Japan during this same period was “closed” to influences from other countries and imported neither culture nor in-

| dustrial technology. Instead, everyday life became thoroughly Japanese | in flavor, even those aspects that had originally been imported from China hundreds of years earlier.* While the Japanese had gone in their own direction in near total isolation, the West had substituted industrially produced objects of daily life for the handcrafted objects of premodern times. Because the Western material culture was the more technologically advanced, it was implicitly, if not explicitly, held up as the standard by which Westerners and Japanese alike judged Japanese culture in the late-nineteenth century. And because Japanese material cul3. Laurence Oliphant, Narrative of the Earl of Elgin’s Mission to China and Japan in the Years 1857, °58, 759, vol. 2 (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1860) as quoted in Cortazzi, Victorians in Japan, p. 254. 4. Jiikichi Inoue, Home Life in Tokyo (1910; reprint, London: KPI Limited, 1985), pp. —4.2.

" : A number of scholars have argued this. See, for example, Tatsumura Ken, Nihon no kimono (Chiko Shinsho 120) (Tokyo: Chaokoronsha, 1966), p. 77, and Kato Hidetoshi, “The Significance of the Period of National Seclusion Reconsidered,” The Journal of Japanese Studies 7, No.1 (winter 1981):85—-109.

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 53 ture was so very different from Western and followed principles that in many ways were the opposite, it was found wanting, even by those Westerners who found Japan charming. However, if we look at Japanese material culture from viewpoints other than that of Western technology, it does not seem so inferior. In the nineteenth century, as well as today, many Westerners admired the artistic qualities of Japanese houses, though they found sitting on the floor uncomfortable. They could appreciate the aesthetic quality of the banquets even if most of the food wasn’t to their taste. Setting aesthetics aside, even in standard of living and quality of life, Japan did not

fare badly by the middle of the nineteenth century if our measure is not the quantity of goods and durability of structures but the quality

| of life the material culture provided. What the Japanese managed to achieve was a material culture that provided for their physical well-being but used resources economically. In any premodern culture, where transportation facilities are limited

and foreign imports nearly nonexistent for commoner use, the people have to create a material culture from resources at hand. Though this was true for Japan until the late-nineteenth century, it was particularly true in the Tokugawa period because the trade that had started to occur in the sixteenth century was largely cut off through the closing of the country in the seventeenth. People in the Tokugawa period knew they had to rely on only the plants and animals available in their islands because they were not allowed to import, with minor exceptions, nor were

| they allowed to leave the country. Or as one Japanese has put it, they thought of their islands as people think of the earth today, their total environment within which they had to live.®

By making optimal use of resources in the long run rather than maximum use in the short run, the Japanese were able to maintain a dense population on a relatively small amount of land on which to live and feed themselves. The Japanese had made good use of their resources for more than a millennium, and by using them wisely and having the

good fortune not to be devastated by a disease such as the plague, by the mid-eighteenth century the country had a population of nearly thirty million on about 370,000 square kilometers of land, approximately one-fifth of which was the island of Hokkaido, largely unpopulated at this time. In contrast, France with 534,000 square kilometers to support approximately twenty-four and a half million people, and 6. Irie Takanori, Nihon ga tsukuru shin-bummei (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1992), p. So.

54 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE _ | England with an estimated population of nearly six million on just over

130,000 square kilometers had almost double the land per capita that Japan had (forty-six and forty-four persons per square kilometer respec-

tively, compared to about eighty for Japan, or one hundred or more with Hokkaido excluded).’ Furthermore, only about 15 percent of Japan is considered arable, in contrast to England, about so percent of which

is suitable for fields or pastures. | But if much of the land in Japan is too steeply sloped for cultivation, the climate and soils compensate. There were numerous renewable and plentiful resources with which the Japanese built their houses: wood, reed, straw, bamboo, bark, and other natural materials. These materials were not only readily accessible, but lightweight and therefore safer in earthquakes than stone or brick dwellings. The basic building material was wood, which was used for the posts and beams—the structure of

the house. It could also be used for the walls, ceiling, roof, flooring, and finishing and decorative elements, but so could a number of other materials, which were all more readily replenishable than wood. Farmers

grew rush for tatami and reed for thatch and used the waste from fields, , such as straw and hulls, for wall material and cushioning for straw mats to lay on the floor. Clay and plaster were frequently used for walls. Thus,

people could afford to rebuild their houses every generation or so, and | in a damp climate such as Japan’s with houses built of wood and other

natural materials, such rebuilding was desirable and often necessary. The gradual scarcity of good wood for beams and posts was certainly

a major factor in the switch from building commoner houses using enormous logs of primeval timber to the lighter frame houses of the nineteenth century. By the mid- to late-seventeenth century, there was already a growing scarcity of good quality lumber as the forests were depleted in building castles, mansions for high-ranking officials, large farmhouses for well-to-do commoners, and other large buildings in demand as a result of the growing economic prosperity and the require-

| ments of the ruling class. Japan’s woodlands were also threatened by the increasing demand for fuel. To counter the growing problem of scarcity of good timber, various levels of government, both domain and the Bakufu, enacted regulations against overcutting of the forests, 7. The population estimates for France and England are from Michael Anderson, Population Change in North-western Europe, 1750-1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education Ltd., 1988), p. 23. For Japan’s, see chapter 3 of Susan B. Hanley and Kozo Yamamura,

Economic and. Demograpince Change in Preindustrial Japan, 1600-1868 (Princeton: |

Princeton University Press, 1977). :

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 55

and as a result, there were few mountains stripped bare of trees by tim-

ber cutting. Other measures were the creation of tree plantations, closing forests to cutting, and an innovative measure known as wariyama designed to give incentive to the people to care for their trees. Wartyama allocated woodlands to certain households for specific, usually long, periods of time, which encouraged those in charge to protect the woods in order to use them and pass these economic benefits on to their

descendants.* |

Though Japan had seemed headed for the ecological disaster of deforestation during its rapid economic and demographic growth during the seventeenth century, the countermeasures put into effect during the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries were effective in preventing this by converging government interests with private interests.” One result was the construction of fewer large minka than would otherwise have been built, because the huge logs used whole for these houses became less available as this resource was depleted. However, the new tech-

niques of construction using sawn lumber mean that a switch in build-

ing styles resulted in a rise in the level of physical well-being. Houses , partitioned into enclosed rooms with ceilings were warmer, and they could be more easily decorated, resulting in more aesthetically refined

styles as commoners adopted the elements of the shoin style of the

| samurai for their farmhouses. Although Western visitors found the lack of furniture, particularly chairs, uncomfortable, some could see the advantage. The paucity of

) large items of furniture meant that small rooms could accommodate more people than if there were chairs, rooms could be used flexibly so | that sitting rooms could be turned into bedrooms at night, and houses _ could be furnished more cheaply than in the West.'° But the Westerners who commented on the emptiness of houses and the lack of furniture were looking at things from a Western perspective and missed seeing 8. The problems and countermeasures regarding the forests have been thoroughly documented by Conrad Totman in The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). : 9. At the same time that government tightened its regulation of forests in the seventeenth century, plantation culture was developed, various arrangements for multiple use were created, and forests were leased under agreements that prevented their devastation and encouraged their renewal. But typically, when use of woodland was divided between government and villagers, the rulers retained rights to the large timber and villagers to undergrowth for use as firewood and fertilizer. See part 2 of ibid. for detailed discussion _ of the variety of arrangements used.

1o. Morse, Japanese Homes, p. 114. .

56 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE

what was important in many cases. What the foreigners saw was the | lack of their own tradition, rather than a different tradition that made life comfortable for those accustomed to it and was more economical and efficient given the climate and type of housing.

Japanese houses were not empty in the way that Western houses were | when all the furniture was removed. As Koizumi Kazuko has pointed

out, what would be retained as movable furniture in other countries tended , to become built in as part of the house in the Japanese tradition.” Tatami is a clear example. Originally movable mats used for sleeping and

- sitting in the Heian period, they gradually came to be built in, first as covering for the part of the room on which people sat, and then the entire floor. This also happened to shelves and the desk in the shoin style. Moreover, folding screens used to partition off part of a room became sliding wall panels, and in the Tokugawa period chests or cupboards to store bedding became built-in closets.. Even decorative elements were built in. Instead of having to decorate bare walls of odd lengths with windows and doors scattered here and there, design principles dictated where the tokonoma and other built-in elements would be, and the partitions and the posts formed the primary decorative elements in the house. Except for adding seasonal decorations in the tokonoma and a few cushions to sit on, a Japanese room was complete and ready to be lived in when the structure was finished. Traditional Japanese furnishings were not the heavy articles of furniture associated with Western houses, particularly in the nineteenth

century—wardrobes, four-poster beds, dressers, sideboards, sofas, tables to seat the entire family, and the like. Rather, the furnishings _ were readily movable, so that they could be changed with the season or with the use. Today a traditional room can be easily transformed from

a sitting room for two to a dining room for eight or a sleeping room for one. With the exception of tansu used for storage, furnishings tended to be small and light—instead of sofas and chairs, there were cushions to sit on; instead of large wooden beds, quilts that were folded

and put away during the day became the custom; and sewing boxes,

, cosmetic stands, lights, and heating devices were all portable. Since people sat on the floor, it wasn’t necessary for furnishings to have legs, and when they did, they needed to be only a few inches high. This in

Ltd., 1986), p. I. 1. Kazuko Koizumi, Traditional Japanese Furniture (Tokyo: Kodansha International

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 97 itself made it possible to have furnishings that could be stored away, moved from place to place, and made with efficiency of materials.

Nor did the Japanese make much use of large tables during the Tokugawa period. There was a proliferation of small tables and serving trays the type and style of which differed by social class. Those who

could afford a more gracious lifestyle than eating out of a single pot usually ate at these individual trays raised off the floor a few inches on short legs. Sometimes the individual trays had drawers under them so

that after a meal each person wiped out the dishes and utensils on the | tray and stored them away until the next meal. In households in which | each person had an individual dining set, this custom was fairly sanitary,

but among the lower classes—and in whorehouses as well—eating utensils were often shared and used in turn. In farmhouses with openhearth fireplaces, the family customarily sat around it and shared food from the pot over the fireplace. In a country short of trees and houses short of space, these customs that made rooms multifunctional were both resource- and space-efficient.’ The primary reason this style of house and furnishings developed was that the Japanese belonged to the tradition of cultures in the world that did not develop chairs. In fact, until modern times, chairs anywhere in the world seem to have been the exception rather than the rule. We

think of them as a permanent feature of Western culture, but this is because we see pictures of the chairs of Egyptian kings and of wealthy Greeks and Romans; most people did without. If they sat on anything, they sat on stools, whatever served as beds, or benches. Much of what there was to sit on was not very comfortable. In the Middle Ages in

Europe, chairs were not for comfort; they were instead symbols of authority. Thus, prior to the development of overstuffed furniture and chairs that mold to the body, there was no reason in terms of comfort to prefer sitting on a piece of furniture rather than on the floor itself, unless animals were kept in the house—and they were not in Japan.'? In medieval times Western and Japanese uses of the home were not very different in principle. Medieval houses in both parts of the world were sparsely furnished, and multiple activities took place in one large

12. Ishige Naomichi, “Shokutaku bunka-ron,” Gendai Nihon nt okeru katei to shokutaku, ed. Ishige Naomichi and Inoue Tadashi, a special issue of Kokuritsu minzokugaku hakubutsukan kenkyu hokoku, no. 16 (1991): 18-22 and the appended materials. 13. Witold Rybczynski, Home (New York: Viking Penguin, 1986).

58 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE

room. Furniture in the West was movable and often collapsible, just as it was in Japan. In towns, houses were divided into work areas and living areas, and both were large open spaces. Though the clothing and other customs were very different, lifestyles were not. Witold Rybczynski ar-

, gues that it was during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that ideas of comfort in the home began to appear in Europe,™ and it was precisely during these centuries that the ordinary Japanese began to live | in a new kind of house with tatami to provide comfort for resting, just

| as Europeans began to put padding on their chairs. | The new styles of house design and living were ushered in both in

| Europe and Japan in periods of economic prosperity. What made them so fundamentally different was that in Europe, in adding to the comforts of home, the emphasis was on increasing the number of goods and furniture. With the Industrial Revolution, an increasing number | of people were able to participate in this new level of comfort, and homes were crowded not only with beds, tables, and chairs, but knickknacks, shelves, table covers, and so on. In contrast, in Japan the seventeenth-century peak of prosperity was accompanied by rapid population growth and pressure on resources, leading to an affluence that not only made the most of scarce resources, but also made a virtue of necessity and continued a form of luxury in austerity.

| Though the advances in technology and the economy made the new , _ styles of housing possible for many in the Tokugawa period, the styles themselves can be traced back to the Heian period. The shinden style of the Heian aristocracy is characterized by houses of “bare stagelike settings of wooden floors and columns.” Screens, curtains, and tatami

were moved around to form a room to suit the needs of the moment. } The concept was traditionally called shitsuraz, referring to “the act of providing and arranging articles so as to create a room for some given _ purpose or activity.” Koizumi argues that although the style of housing changed through the medieval period into the Tokugawa, from the shinden to the shoin, this practice of shitsurat continued and was what made traditional Japanese rooms so versatile in terms of function.'° _ These two traditions, movable furniture and sitting on the floor, enabled the Japanese to develop lifestyles that even at their most luxurious were resource-saving. This tradition may have been at least partly in-

14. Ibid., pp. 90-107. | , 15. Koizumi, Traditional Japanese Furniture, p. 11, and Koizumi Kazuko, Kagu (To-

kyo: Kondo Shuppansha, 1980), pp. 18-21. ,

| A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 59 fluenced by Zen Buddhism, but whatever the origin the result was a style of life for the elite that depleted resources less than the lifestyles of the wealthy elites in the West. In fact, it should be noted that even the word for /uxury has different connotations in Japanese than it does in English. At the same time that zeztaku means “luxury,” it connotes “waste.” To be zeitaku means both “to indulge in luxury” and “to be extravagant,” and today the word is used to mean “wasteful,” whereas the English word /uxury would never be used to refer to waste. Wood , was needed for the frame of a house and for major decorative and structural elements such as posts, but in the Tokugawa period walls and flooring were decreasingly made of wood in favor of tatami, paper slid-

ing doors, and plaster. Very little furniture was needed for function, decoration, or displays of wealth. Instead of displaying all of the artwork a family owned, one sample suitable for the season or a special occasion would be hung in the tokonoma, accompanied by one or two other objects such as a vase. The focus was then on the one item, which is what the family was proud to present to guests. Each item may have been luxurious, and this very luxury was all the more apparent for there being only that single object to admire, competing with nothing else.

This austere form of luxury is apparent in many of the traditional art forms that became popular among those who could afford them during the Tokugawa period. One example of this austere form of luxury is the art of flower ar-

ranging. In Europe, the more flowers that are crammed into an arrange- , ment, the more luxurious it is considered. Quantity is a major measure of quality. In contrast, in Japan, modern flower arranging (ikebana), considered to have originated in the mid-fifteenth century, uses only a few flowers to create a piece of art. This art form has elaborate traditions, but all give symbolic meaning to various elements of the arrangement, meaning that each element, each branch or flower, can be distinguished from another, in contrast to the large number of flowers that

, make up the Western bouquet. In economic terms, this means that ikebana requires far fewer flowers and branches for an arrangement than

, does a bouquet. The materials for an elaborate arrangement in Japan would look too sparse for anything other than a small homely bouquet in the West. As the art of flower arrangement filtered down to the commoners in the Tokugawa period when the merchants began to enhance

| | their lifestyle with this art form, it was further simplified so that there were only three main branches to each arrangement rather than the , seven or nine in the early styles. Whether one prefers the Western tra-

60 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE

_ dition of abundant displays of flowers or the Japanese tradition favoring focus on the individual flowers and branches that make up the display is a matter of cultural background and taste. But it can objectively be said that the Japanese created an elaborate art form out of an artistic enhancement of a room, and they did so in a manner that was resourcesaving and economical.

Tokugawa developments in comfort within the house were equally resource-saving, particularly with regard to the use of heat. Medieval homes, it is true, were inefficiently heated in both the West and Japan by open fireplaces in the center of the main room. Much of the heat went up to the roof and houses were smoky. Then fireplaces were developed in the West, which offered a greater degree of safety, permitted

, the development of ovens, and alleviated the problem of smoke, but they were not an efficient way to heat a room. The Japanese retained the open-hearth fireplace in the center of the room—the ivori—which

| - permitted people to sit around it, warming a larger number simultaneously, while the heat and smoke dried and preserved items hung in the rafters and even protected the thatch roofs from rot and bugs. As people began to install wooden floors in their houses, the zvovt was moved to a room with a floor, so that people sat around it with more comfort, cooking, eating, doing various tasks, and socializing.’® — Even as they developed new techniques to more efficiently provide heat, Westerners continued to follow the principle of heating space. They created more efficient fireplaces, later stoves, and finally furnaces that would heat the air and occupants within a room. This type of heating device, whether wood or coal is used, consumes much fuel, and with

the rapid growth of population in Japan in the seventeenth century, fuel became a relatively scarce commodity, thus an expensive one that people could ill afford to use to heat the air. In order to save on fuel, the Japanese developed methods of providing heat using the principle of heating the body rather than the air in the room. They also made maximum use of the climate and weather to . 16. Suzuki Yoshio and Takahashi Mayumi, “Nagashi, irori soshite kamado,” Sezkatsu bunka-shi, no. 8 (August 1985): 30-34. This information was gathered from a survey taken

- in 1955 of over three hundred minka that were studied to determine if they could be

restored as national treasures. Most of the houses in this study were built between the | seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and building peaked in the eighteenth century. It. is thought that in most cases the heating and cooking arrangements noted in the survey were the original, as it is usually possible to determine when renovations are made if the fireplace or stove has been moved. In 87 percent of the sample, the zrori were located in wooden-floored rooms rather than in the doma.

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 61 provide a comfortable atmosphere for people, rather than trying to keep it out. It has long been said that whereas enclosed European homes with thick stone walls are made for winter, open Japanese houses are made

for summer, but this is only partially true. European rooms warmed only by space heaters or fireplaces are cold a short distance from the source of heat, and in summer the thick stone walls can make houses

uncomfortably damp and cold even in pleasant weather; an enclosed | house can be suffocatingly hot if breezes are kept out. In contrast, the

| type of Japanese housing that became increasingly popular during the Tokugawa period took full advantage of summer breezes and what sun , there was in winter. And in inclement weather, rooms could be made into small cozy spaces by closing all the fusuma and shoji, and in the worst weather the wooden storm doors as well. To minimize the use of scarce and expensive fuel, methods were developed to warm the body without wasting fuel: the hibachi (an open charcoal burner), anka (a container for hot charcoal used to heat the feet or bedding), and kotatsu (a small heater placed under a table that is covered by a quilt to keep in the heat). These heaters used charcoal and coals and thus were extremely fuel-efficieht.'’ Hibachi are extant that were made during the Nara period, but this form of heater, which really warms only the hands of those sitting around it, was limited to the rulers and the wealthy who could afford the metal necessary for a

, fireproof container. It was only during the Tokugawa period, when mining technology that was developed during the Sengoku period was combined with the prosperity of the economy, that ordinary folk were able to afford hibachi. By the end of the Tokugawa period, ceramics had developed to the point that hibachi no longer had to be metal, and

| this further popularized them. Hibachi could be placed anywhere, so guest rooms could be used year round; all one needed were a couple of

, pieces of charcoal. Portable heaters that used charcoal were especially convenient and could even be used under quilts and thus taken to bed

| at night. The heat lasts longer than a hot water bottle’s and they do not leak, but they did have to be made of materials that would not burn. From the tradition of the zvorz and the anka developed various types of kotatsu. Whether the heater was a hearth sunk below floor level so 17. The growth in the charcoal industry in every region, technological advances in charcoal production, and the growth of the charcoal market are well documented. See Higuchi Kiyoyuki, Mokutan no bunka-shi (Tokyo: Higashi Shuppan Kabushiki Kaisha, 1962) and Nihon Mokutan-shi Hensan Iinkai, ed., Nihon mokutan-shi (Tokyo: Zenkoku Nenry6 Kaikan, 1960).

62 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE | that one sat as at a Western table, or a portable heater set on the floor, the table combined with quilts raised indoor life to a new level of comfort in the Tokugawa period. Kotatsu made any quiet, indoor activity _ more comfortable and enabled hand work or study that would otherwise have been uncomfortable or impossible because of the cold. Mov-

| able hibachi and kotatsu meant that heaters could be moved to sunny | spots of the house, enhancing comfort and enabling people to make maximum use of light. These devices, combined with the shoin-type of | architecture, allowed large houses to be fully utilized year round and

made possible a new lifestyle in which guests could be served away from | family activities and in which family members could work or relax sepa-

rate from one another. Here is an example of the development of re- | source-saving techniques that also made life more comfortable and gave people a higher level of physical well-being. Because of growing scarcity of fuel, especially on the plains where the largest concentrations of population were, people used ever-increasing ways of conserving fuel. One innovation that conserved two kinds of scarce resources was resting a pot on an iron ring in the zvorz so that it did not sit directly on the fire. Not only did this mean that earthenware pots instead of precious iron could be used for cooking, but that a small fire could be maintained under the ring instead of a large fire that would heat a hanging metal pot. Charcoal, which used fewer re-

| sources than directly burning wood and which could be more readily transported, was sufficient for this new method of cooking." How much the Japanese came to depend on charcoal is evident from

| the role it played in the economy. Although charcoal was used even in prehistoric times—there is evidence of its use in the Jomon period—by the Tokugawa period the quality of charcoal had improved remarkably; it had a higher carbon content, which meant that it burned longer at a higher heat.’” By the early-seventeenth century, every region in Japan was producing its own charcoal, and not only were there specialists who made it as an occupation, but ordinary villagers processed it during the winter. It is impossible to know the total output because so many people

were producing it, but by the late Tokugawa period, as much as 2.38 18. For developments in the kitchen, see Ekuan Kenji, Daidokoro dogu no rekishi (Tokyo: Shibata Shoten, 1976) and Kanzaki Noritake, Daidokoro yogu wa kotaru (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobo, 1984). 19. Because Japanese houses were so much less air-tight than Western ones, there was -not so much danger of asphyxiation, and when charoal was used in enclosed warmers, there was even less.

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 63

million Ay (straw bags) were shipped annually to Edo.*° Some domains went into the charcoal business, others permitted some taxes to be remitted in charcoal, and it was usually taxed when sold at retail. Budgets

| of people in various classes reveal that charcoal was a major component in all of them, and firewood as well in most. A merchant household of ten spent twenty-four vyo on ground rent, thirty on food, and twelve on charcoal and firewood. A couple making about seven ryd spent one on these fuels. And a samurai whose real income was thirty vyo per year

spent more than four on charcoal.2* |

People in the warmer and urban areas began to use the kamado. The

- kamado is a stove traditionally of stone, brick, or earth with openings at the top for the insertion of pots called kama. Since it was enclosed

| and directly heated only the pots, it was more fuel-efficient than the open hearth, but charcoal provided too weak a fire to cook rice, and so

the kamado still required firewood. The innovation of the kamado tended to move the cooking area, a major source of fire danger, from

the wooden-floored living area of the house to the earthen-floored ~ doma. People in the warmer southwestern parts of Japan and fuel-short Kinai area around Kyoto and Osaka switched to using kamado, whereas minka with only irort were almost exclusively confined to the snowy regions of the north and the mountainous areas of central Japan.*” Not only could firewood be more readily obtained in these regions, but because of the long, cold, and snowy winters, the family needed the zvors as a heat source. Since the minka that have survived are mostly houses of the well-to-do, many have both zvori and kamado. The growing shortage of fuel and the innovations in stoves that accompanied it had side effects on the Japanese diet. Kamado, which usu-

ally had more than one place for a pot, could be used to cook more , complicated meals than the stews that could be prepared over the z7o7r1. 20. The size of these straw bags differed by region and by period, but one /yé contained about two bushels, which is approximately nineteen gallons or seventy-two liters. 21. See Higuchi, Mokutan no bunka-shi, pp. 8-29, 89-125. To give some idea of the value of a 7yé, the Bakufu made the koban, the one-7yé gold piece, the standard of value in Edo and its own lands. In 1700 it fixed the value at sixty momme of silver for daily use in Edo. By the nineteenth century, daily workers in agriculture had an annual income of about 360 momme, which would have been equal to six vyo. This income would have bought 5.5 koku of rice even if purchased in Osaka. See Hanley and Yamamura, Economic and Demographic Change, pp. 118-25. 22. Suzuki and Takahashi, “Nagashi, irori soshite kamado.” Whereas 87 percent of the zvorz in the surveyed minka were on wooden-floored rooms, 87 percent of the kamado were found in the doma.

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64 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE

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Rice or grain could be cooked as a separate dish from the soup and | vegetables. Whereas this new cuisine was fuel-conserving, people with low incomes economized on fuel still further. Many families started to cook rice only once a day, and people who lived in one-room tenements in cities often did very little cooking at all. This gave rise to numerous

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 65

shops specializing in take-out foods for consumption at home—the fast-food industry of the Tokugawa period. Not only were methods of cooking resource-conserving, so too did the very cuisine itself make maximum use of scarce resources. The land

that could be given over to game had all but disappeared early in the | Tokugawa period for everyone except the highest members of the ruling class. Buddhist strictures are often cited for the lack of animal protein

, in the diet in traditional Japan, but since the Chinese were also Buddhist

| and ate meat when possible, this argument is not very convincing. It seems more than coincidental that the consumption of meat declined

as the population grew and the need to use all land for agriculture left , little or none for grazing. Though meat from four-legged animals was proscribed by Buddhism, those who could afford to hunt ate wild birds, and outcast classes are known to have eaten animal flesh. This would lend credence to the argument that people gave up meat eating more because commons, woods, and open fields gave way to cropland than because Buddhism proscribed it. But a good number of Japanese did eat meat. For the most part they did not raise it, but obtained what wild birds and other animals they could, eating nearly every species they found. When the city of Edo was first built, the sudden influx of population caused a food shortage. As a result, samurai and townspeople alike ate dogs in the winter months; this was not famine food but a common practice in the region. Westerners in Japan in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries noted that wild and tame animals and birds could easily be obtained in large

quantities as food sources in the cities of Kyoto and Edo.” In these centuries and earlier there were no decrees issued by government prohibiting the eating of meat.** Although a discussion of meat eating is not central to the argument of this chapter, that the Japanese ate meat goes against conventional wisdom that they did not and that the reasons were religious. All of the evidence substantiates the argument that the _ Japanese used all potential sources of food but did not sacrifice cropland, whose harvests directly fed the people, for pasture or fodder for animals to feed the few.

| However, in 1612, the Bakufu issued a decree banning the killing of cattle and also the sale of cattle that died naturally. This was not only 23. Harada Nobuo, Rekishi no naka no home to niku (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1993), p. 258.

: 24. Ibid., p. 92.

66 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE | a decree for Bakufu-held territories but was communicated to all of the daimyo as well. The concern of the Bakufu was not religious; rather it was to preserve draft animals in order to maintain and increase agricultural production. The need for such a decree belies the belief that Japa-

nese didn’t eat meat.”°

A variety of evidence attests to the eating of meat in Japan during the Tokugawa period. The Meisan shojtki orai, published in 1760, listed

the kinds of meat sold in Edo’s Kojimachi area. Included were boar, venison, fox, wolf, bear, badger, beaver, cat, and wild dog. Nor was meat

eating limited to certain classes who did it clandestinely. The shogun was sent a gift of beef preserved in miso (bean paste) from the domain of Hikone (Shiga Prefecture), and the domain of Sendai (Miyagi Prefecture) had a well-known cook named Kikkawa Fusatsune who recommended making soup stock using a beef base. A number of books were published from the early-eighteenth century that gave advice on how to feed beef to the sick to improve their health and offered direc-

tions on how to prepare meat and game birds to make them “most deliciously.” During the second half of the Tokugawa period, as wild game declined because of overhunting, chicken became more popular, as did their eggs. In 1875, a book called Manpo ryori himitsu bako described 103 different egg dishes, including one in which the white of the egg was cooked inside the yolk.*° Meat eating became more popular in Edo by the nineteenth century when shops selling meat proliferated. It was reported by Yamada Tose that even samurai bought meat. Most of what was sold was caught in the wild, and included boar, bear, wolf, badger, beaver, squirrel, and monkey. People who were opposed to the eating of meat decried the smell emanating from shops that sold it, and many may not have wanted | to admit to the eating of meat. Euphemisms were used in talking about _ meat, with boar commonly called “mountain whale” and deer referred to as “maple.”’’ Teradako Seiken in his Edo hanjoki, which was written about Edo’s prosperity in the early 1830s, devoted one segment to the

: “mountain whale.” Its opening sentence was “Scallions and meat—a 25. Kamo Giichi, Nihon chikusan-shi (Tokyo: Hései Daigaku Shuppan-kyoku, 1976), pp. 189-90. 26. Matsushita Sachiko, “Edo jidai no ryOri no zairyo to choriho,” in Shoku to shoku kukan, ed. Nihon Seikatsu Bunka-shi Gakkai, vol. 5 of Seckatsu bunka-shi (Tokyo: Yiizan-

| kaku, 1984), pp. 44-46. 27. Kamo, Nihon chikusan-shi, p. 209.

A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE 67

perfect combination.” This segment is a satirical description of meat eating in Edo.” The more adventuresome in the prosperous capital were not the only people eating meat. In the domain of Chéshi, official records were kept in the nineteenth century of game sold in the domain, and the list in-

cluded bear, wild boar, deer, rabbit, badger, monkey, pheasant, duck, | dove, and other birds. Chicken and eggs were sold in seventeen villages.””? That the domain kept records is evidence that trade in game was a recognized and common activity. The value of this trade is no indication of how much game was actually consumed, since considerable amounts must have been consumed by the hunters and others and gone unrecorded. Meat eating was almost certainly more common, at least among the samurai, in western Japan than elsewhere. Japanese also raised pigs to

. sell to the Chinese and Koreans in Edo and Nagasaki. Pork was eaten by the Japanese in Satsuma, from which comes Satsuma-jiru, a traditional soup with meat in it, and in the 1850s it was widely known in Edo

that employees of the Satsuma domain were raising pigs both to eat

the meat and to sell it.*° Yet it is unlikely that the majority of Japanese | were eating meat, and certainly not on a regular basis.** Reports make

- it clear that selling and eating meat were not everyday activities, but

rather something fairly unusual that occasioned comment. Game be- | came ever more scarce as the population and the amount of land under

| cultivation increased. How much meat was eaten by whom and how often will likely remain unknown; what evidence does show is that Japa-

nese did not ignore game as a food source and that there was such a demand that it was openly sold in many parts of the country. Nevertheless, for protein sources, most people relied on seafood and grains. In the Tokugawa period, the sea provided a never-ending source of protein, and the main limitation on its consumption was transporting it inland from the coast. Inland, the main source of protein was the soy bean, which has a much higher calorie output per acre than animal 28. Andrew Markus, “Meat and Potatoes: Two Selections from Edo Hanjokt,” SinoJapanese Studies 4., no. 2 (April 1992): 7-26. The translation is Markus’s on p. 12. 29. Gotd Yoshiko, “Bocho fudo chushin-an kara mita Tempo-ki Chosht-han ni okeru : omo na shokuy6o jiich6-rui ni tsuite,” Yamaguchi Daigaku Kyoiku Gakubu kenkyu ronso

38, no. 2 (1988): 19-29. , 30. Kamo, Nihon chikusan-shi, pp. 194, 210. 31. Ibid., p. 195.

68 A RESOURCE-EFFICIENT CULTURE

flesh, an inefficient source of protein in terms of the amount of land and grain needed to produce it. Thus tofu and other soybean products became a major source of both protein and calcium during the Tokugawa period.

, Compared to Europe, far greater use was made of wild plants. Ferns, burdock roots, and in time of famine various wild tubers and even bark

were consumed. The sea provided not only protein sources, but also greens, as seaweed was dried and used widely in a variety of ways—from adding it to soup, brewing it as tea, and using it as medicine.

But the staple of the diet was rice and other grains. Rice was the preferred staple, but not enough rice was produced to enable everyone

to eat it as the staple food. Probably most people in cities were eating rice and most farmers were eating it mixed with other grains.*” People preferred rice because they liked its taste, but it could be argued that they came to prefer it, like many other peoples in Asia, because it was suited to a densely populated country. Rice has a higher yield to seed ratio than the staple cereals of northern Europe. It has been estimated that up to the seventeenth or eighteenth century in Europe, 20-25 percent of the yield had to be held over to use as seed the following year.**

Though this is only an estimate, and the estimate of the amount of rice crop that would have to be saved for seed varies widely with the conditions of agriculture, estimates for rice crops produced by premodern techniques are I-2 percent. Rice produces very high yields, and efforts to increase the yield make the land more productive though they are labor-intensive. Thus they maximize use of land and allow popula-

tion to increase, or where it is already dense, maintain it.** | The economy of resources can be found not only in housing and

cuisine, but also in clothing. By the seventeenth century, the basic garment for formal and casual wear of all classes was the kosode, which fits the description of what Westerners envision when the word kimono is ~ used. The kosode was so widely adopted by the eighteenth century that people were calling it kzmono, which means “clothing.” Originally an

, undergarment, it became the article of clothing worn immediately un32. Kit6 Hiroshi, “Edo jidai no kome shoku,” Rekishi koron, no. 89 (April 1983); Shunsaku Nishikawa, “Grain Consumption: The Case of Chéshi,” in Japan in Transition, ed. Marius B. Jansen and Gilbert Rozman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).

, 33. B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe A.D. 500-1850 (London: Edward Arnold, 1963), p. 382. 34.. Francesca Bray, The Rice Economtes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 3, 15.

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