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Human Capital Accumulation in Premodern Rural Japan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

J. I. Nakamura
J. I. Nakamura
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics at Columbia University, New York, N.Y. 10027.
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Abstract

Premodern human capital accumulation helps to explain the exceptional growth performance of the Japanese economy in the last hundred years. Prior to this century informal institutions were more important for human capital formation than were the more formal ones familiar today. This paper examines a few seminal changes—national market formation, population control, and the involvement of farmers in rural administration—that were primarily responsible for the emergence of economically responsive, more productive individuals in rural Japan.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 41 , Issue 2 , June 1981 , pp. 263 - 281
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1981

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References

This is a substantially revised version of a paper published in Japanese as “Kinsei nomin to Nihon no kindaika” (Kinsei farmers and Japan's modernization) in Ara Kenjiro et al., eds., Shinohara Miyohei Sensei Kanreki Kinen Ronbunshu: Sen go Keizai Seisakuron no Soten (Essays in honor of Professor Miyohei Shinohara: controversies in postwar economic policy) (Tokyo: Keiso Shobo, 1980).Google Scholar

1 It is also true that man was the overwhelmingly important factor of production in premodern times. Land resources were still of limited importance because the technology required for their use remained at low levels, and capital was both primitive and limited in supply. The human factor of production also was primitive in nature; that is, human capital at that time remained shallow indeed, relative to what it is today.Google Scholar

2 See for example Mincer, Jacob, “Human Capital and Economic Growth” (paper presented to the conference on “Issues in Economic Development,” Mexico City, 11. 1980), pp. 1–27.Google Scholar The importance of human capital has long been espoused by Schultz, Theodore W.. See his presidential address delivered at the 83rd annual meeting of the American Economic Association, St. Louis, Mo., 12. 28, 1960Google Scholar (rptd. in Schultz, T. W., Investment in Human Capital [New York, 1971], pp. 24–47).Google Scholar

3 Mincer, “Human Capital,” p. 14.Google Scholar

4 Interestingly, at that time when Japan had only recently emerged from a seclusion of over 200 years during which only minimal contact was maintained with the rest of the world, the Japanese were highly optimistic about their capabilities. They believed that they could indeed achieve economic and military parity with the West within a foreseeable future. This is evident in a 10-year economic plan published in 1884.Kido, Yoshiko, “Kogyo Iken and Its Production Targets,” Master's essay (Columbia Univ., 1970).Google Scholar

5 Lockwood, W. W., The Economic Development of Japan (Princeton, 1954), p. 578.Google Scholar

6 Smith, Thomas C., Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan (Stanford, 1959).Google Scholar

7 Crawcour, E. Sidney, “The Tokugawa Legacy,” in Lockwood, W. W., ed., The State and Economic Enterprise in Japan (Princeton, 1965), p. 33.Google Scholar

8 Mincer, “Human Capital,” p. 3.Google Scholar

9 Henderson, Dan F., Village “Contracts” in Tokugawa Japan (Seattle and London, 1975), pp. 7–11.Google Scholar

10 Brown, Delmer M., “Impact of Firearms on Japanese Warfare, 1543–98,” Far Eastern Quarterly, 7 (05 1948), 244–47.Google Scholar

11 Hall, John W., “The Castle Town and Japan's Modern Urbanization,” Far Eastern Quarterly, 15 (11. 1955), 44.Google Scholar

12 Smith, Thomas C., “Premodern Economic Growth: Japan and the West,” Past and Present, 60 (08. 1973), 129–31.Google Scholar

13 Smith, , Agrarian Origins, pp. 128–31.Google Scholar

14 There are some exceptions to this rule. For a good historical study of the system see Tsukahira, Toshio G., Feudal Control in Tokugawa Japan: Sankin Kotai System (Cambridge, Mass., 1956).Google Scholar

15 Ibid., pp. 96–102. The shogunate was aware that these costs served its purposes by reducing the economic capability of the feudal lords to rise against it. (See also pp. 20–21, 35.)

16 Nakamura, James I., “The Alternate Attendance System and Japanese Economic Development” (unpubl. manuscript).Google Scholar

17 A detailed study of a late developing domain is provided by Reinhard, Heinrich M., The Tale of Nisuke: Peasant and Authorities in Higo around 1800 (Weisbaden, 1978).Google Scholar

18 Nakamura, James I. and Miyamoto, Matao, “Social Structure and Population Change: A Comparative Study of Tokugawa Japan and Ch'ing China” (forthcoming in Economic Development and Cultural Change).Google Scholar

19 Chang, Chun-li, The Chinese Gentry (Seattle, 1970), p. 141.Google Scholar

20 Gonin-gumi is literally translated as five-man group. Neighborhood group conveys the meaning somewhat better. Its functions are described later in this section.Google Scholar

21 An illuminating study of population control in a village appears in Smith, Thomas C., Nakahara: Family Farming and Population in a Japanese Village, 1717–1830 (Stanford, 1977). See particularly chap. 7, pp. 107–32.Google Scholar

22 Saito, Osamu, “Labor Market in Tokugawa Japan: Wage Differentials and the Real Wage Level, 1727–1830,” Explorations in Economic History, 15, 1 (01 1978), 84–100.Google Scholar Also see Smith, Agrarian Origins, pp. 120–23.Google Scholar

23 Crawcour, “The Tokugawa Heritage,” pp. 41–42.Google Scholar

24 The numbers are spectacular. New terakoya established to 1804 are said to be 558. Then in the next 40-year period (1804–1843), newly established ones numbered 3,050; and in the following 24 years (1844–1867), the number was 6,691.Google Scholar (Ishikawa, Ken in Nihon Shomin Kyoiku-shi [Tokyo, 1929]Google Scholar as quoted in Passin, Herbert, Society and Education in Japan [New York, 1965], p. 14.)Google Scholar

25 Smith, Thomas C., “Okura Nagatsune and the Technologists,” in Craig, Albert M. and Shively, Donald H., eds., Personality in Japanese History (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), pp. 127–54, particularly p. 147.Google Scholar

26 Originally, mizunomi hyakusho referred to landless farmers and honbyakusho to independent landed farmers. These social status terms tended to cling to families in the rural areas to the end of the Tokugawa period, but the economic positions of the two types of farm families were often reversed over that long period.Google Scholar

27 Passin, Society and Education in Japan, p. 47. Data on literacy at this early date are probably more available for Japan than for any other large country. Small countries, particularly those whose urban sector is disproportionately large relative to most countries, or whose political and social developments are unusual, can have much higher rates of literacy and more reliable data than large countries. One example is Sweden where universal elementary education had become available by the late 1850s. Lars Sandburg attributes this headstart to “religious, cultural and political phenomena” rather than to economic factors.Google Scholar (“The Case of the Impoverished Sophisticate: Human Capital and Swedish Economic Growth before World War I,” this Journal, 39 [03 1979], 225–26, 229–30, 237–41.) Sweden's high literacy rate in the early nineteenth century (adult literacy in 1850 was about 90 percent, the highest in Europe;Google Scholaribid., p. 230), did not induce sustained rapid growth. But from 1860 to 1913, when technological change and expansion of the market through increasing foreign trade raised the need for educated labor, Sweden had the highest growth rate of per capita gross national product in Europe (ibid., pp. 225, 227–29). Similarly, the availability of a potentially productive stock of human capital toward the end of the Tokugawa period did not cause the Japanese economy to achieve sustained rapid growth. Modern economic growth had to await the end of seclusion in the 1850s; the release from the remaining feudal restrictions following the Meiji Restoration of 1868; the coming of science, scientific methodology, and foreign technology with the opening to foreign contacts; and the challenge of Western imperialism. It was the availability of a stock of human capital that had prepared the two countries to respond to the new economic opportunities when they arrived.

28 This requires qualification. In some domains the rural samurai (goshi) remained in the villages, and they usually assumed leadership positions. In general, the three important village positions (sanyaku) were filled by members of leading families who were thus regarded so for hereditary reasons. In the traditional status society of Tokugawa Japan, the rest of the villagers tended to pay obeisance to them as a matter of course. For our purposes, however, the separation of samurai and farmers was the important fact that enabled the gradual erosion of hereditary distinctions among village families over the course of the Tokugawa period.Google Scholar

29 After the Tokugawa seclusion came to an end and foreign goods began to compete in the Japanese market and Japanese goods found markets abroad, the economic responsiveness of the farmer caused a rapid change in the structure of agricultural production. The story of this change is told in Shimbo, Hiroshi, “An Aspect of Industrialization in Japan: In Its Formative Stage,” Kobe University Economic Review, 13 (1967), 19–42.Google Scholar