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Population Growth and Economic Development in Japan*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
Extract
Today there is a plethora of pessimistic literature on the population problems of densely settled agricultural areas. It is matched, if not exceeded, in quantity by the optimistic writings of those who see economic development as a panacea for demographic ills. There is research, too, but the definitions of problems, the analytical approaches, and the conclusions reflect the cleavages of academic specializations. Demographers deprecate the realistic possibilities for economic development and so project present populations into future situations that must be catastrophic if the cynicism concerning economic expansion is justified. Economists analyze the potentialities for development and assume some mystical force in human reactions that automatically reduces rates of population increase as the material basis of living becomes more abundant. Analysis of the relations between population increase and economic development is notably deficient. The difficulty lies deeper than the naïveté of social scientists. That quantitative research for which they are prepared requires statistical materials, but those materials exist primarily for the advanced industrializing economies of Western origin. These are precisely the economies in which the relations between people and economy have been or are in process of being rationalized through controlled human reproduction. The techniques of the historian and the anthropologist must be combined with those of the economist and the demographer for the analysis of social, demographic, and economic relations within prestatistical cultures.
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- Copyright © The Economic History Association 1951
References
1 Consideration of these broad topics in a few pages would seem to require a choice of alternatives: a detailed analysis of a limited segment of Japanese experience or a résumé of the events of centuries of recorded history. Since neither seems feasible, we shall emphasize the great reorientations of Japanese culture: the Taiko reforms whose goal was the creation of a replica of Tʼang China in seventh-century Japan; the period of seclusion whose goal was the coexistence of the political power of the industrial state with the social values of the agrarian culture; and the occupation whose goals had best be described at some future period. The focus of attention will be the national state of Taiko and the secluded feudalism of Tokugawa, since both economic historians and demographers can be assumed to be familiar with the outlines of Japanese development after 1868.
This seemingly episodic approach reveals the planned national reorientation as another factor of continuity in Japanese history. At each of these periods of crisis the transformation of society and economy was ordered by fiat. In each, population and economic changes were both causes and consequences of political reorientations. In each, changes that appeared revolutionary became evolutionary integration of alien and indigenous elements into a continuing culture that became and remained specifically Japanese. In fact, the nearest to the unique in Japanese development was neither the economic nor the demographic, narrowly conceived, but a continuity in social structure and in the discipline and conformity of the people.
2 The councillors attempted to solve the difficulty through granting exemptions from reallocation for three generations to those who built new irrigation works, for one generation to those who developed new fields that utilized existing facilities. Thus the Great Council, in attempting to bolster the functioning of the allotment system in a situation in which population growth was outstripping available land, introduced the exceptions from allotment that quickened the growth of a manorial structure of economy and society.
3 The demographic evolution of Japan during the feudal period is fundamental both to the assessment of the population dynamics of Japan during the period of industrialization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and to the evaluation of the extent to which the past experience of Japan is relevant to the future experience of other nonindustrialized Asian areas. Japanese developments should be traced for three major periods: the move toward centralization in the Kamakura period; the instability that culminated in the Muromachi period; and the seclusion of the Tokugawa period. These are somewhat artificial distinctions though, for feudalism came by evolution. Its origin traces to the growth of the shoen (manor) centuries before the feudal period began, and it extends beyond its legal termination in the restoration of 1868. Its demographic consequences have varied according to the balance of the forces of internal order, economic dynamism, social mobility, and cultural change. Here considerations of space force limitation to the most controversial period in Japanese demographic history, the last century and a half of the period of seclusion.