The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan by Thomas Carlyle Smith (1971-01-07) by (PDF)

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⭐Reading this you get a clear sense of what can be accomplished with scholarship, with discipline and a lot of talent. And how far current scholarship has lost its edge. This book is now almost 60 years old but it is not out of date–it may be even more relevant considering the domination of PC and its ill effects on current academic papers. It is a real treasure.

⭐Very insightful and succinct. Thomas C. Smith also wrote another book “Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization” which in my opinion is equally important. I bought the two books (“used”, but as good as new) from a nice seller for $0.01 each (plus shipping).

⭐This concise and very interesting book is a work of historical sociology aimed at describing the changes that took place in Japanese village structure during the Tokugawa period. At the Tokugawa accession to power, Japanese villages were largely devoted to subsistence agriculture with village social and political structure dominated by extended family units constructed on the basis of traditional patrimonial kinship ties. The latter included both biological and fictive kinship ties. The Tokugawa state, which removed samurai from immediate control of villages, brought national peace, and ultimately, a national market, to Japan. The ensuing economic growth, massive urbanization, and monetarization of the economy had profound consequences for Japanese villages. Commercialization of agriculture and considerable rural proto-industrialization profoundly changed the Japanese village. Traditional forms of labor and political relations were eroded and increasingly replaced by more or less financially based landlord-tenant relationships with peasants increasingly dependent on varying combinations of commercial agriculture and other commodity production for their livelihoods. These consequences of market penetration have clear parallels in pre-modern Europe but Smith is also careful to point out important differences. While land ownership seems to have consolidated, farm size did not. Indeed, Smith argues that Japan become a nation of relatively uniform smallholdings, even though a majority were farmed by tenants. This process was accompanied by considerable social stress but also appears to have been very successful in several senses. In a particularly interesting final chapter, he argues that these structural changes in Japanese villages contributed significantly in a number of ways to the Meiji modernization of Japan.

⭐The Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated its power by making surveys of the land under its control and tieing the peasant population to the land. The surveys also allowed overlords to collect taxes directly and to remove the lower-ranking warriors from the villages and retain them in castle towns.In one stroke, a major source of political instability was eliminated and the structure of social relations in rural japan set for the next 250 years. When Japan modernized in the nineteenth century, the complex system of family obligations by which land was exploited laid the ground work for the mechanisms of social change that brought the country so quickly into the industrial world.This is a brilliant and beautifully written description of the role that these agricultural arrangements played in that modernization.Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG

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