The peasantry and tenancy-market dependence: Rural capitalism in Meiji-Era Japan

Abstract

Japan during the Meiji era (1868–1912) has often been held up as a paradigmatic case of capitalist development “from above,” in which industrial capitalism did not emerge from a revolution in the production relations of the rural majority. Instead, state elites used fiscal policy to nurture the development of capitalism on top of a fundamentally pre-capitalist agrarian economy. This chapter criticizes these accounts and provides an alternative explanation of the transition to capitalism in Japan. This involves two main tasks. First, this chapter collects the ample evidence of broadly based productive dynamism and capital accumulation within the rural sector. Japanese capitalism was born not as isolated enclaves but instead in the countryside itself. Second, this chapter argues, against many of the economic historians who have contributed to uncovering the dynamism of the Meiji-era rural economy, that this process of economic development was not simply a continuation of the commercialization of the preceding centuries. Instead, changes to the legal enforcement of landlords’ property rights enacted by the Meiji state in the 1870s, tied to its efforts to reform the land tax, fatally undermined the non-market access to the means of subsistence previously enjoyed by peasant cultivators.