ABSTRACT
In the historical literature on Japan, rural people have tended to be regarded as the exploited victims of the industrialisation process. This book provides an alternative view of the role and significance of the rural economy in Japan’s emergence as an economic power prior to World War II.
Using theories and approaches derived from development studies and economic history the book describes the nineteenth-century development of a diversified, proto-industrial rural economy, focusing on the strategies employed by households as they sought to secure and improve their livelihoods. The book argues that rural people, through their ‘industrious revolution’, played an active part in determining the course of Japan’s agrarian transition and, eventually, the distinctive features of industrial Japan’s political economy, with the result that rural life still figures largely in the reality and imagination of contemporary Japan.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
chapter 1|20 pages
Rethinking rural Japan
part I|84 pages
The nineteenth century
chapter |2 pages
Introduction
chapter 2|25 pages
Rural economic growth in the nineteenth century
chapter 3|27 pages
The rural economy and the household
chapter 4|25 pages
Power, policy and resistance in the nineteenth-century countryside
chapter |3 pages
Conclusion
part II|82 pages
The agrarian transition, 1890–1920
chapter |5 pages
Introduction
chapter 5|24 pages
The rural economy and urban industrialization
chapter 6|25 pages
The household and the village in transition
chapter |3 pages
Conclusion
part III|105 pages
The inter-war years: Crisis and modernization