Page 164 - Changing Living Spaces

Miyuki Takahashi

this brought some profit. Since there were no major wars in early modern
Japan, horses were never used in warfare, but such good horses were pur-
chased by ranches run by the shogunate for a high price to be trained as
military horses. The purchased horses were used when the Shogun went
on falconry excursions. On the other hand, the farming villages adjacent
to the government-operated ranches suffered from crop damage caused
by the invasion of these horses. However, it was difficult for farmers to
take effective measures against them.
While horses were an important source of income for farmers, they
also posed a challenge by destroying their rice and crop fields.
Here I would like to return to my original question. Akira Hayami’s
‘Industrious Revolution’ started from a phenomenon observed at the be-
ginning of the early modern period in Owari Province, where the num-
ber of horses declined despite population growth, and led to economic
growth in early modern Japanese society driven by an increase in per cap-
ita labour output instead of capital, in this context, livestock. However,
horses were rarely used for ploughing fields in the early modern period
(Saito 2004; Kanehira 2015). Moreover, time-related observations of pop-
ulation (or number of households) and number of horses in Asaka County
show that when one variable increased, the other also increased, and like-
wise when either variable decreased; thus, they fluctuated in direct pro-
portion to each other. Aside from being raised for sale in the market,
horses in farming villages were mainly used to transport heavy loads and
to obtain manure. Each household often owned a horse, which it raised
in a small barn attached to the house where the family lived. Regionally,
more horses were raised in eastern Japan than cattle. One of the rea-
sons for this was that horse manure, which fermented at higher tempera-
tures, was preferred in the cold regions of eastern Japan. In the Meiji pe-
riod, when dry paddy farming was adopted, horses were increasingly used
for ploughing and tilling. At the same time, improvements were made to
raise larger horses.

Acknowledgement
This paper was first presented at weHC2018 in Boston.
I am grateful for PFHP at Reitaku University and Kashiwa City for kindly
permitting me to use documents. Hiroko Nakamura helped me with the
translation from Japanese to English.
This study is funded by the research Grant-in-aid for Scientific Research
of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology,

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