Page 197 - Changing Living Spaces

Wet-Rice Agriculture and Economic Growth in Pre-Industrial Japan

of rice and other crops, indicating the positioning of agricultural prod-
ucts other than rice.
Rice cultivation in Japan should be seen in the light of the political
history of the region. The ancient Japanese regime was based on a polit-
ical system called Ritsuryō (a system of laws and codes influenced by the
Chinese political system) – the first centralised government in Japan. The
Ritsuryō regime was established in the late eighth century by transfer-
ring the Ritsuryō system from China to the Yamato Kingdom, which was
originally a confederation of great kings (daiō) and local powerful clans
(gōzoku). Prior to the establishment of the Ritsuryō regime, individual
clans owned land in the Japanese archipelago. After the establishment
of the Ritsuryō regime, all land belonged to the emperor and was there-
fore considered public land. Under this system, arable land was distrib-
uted to farmers based on their respective family sizes. After the death of
the cultivator, the land was returned to the government and given to an-
other farmer (handen shūju). The farmers cultivated their allotted paddy
fields (kubunden) and paid rice as land tax and various head taxes to the
government. To maintain this system of land allocation, the old govern-
ment set up a family register to record the details of each household, and
land allocations were adjusted every six years according to the size and
composition of each household. Thus, there is no doubt that the Ritsuryō
government kept records of the condition of paddy fields throughout the
country. However, data on the total land area of the entire archipelago in
the eighth century, when the Ritsuryō government was established, are
lacking. The unavailability of data can also be attributed to the fact that
the older the period, the less likely it is that primary documentation will
be available. Since paper was a precious commodity at the time, once a
written record became redundant, the blank reverse side was often reused
to create another record. The renewal of official documents such as land
registers and family registers, which took place every 6 years, would there-
fore have resulted in the destruction of individual documents so that they
could be reused as recycled paper for other purposes (Sakaehara 1991).
Quantitative data on paddy fields throughout the country became
available around the tenth and twelfth centuries. These rare quantitative
data were recorded in encyclopaedias, not in the official government doc-
uments of the time. These two centuries are the only time when data were
collected at the country level, and therefore these data represent the only
information available for the ancient period. There is no information on
the non-paddy fields of the country during this period.

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