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

the recorded number, and this surplus was more than 50 percent in some
regions.
The Tokugawa shogunate was overthrown by the Meiji government,
which made fukoku kyōhei (enriching the country and strengthening the
military) its prime motto. It also initiated measures to modernise gov-
ernment accounting in order to increase the sustainability of the admin-
istration charged with the nation’s construction. Although official sta-
tistical books including agricultural production were also compiled and
published, the survey method, and commodities produced were not uni-
form. This can be attributed to the results of trial and error in the ear-
ly stages. However, data on the use of arable land can be estimated by
analysing prefectural, regional, and field data. Since agriculture has not
changed significantly since the Tokugawa period, it can be said to reflect
the situation of cultivated land just before industrialisation.
The numerical uncertainties in the above-mentioned historical docu-
ments have often been the subject of discussions on quantitative econom-
ic history. Academically, several historians, including the author, have
made efforts to estimate actual production asymptotically. Generally,
however, this chapter uses the data in the primary records rather than
the results of historical estimates in previous studies. This is because the
available estimates of agricultural production on cultivated land are at
the national and regional levels. These estimates are considered symmet-
ric and preliminary and are therefore inappropriate for detailed discus-
sion (Takashima 2017; Bassino et al. 2019). However, as described at the
beginning of this chapter, it is important that regional data be collected,
even if they are raw data. The study considers them sufficient to outline
the long-term trend.

Distribution of Arable Land Before the Modern Period
Ancient Period

Despite limited data, it was possible to determine the distribution of pad-
dy fields in ancient period. Table 2 shows the distribution of paddy fields
by region in the tenth and twelfth centuries. As shown in figure 1, the
Japanese archipelago is divided into fourteen different regions (exclud-
ing Ezochi and Ryukyū, which were outside the effective control of Japan
before modern period). As for the beginning of the eighth century (at the
beginning of the Nara period), when the first centralised state emerged,
the study referred to the estimated value of the cultivated area of the

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