Page 207 - Changing Living Spaces

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

Table 7 Proportion of Arable Land (Paddy and Non-paddy) from the Pre-Modern
to the Early Meiji Period, 1721–1882 (in %)
Region Paddy fields Non-paddy fields
1721 1882 1721 1882
East Japan East Tōhoku 4.0 6.0 3.4 5.1
West Tōhoku 4.2 8.6 1.8 3.2
East Kantō 10.5 16.3 12.2 14.5
West Kantō 6.6 8.8 14.6 14.9
Tōsan 3.5 4.1 4.3 5.4
Mid Japan Niigata and Hokuriku 7.4 13.2 3.0 4.4
Tōkai 4.9 10.3 3.7 6.5
West Japan Kinai 11.8 15.9 5.2 5.0
Around Kinai 7.3 11.1 3.2 3.0
Sanin 5.1 8.2 2.4 3.7
Sanyō 5.9 9.8 3.2 4.4
Shikoku 4.6 7.8 3.3 6.3
North Kyūshū 8.8 13.1 5.2 8.4
South Kyūshū 3.5 5.8 3.5 9.3
East Japan 5.0 7.5 6.0 7.4
Central Japan 6.3 11.9 3.3 5.3
West Japan 6.2 9.6 3.6 5.9
West Japan (incl. Mid Japan) 6.2 10.3 3,5 5.7
Total 5.7 9.1 4.6 6.4
Source Table 5.

This raises the question of how the expansion of cultivated land led to
a long-term change in agricultural production. In the early modern peri-
od, the Tokugawa shogunate and feudal lords began to periodically meas-
ure crop yields (kenchi: cadastral survey) to secure their financial base.
However, these data were not revised for some time after the introduc-
tion of the cadastral survey to measure the area and productivity of ag-
ricultural land. Therefore, these data do not reflect the actual increase in
land productivity, i.e. the increase in cultivated area and harvested quan-
tity due to land improvement and agricultural technology that occurred,
until the next survey. Therefore, it is difficult to estimate the area culti-
vated and the amount harvested in a single year, even from records in pri-
mary documents at the village level. In fact, an unnatural increase is of-
ten observed in the year of the cadastral survey in which the target area
is reviewed.
Given the limited availability of information in the agricultural sector,
it would be more accurate to conduct a macroscopic and reference year
analysis to observe the long-term trend. The reference year that can be

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