Page 213 - Changing Living Spaces

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

3.00

2.50

Increase rate of agricultural output (%) 1.50
2.00

1.00

0.50

0.00
0.00 0.10 0.20 0.30 0.40 0.50
Increase rate of arable land (%)
Figure 3 Increase of Agricultural Output vs Arable Land in the Latter Half
of the Early Modern Period
Sources Table 8 and 9.

lead to an increase in production and that the increase in production was
due to the increase in agricultural productivity, not cultivated area.
It is true that the yield of paddy fields compared to non-paddy fields
is generally considered to be lower than that of land. However, the com-
parison with the production of main cereals and non-main cereals, such
as millet, does not apply to commercial crops. It is also necessary to con-
sider whether the cultivation area of non-paddy fields in the sericulture
industry was determined on the same basis as that of the cultivation of
other cereals. In fact, sericulture was very prosperous in the mountain-
ous regions in the Tōsan and Kantō regions, which belong to this other
group. The kokudaka value is a kind of numeraire that expresses the val-
ue of the crop produced on the land in units of rice. Therefore, the spread
of commercial crop cultivation on non-paddy fields, which were originally
unsuitable for growing main cereals such as grain, may have led to an in-
crease in productivity, i.e. an increase in agricultural production.
This was a turning point in terms of the scale of paddy field agricul-
ture in Japan since ancient period. In other words, rice remained the

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