Page 223 - Changing Living Spaces

Agricultural Crises Due to Flood, Drought, and Lack of Sunshine

of the United Kingdom, it was necessary to determine which time period
was optimal. Using energy consumption as an indicator for periodization,
the relevant period in Takahama was before the seventeenth century in
the United Kingdom, which paved the way for the Industrial Revolution.
As part of the Asian monsoon region, Takahama struggled with the con-
straints of the organic economy (figure 3). To clarify the characteristics of
this Asian monsoon region and contrast the crop constraints of an organ-
ic economy in Takahama, we focused on monsoonal climate events with
clear seasonal patterns that significantly affected agricultural production
from spring to autumn. Large areas of South, Southeast, and East Asia
are characterized by abundant annual rainfall (figure 3a).
On the other hand, monsoon systems provide a dry winter and a hu-
mid summer climate (figure 3c, d), although the geographic distribution
of precipitation varies greatly and is related to topographic complexity.
On the north and northwest sides of Japan, it is humid during the win-
ter season because much moisture evaporates from the sea surface of the
back-arc basins of the Japanese islands. This is also one of the results
of the monsoon climate caused by the spectacular seasonal reversal of
the thermal contrast between land and ocean. Monsoon systems result
in dry, wet, hot, and cold periods, and their contrasting geographical and
seasonal characteristics are influenced by tropical cyclones and storms
(figure 3b), extreme weather conditions, and a lack of sunshine.

Population Changes in Takahama
Arthur E. Imhof, a German historical demographer, said the following:2
Today it makes sense to talk about a life expectancy of—for example—
seventy or eighty years, since the vast majority of us can really count on
living that long. To count on any number of years—however few—would
have been folly for our forebears up until but a few generations ago. On
the contrary, one of the most pronounced characteristics of their time
was the omnipresent danger to every human existence. Extended peri-
ods without at least one of the three scourges, ‘plague, hunger and war’,
were unknown.
The major disasters in early modern Japan during the Tokugawa sho-
gunate were rainstorms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, the spread of ep-
idemics (especially smallpox), and fires. However, there were no mortality
2 Imhof (1990, 37). Historical demography revealed that the early modern mortal-
ity factors were chiefly epidemics, starvation and war. See also Imhof (1988, 92–
102).

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