Page 225 - Changing Living Spaces

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

land for rice paddies. Takahama had a population of 3,413 in 1816 (Bunka
13), and the village kokudaka was only 611 koku in size, which was equiv-
alent to 0.18 koku per capita.3 The population of Takahama4 went from a
stagnant phase to a gradual growth phase, increasing from 3,086 in 1785
(Tenmei 3) to 3,470 in 1818 (Bunka 15). To examine how the disasters af-
fected the population of the village, we need to look separately at the
three periods of population decline: the first period from 1807 (Bunka 4)
to 1809 (Bunka 6), when the population decreased by 63 people; the sec-
ond period from 1813 (Bunka 10) to 1814 (Bunka 11), when it decreased by
41 people; and the third period from 1815 (Bunka 12) to 1816 (Bunka 13),
when it decreased by 35 people (figure 4).
In contrast to Takahama, Sakitsu, a village near Takahama, suffered
a dramatic loss of population as a result of three smallpox outbreaks in
1801, 1813, and 1834. As a fishing and trading port whose continued exist-
ence depended on its market network, Sakitsu experienced changes in its
population: in 1690 it was 850, it rose to 2,466 in 1808, declined to 1,252
in 1864, and rose again to 1,414 in 1872 (figure 3). Studies on the effects of
smallpox outbreaks shed light on the vulnerability of isolated early mod-
ern villages such as Sakitsu (Murayama and Higashi 2012), which suffered
from repeated smallpox outbreaks. Isolation due to quarantine destroyed
the economic interactions on which Sakitsu depended, and thus smallpox
outbreaks led to rapid population decline. This observation shows that
livelihoods during the Tokugawa era were primarily based on rice paddies

3 In the Tokugawa period, it was widely held that 1 koku (=150 kg of rice volume or
capacity) was enough to feed one person for one year. According to Nakamura’s
calculation (1968, 168–74), the production of farm products in the benchmark
year 1700 was 169 kg, exceeding the level of 150 kg (or 1 koku/person), and it in-
creased over time to 201 kg in 1872. In many Japanese villages, land tax and oth-
er taxes were static or even slightly reduced, although the productivity of land
was generally on the rise, and thus, an increasing amount of ‘surplus’ was a gen-
eral phenomenon. The widely held notion that the land tax imposed during the
Tokugawa period was cruelly oppressive is unsupported. While kokudaka did not
reflect the actual productivity of a village, it served as a criterion that is com-
monly used within a region, and due to the ecological and climatic conditions of
each village, the kokudaka per capita in a village differed enormously, not only re-
gionally but even locally within neighbouring villages. According to our provi-
sional study, the difference in village kokudaka per capita could have fluctuated
from under 0.2 to more than 3.0 koku. See: Smith (1988) and also Alfani and Tul-
lio (2019), especially regarding information on economic inequality in early mod-
ern fiscal states.
4 See the sources shown in figure 3.

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