Page 243 - Changing Living Spaces

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

The village, in this sense, was a form of enterprise on a small econom-
ic scale, albeit with more than 3,000 inhabitants, whose individual and
economic performances were conditioned by the possibility of a commu-
nal tax payment, obtained through the harvest of rice fields, which were
prone to flooding, drought and lack of sunshine. All villagers worked
against natural disasters almost every year. Amakusa, an East Asian
monsoon region, developed a kind of social capital that was able to mo-
bilize 11,317 person-days from among the residents, including men and
women, in the following years, so that the village’s rice production soon
recovered after the disastrous flood of 1803.

Acknowledgement
This study is based on reports at several international conferences.
We have received much feedback and advice from the following confe-
rence participants. We would like to take this opportunity to express
our appreciation: 1. Local diversity and changing organic economies du-
ring the Industrial Revolution: Otagi, Kyoto, Japan, 1880-1908. Satoshi
Murayama and Hiroko Nakamura. weHC 2018, Subsistence, sustenan-
ce, and changing living spaces: Comparative studies of Eurasian econo-
mies from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Boston Marriott Cambridge
& MIt Campus, Boston, MA, USA, August 2 (July 29-August 3), 2018;
2. Flood, drought, and lack of sunshine in the East Asian monsoon re-
gion: An environmental history of Takahama in the Amakusa Islands,
Kyushu, Japan, 1793-1818. Satoshi Murayama, Hiroko Nakamura,
Noboru Higashi, and Toru Terao, presented at eAeH 2019 (October 24-
27), National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, October 26, 2019;
3. Flood, Drought, and Lack of Sunshine in the East Asian Monsoon
Region: Quantified Analysis of Weather Statements in Administrative
Diaries of a Village, Takahama in the Amakusa Islands, Kyushu, Japan,
1793-1818. Satoshi Murayama and Toru Terao, presented at AOGS 2021
(Aug. 1-6), Aug. 6, Singapore, 2021. (Online).
This study is the first result of an ongoing project, which is fun-
ded by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research (B) (20H01523), suppor-
ted by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science from April 2020
and by a JSPS/MeSS bilateral project from April 2019. I am also grateful
to the Eurasian Project, which was conducted from April 1995 to March
2000, funded by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports,
Science, and Technology, which provided us with the opportunity to se-
lect Takahama in the Amakusa Islands as our research field, and other
projects supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. In
this study, we used the digitalized database sets of the village head’s dia-

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