NOTES
Japan was under the Tokugawa shogunate's ‘seclusion’ policy from the 1630s to 1859. For one thing, the term ‘seclusion’ may be a misnomer because, as a trade policy, the point of the regulations was to bring overseas trade under strict control by confining foreign merchants to one port, Nagasaki.
There were two other trade channels as well, that is, the Tsushima and Satsuma routes. On the other hand, it is true that the volume of overseas trade did decline during the long ‘seclusion’ period.More precisely, three different currencies were issued by the shogunate: gold coin, silver by weight, and copper coin or penny cash which was circulated in both gold and silver zones. Silver was never circulated as coin, only by weight. In Osaka, therefore, as transactions grew merchant-issued bills, expressed in silver as a unit of account, came to be used widely.
Other rice wage series are summarized in Yasuba (1987: 299), based on which he suggested that the sharp reduction of real wages in the Kinai was a rather exceptional result of the ‘socio-economic disruption’ in the late Tokugawa period.
The koku is a measure of volume or capacity. As a rice equivalent, however, the kokudaka can be converted into a weight measure (with 1 koku being 150 kg of rice). Here I adopted Angus Maddison's conversion results (2001: 255).
One could make a fine tuning to the calculation of wage growth by distinguishing the last three years of upturn from the previous phase of decline. In that case, of course, the re-calculated rate of increase in real wages would get closer to that for GDP growth in Table 3.3.
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