Rice price and agrarian economy in Tokugawa Japan
As we just saw above, the population sizes of the two villages declined at the times of known major famines. How did local grain prices fluctuate under these economic hardships? Were there any trends in grain price variations? The only available series of grain prices in Tokugawa Japan with sufficiently long duration are rice prices.
This study uses rice price series in the local market of Aizu to measure annual fluctuations in agricultural output, which in turn serves as a measure of short-term economic stress.7 Unlike grain prices in pre-industrial Europe, rice prices in Tokugawa Japan were not always determined by market factors such as harvests and the demand for consumption, trades, and storage, but were often influenced by the political and policy-related decisions of domain governments. Here, a brief explanation of the nature of the rice price and the agrarian economy in Tokugawa Japan is in order.A major characteristic of the Tokugawa economy is the kokudaka system (Hayami 1985: 75-107). Under the increasing prevalence of a money economy, the central and domain governments adopted this system under which all agricultural output was measured, taxes on peasants were assessed (not individually but on villages as a whole), and the incomes of domain lords and their warriors (samurai) were determined in terms of the value of one unit (koku) of rice yield.8 The system
was facilitated by the separation, both physically and socially, between samurai and peasants (Hayami 1985: 75-8). Whereas samurai all lived in the castle town of their domain lord, villages were inhabited almost exclusively by peasants; thus in Tokugawa Japan the so-called ‘landed warriors' ceased to exist and samurai essentially became salaried officials of domain governments. Meanwhile, peasants were required to pay taxes: in some domains they were required to pay solely in rice; while in others they were required to pay in money—it was thus necessary to have a sort of exchange rate between rice and money.
For example, if the domain government required their peasants to pay 500-koku-worth of taxes half in rice and half in money, peasants would have had to sell rice in the market to pay for the 250-koku-worth of taxes in money. If crops failed and there was not enough yield to pay for the 250-koku of taxes in rice, they would have had to buy rice in the market. The government then sold the rice collected as taxes in the market to obtain necessary funds. Putting it differently, harvested rice could have three uses: to be consumed directly by peasants, to be sold by peasants directly to merchants (commercial rice), and to be paid as taxes to domain governments or to the central government if peasants lived in areas governed directly by the Tokugawa shogunate (tax rice).
Evidence indicates that in the Nihonmatsu domain peasants were required to pay taxes with a combination of rice and money (Koriyama-shi 1981^: 320-4). Therefore, if the local rice price took an abrupt upturn due to a crop failure, the domain government had a strong incentive to curb the increase since if the rice price became too high too quickly, peasants would not have been able to buy the rice needed to pay for taxes. On the other hand, if the rice price became too low, it pressed hard on the livelihood of the samurai and put the domain government in a financial predicament, since the income of the domain government and the salaries of its samurai were obtained by selling tax rice in the market. In this sense, the rice price in the local market is not only an indicator of harvest variations, but also served as an exchange rate between rice and money. Given that there are no data on local rice prices based solely on the market conditions in the Nihonmatsu domain (nor northeastern Japan in general), we use the ‘exchange-rate' based rice price data from the local market of Aizu.
Despite the government-controlled nature of rice prices, annual variations in rice prices in the market of Aizu seem to reflect fairly well local crop failures at the time of major famines. As shown in Figure 17.2, the local rice price shows an upsurge at around the times of the three major famines of Kyoho (in 1730s), Tenmei (in 1780s), and Tempo (in 1830s), although increases are by no means limited to the years of known famines.
2.4