Hers is an “alternative economic history,” explains Penelope Francks. She will recount “the story of the Japanese consumer.” The story is “alternative” because the “‘demand-side,’ 'bottom-up’ approach is not the one to be found underlying the usual account of Japan's economic history” (p. 2).

Francks is right in her description of the scholarship on Japan. Most scholars of the economy have focused more closely on supply than on demand. They detail the growth in paddies irrigated, but not what foods the increasingly available rice displaced. They detail the kilometers of railroad track laid, but not who rode the new trains or how those people had moved about before. They detail the spools-per-factory installed in the cotton-spinning firms, but not what the buyers of the cotton fabric had worn instead.

Franck's point is not that no one studied Japanese consumers. It is that they were not professional economic historians. By the peculiar division of academic labor, economic historians of Japan focused on supply. Anthropologists and social historians did demand. For the economically inclined reader, this split generated more than the occasional frustration. The social historians offered plenty of “telling anecdotes,” but—as readers of this Journal know all too well—those anecdotes gave little assurance that they told what the historians claimed they told. And some historians routinely laced their accounts with blindingly opaque quotations from Walter Benjamin (or Adorno or Foucault), all the while ignoring any sense of equilibria.

Francks writes sparely, clearly, and analytically, but does introduce a few gaps of her own. First, she deliberately leaves half the story untold. She will focus on the “demand-side” story, she writes, and she does. But price and quantity obviously derive from the intersection of two curves. Franks focuses on one of the two, but that necessarily leaves some questions unasked and therefore unanswered.

For example, Francks explains how Japanese shifted their menus from one-pot stews to “rice plus side dishes” formulae. Fine and good, but presumably the shift relates to the conventionally detailed increases in irrigated paddy acreage. Did the higher demand for rice coax investors into irrigating more land, or did farmers irrigate the land for other reasons and the resulting lower rice prices induce Japanese to eat more rice? Did exogenous changes in pesticide and fertilizer technology shift production patterns, or were technological changes themselves endogenous to the demand for white rice? In her other books and articles, Francks explores questions like this at length. Here, she apparently decided not to connect them to her new story.

Second, Francks leaves largely undiscussed the tie between consumption and income levels. She focuses on consumption from about 1600 to the present. For the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, she mostly recounts what Japanese ate, drank, and wore. Not until the twentieth century does she cover a broader range of goods and services.

In part, Francks’ bias reflects the information available. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese artists and authors describe epicurean eating and fashionable dressing at length. By contrast, the government counted tax revenues, but hardly anything else. By the twentieth century, firms left elaborate records of what they did, and the government measured everything from schoolboy heights to kilograms of apples grown per prefecture.

Yet the bias also reflected income. Poor people spend most of what they make on food and clothing, and most Japanese in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were poor. Not until 1900 did most have enough to buy a wide variety of other products. Focusing so closely on consumption, however, Francks leaves some of this connection unexplored. She obviously understands it—she chronicles changes in national income in her own work elsewhere. But she does not focus on it here.

Last, Francks will leave the readers of this JOURNAL wishing for more numbers. Like the social historians, Francks all too often relies on the anecdote when she might do better with a column of careful numbers. The numbers might tell a different story, and they might tell a better one as well. Unfortunately, Francks did not take the job of estimating consumption volume as part of her project—not volumes by geography, by sector, or over time. She tells us Japanese changed what they ate, but (for the most part) not how rapidly, where, or over which decades. Neither does she tell us what effect any shift had on caloric consumption, or whether any of these changes correlated with anthropomorphic patterns.

The numbers that Francks does include she mostly takes from other sources. In a series of tables in the appendix, she includes some of the data readers will want. Unfortunately, she primarily includes those found in the standard sources. She does not give us many new estimates. Instead, she mostly weaves a narrative—a careful, thoughtful, and analytically sophisticated narrative to be sure—around the standard statistics.