Pestilence, famine, pillage. For most of the time between 600 and 1600, these scourges stalked the short, hard lives of commoners and elites alike. Climatic changes played a part, as demonstrated by bouts of intense volcanic eruptions. Even in good years, low agricultural productivity doomed cultivators to “spring hunger,” while urban dwellers lived in cesspools of disease. Marked more by stasis than by progress, the uneven course of economic development suffered many long-term setbacks. When growth began in the fourteenth century, it stimulated repeated periods of endemic warfare.
In this textbook designed for undergraduates, William Wayne Farris demonstrates how demographic and ecological constraints affected the best-laid plans of rulers and warlords. For scholars, the book provides a welcome synthesis of Farris's previous publications over the last twenty-five years, which illuminate Japan's demographic, social, and economic history to 1600. To balance a depressing litany of hardships, Farris enlivens his narrative with short explanations of material culture such as toilets and telling anecdotes revolving around often obscure individuals. Both in reading written texts against archaeological findings and in developing a periodization distinct from a chronology based on political events, he follows the latest trends in writing Japanese history. By refusing to use terms such as “ancient,” “medieval,” or “feudal,” he removes Japanese history from dependence on European-derived conceptual categories. At the same time, he emphasizes Japan's debts to Continental culture over the centuries, including the introduction of Champa rice, green tea, and soy bean curd, which contributed to the foundation for economic growth, and he situates Japan within a wider East Asian network of warfare and trade that, by the sixteenth century, extended as far as Southeast Asia.
Farris begins his account with the Paleolithic populating of the islands before moving to an extended discussion of the Jōmon era, perhaps “the most materially affluent hunter-gatherer society known to the modern world” (p. 5). Despite a varied diet, people were short in stature and life expectancy. Although the Yayoi period is known for the introduction of agriculture, it had not completely replaced foraging even in the 1600s. Across the globe, the advent of agriculture brought warfare and the first inklings of social differentiation. In Japan, these culminated in Yamato state formation.
In subsequent chapters, Farris outlines political developments before focusing on demographic change, agriculture, industry, religion and culture, domestic and overseas trade, and issues related to class, family, women, and children. The period from 600 to 800 marked what he titles “An End to Growth” (pp. 27–52), owing to a demographic collapse caused by smallpox (in earlier books he resisted naming this disease), crop failure, and ecological degradation. Between 800 and 1050, political elites tried a variety of innovative schemes to amass resources in “an Age of Depopulation” (pp. 53–80), while new local leaders, “the rich,” resisted. Although conflict rarely reached the level of full-scale war, violence spread across the countryside. The quality of silk declined, commerce shrank, money went out of use, and powerful aristocrats and temples found their building projects delayed for decades. Farris acknowledges that the “trifunctional elite” (p. 81) of aristocrats, temples, and warriors (other historians refer to them as power blocs) that dominated this period lasted until 1300, but his next chapter deals with the period between 1050 and 1180, “an Epoch of Minimal Growth” (pp. 81–106), which was driven by a renewal of the iron trade with Koryo Korea and the stimulation of overseas trade with Sung dynasty China. Everyday life held such horrors that elites cultivated refined “aesthetic concepts such as miyabi as a form of escapism” (p. 90). Then followed “an Age of Want” (pp. 107–35) between 1180 and 1280, when famine limited population growth and Buddhist clergy offered heterodox paths to salvation during the later days of Buddhist law. Growth started to revive between 1280 and 1450, thanks to improved agricultural products and techniques, a more benign climate, and a temporary respite from war during the age of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu. Finally, the period of endemic warfare between 1450 and 1600 saw “Uneven Expansion,” (pp. 164–94), with the population first falling from the effects of starvation and then rising after 1550 as improved irrigation, more intense cultivation, and trade raised production above subsistence. A bleak history indeed.
Although Farris notes points at which historians have no answers, a student reading this book would learn nothing of the debates around such topics as the origin of the samurai or the reasons for the Mongol defeat in 1281. The inclusion of issues related to all members of society is welcome, but his focus on the declining status of women assumes that they once had autonomy that they later lost. Such was not the case. From elites to commoners, from the days of Himiko to 1600 and beyond, relations between men and women were characterized by gender asymmetry, which, in differing ways depending on the period, inevitably gave men greater control over women's welfare than women had over men's. “Opportunities for sexual liaisons” (p. 132) was not necessarily a boon for commoner women, for example, if they were not the ones to decide with whom they would have sex. Despite these and other caveats, the book presents a refreshing perspective on Japanese history that should work well in the classroom.
