The Labor Force in Meiji Economic Growth: A Quantitative Study of Yamanashi Prefecture*

¹ Umemura, (,) Mataji, , Chingin, Koyō, Nōgyō (“Wages, Employment, Agriculture”; Tokyo: Taimeido, 1961).

² Rosovsky, Henry and Ohkawa, Kazushi, “The Indigenous Components of the Modern Japanese Economy,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, IX (Apr. 1961), 476–501.

³ Abegglen, James C., The Japanese Factory: Aspects of Its Social Organization (New York: Free Press [Macmillan], 1958).

⁴ Tōkeiin, Kai (no) Kuni Meiji 12-nen Jimbetsu (no) Shirabe (“Census of Individuals in the Province of Kai”; Tokyo, 1882).

⁵ Yamaguchi, (,) Kazuo, , Meiji Zenki Keizai no Bunseki (“An Analysis of Early Meiji Economy”; Tokyo: Tokyo Daigaku Shuppankai, 1956).

⁶ “Farm household” (nōka or nōgyō setai) is used here as it is in the Japanese data, as a household in which at least one member is engaged in agriculture.

⁷ This point is emphasized by Ranis: “Reserves of productivity usually do exist somewhere in the underdeveloped economy …. Taking up the slack in any economy means making potential increments of productivity socially available …. In the case of Japan, slack was in evidence mainly in the form of excess labor on the land and in reserves of productivity in the land.” Ranis, Gustav, “The Financing of Japanese Economic Development,” Economic History Review, XI (Apr. 1959).

⁸ Among these would be included Umemura (,) Mataji (cited in n. 1) and the following works: Ohkawa, Kazushi, Growth Rate of the Japanese Economy (Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1957); Shinohara, (,) Miyohei, , Nihon Keizai no Seichō to Junkan (“Growth and Cycles in the Japanese Economy”; Tokyo: Kinokuniya, 1961); Yamada, (,) Yūzō, , Nihon Kokumin Shotoku Suikei Shiryō (“Comprehensive Survey of National Income Data for Japan”; Tokyo: Tōyō Keizai Shimpōsha, 1957).

⁹ Hijikata (,) Shigeyoshi, “Shokugyōbetsu Jinkō no Hensen o Tsūjite Mitaru Shitsugyō Mondai” (“The Unemployment Problem Seen Through Changes in the Employed Population by Industry”), Shakai Seisaku Jihō (Sept. 1929).

¹⁰ Hemmi (,) Kenzō, “Nōgyō Jinkō no Kōteisei” (“The Constancy of the Agricultural Population”) and “Nōgyō Yūgyō Jinkō no Suikei” (“Estimates of the Employed Population in Agriculture”), both in Tōbata, (,) Seiichi, , and Ohkawa, (,) Kazushi, , Nihon no Keizai to Nōgyō (“Japan's Economy and Agriculture”; Vol. I, Tokyo: Iwanami, 1956).

¹¹ Tōkeiin (cited in n. 4).

¹² Tōkeikyoku, Naikaku, Taishō 9-nen Kokusei Chōsa Hōkoku: Zenkoku no Bu dai 8—Shokugyō (“Report of the 1920 Population Census: Nationwide, Part 8—Occupations”; Tokyo, 1934).

¹³ A complete description of the techniques used to estimate population, labor force, and FTE by sector can be seen in ch. iii and in the appendix of my unpublished doctoral dissertation, “Employment and Wages in Japanese Economic Development: A Quantitative Study of Yamanashi Prefecture in the Meiji Era” (University of Washington, 1965).

¹⁴ Following Rosovsky and Ohkawa (cited in n. 2) we have considered both the nature of the product or service and the productive organization in classifying activities into traditional (indigenous) or modern components. Our definition of a traditional product is slightly different from theirs; here a traditional item is one which was regularly available before 1859. Some products must be regarded as “hybrids” of traditional and modern—for instance, machine-reeled silk, a “traditional” product manufactured at least partially by modern techniques. Some products, like beef and clocks, were certainly produced in Japan in Tokugawa times but only in minute quantities, and the increase in their production and consumption can hardly be distinquished from that of completely new or foreign products. These cases have been classified here as “ambiguous,” along with those services which combine both modern and traditional elements—for instance, the retail sale, in traditional family enterprises, of modern or imported goods. Moreover, there were “teachers” and “soldiers” in pre-Meiji Japan, but whether this fact justifies regarding a primary school teacher or an army officer as pursuing an “indigenous” calling is a purely arbitrary matter; such occupations too have been classified as “ambiguous” cases. All occupations listed specifically as occurring in kaisha (companies) were classified as modern.

¹⁵ The rounded figures for 1920 here and following are a result of the rough division of some of the 244 occupational categories in the 1920 census which clearly lumped together indigenous and modern-type activities. The 774 categories in the 1879 census could be grouped according to the preceding definitions with considerable confidence.

¹⁶ For a classic first-hand account of the labor market in the cotton-spinning industry in the first decades of this century, see Hosoi, (,) Wakizō, , Jokō Aishi (“The Sorry History of the Factory Girls”; Tokyo: Iwanami, 1925).

¹⁷ Ōkōchi, Kazuo, Labor in Modern Japan (Tokyo: Science Council of Japan, 1958).

¹⁸ Sumiya, (,) Mikio, , Nihon Chin Rōdō Shiron (“Dissertation on the History of Wage Labor in Japan”; Tokyo: Tōdai Gakujutsu Sōsho, 1955).

¹⁹ Cited in n. 1.

²⁰ Real daily wage rates for agricultural labor did not fall but moved roughly in the same fashion as daily wage rates in manufacturing. These rates, however, reflect supply and demand conditions at the seasonal peaks and are not an indicator of the year-round marginal productivity of agricultural labor but rather of wages in occupations alternative to agriculture at those times of year in which the labor market was tightest.

²¹ The values ranked in this case were the arithmetic means of the ratios between five-year arithmetic means of daily wages for each occupational category and those of female silk-reeling workers. Not all of the six five-year periods were available for every occupational category, and where values were missing within any one five-year period, the ratio was calculated for the remaining years.

²² The mean deduction for adult female workers alone was 9.2 sen, but we could not calculate mean expenditures separately by age and sex.

²³ The slogan of the militant nationalists, “Expel the barbarians.”

²⁴ Fukuzawa, (,) Yukichi, , “Tōjin Ōrai” (“Coming and Going of the Foreigners”) in Fukuzawa Yukichi Zenshū (“Complete Works of Fukuzawa Yukichi”; Tokyo: Iwanami, 1951), Vol. I.

* The author is indebted to the Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship Program for a grant under which part of the research reported in this paper was conducted in 1960–62, and to Mataji Umemura for falling his attention to the 1879 census of Yamanashi Prefecture.

Throughout this article, the names of Japanese authors are listed in the following way: where the citation is to an English-language work, the name is printed in the Western fashion, with the given name followed by the family name; where the citation is to a Japanese-language work, the family name precedes the given name and is separated from it by a comma in parentheses.