The assessment of relative living standards, dominated by food, has been central to analysis of the timing and causes of the Great Divergence. Comparative quantitative measures of real incomes and food availability have generated the conclusion that living standards on the western side of Eurasia, in particular in England, were already higher than those observable on the eastern side by the seventeenth century, with the divergence widening thereafter. However, in the English case, research based on evidence as to what people actually ate suggests that the path of dietary change was by no means a straightforward matter of rising calorie consumption. When viewed in the light of this, evidence derived from the work of food historians of Japan can similarly be used to reveal a more complex pattern of dietary development than can be encompassed in quantitative estimates, even if along the lines of a very different diet and cuisine. This needs to be taken into account when living standards are compared across the divergence.

Contrary both to Pomeranz's argument for the comparability of pre-industrial living standards across Eurasia and to the accumulating evidence of the extent of growth in the Japanese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quantitative historical comparisons of living standards consistently place Japan on a level with the least developed parts of Europe and imply that the living conditions of ordinary Japanese people only began to approach those of the industrialized West once imported modernization had been absorbed. This article uses concepts derived from comparative consumption history to go deeper into this issue, arguing that, from at least the late eighteenth century, Japanese living standards were changing in ways that paralleled equivalent developments in Europe. Through the consumption histories of a set of ‘transformative’ products – rice, tea, tobacco, and sugar – it seeks to demonstrate the potential for comparative qualitative analysis of living standards and to show that, in Japan as in Europe, the ‘transformation of desire’ paved the way for industrialization.

The growth of consumption and the emergence of the consumer have become major fields of study in the history of Europe and North America but have been largely neglected by historians of Japan, especially economic ones. This paper argues that, in Japan as elsewhere, the “birth of the consumer” predated the onset of industrialization—hence was not simply a function of the opening of the country to Western modernity—and that the growth of consumption, of “indigenous” as well as “foreign” goods, went on to represent an integral part of the process of economic development. This argument is illustrated by a case study of growth and change in the “ordinary consumption” of food and drink, and in particular of sake, a “traditional” product that emerged as a major consumer good, and of beer, the “foreign” product that was to become, alongside sake, one of the necessities of modern Japanese life.

“Rural crisis” is a concept with which anyone who has lived through the summer of 2001 in Britain is only too familiar; the parallels between the rhetoric employed daily in the media here, and that surrounding the undoubtedly much more severe crisis that hit Japanese farm households in the 1930s, are a reminder that periodic agricultural instability remains an as-yet unsolved problem in industrial economies. Nonetheless, Kerry Smith's study of the impact of the Great Depression on rural Japan, which interweaves accounts of the national-level policymaking process with a case study of one village, locates Japan's rural crisis within the specific process of economic and political change that generated both the wartime political economy and significant features of the postwar institutional structure. In this, he reflects the ongoing work of a number of Japanese scholars who are seeking to locate the grass-roots-level continuities between the immediate prewar and wartime periods and the postwar era of reform and growth. However, his wide-ranging study is the first in English to trace in such detail, through the experiences of an individual village and its inhabitants, the impact of and responses to the depression in rural Japan.

In recent years, a considerable change has taken place in the way in which analysts of economic development have come to understand the nature of the growth process in rural areas and the relations between agricultural and nonagricultural activity as industrialization takes place. Growing awareness of the significance of nonagricultural activities in rural areas, of rural industrialization, and of the “livelihood diversification strategies” adopted by rural households has prompted this shift in understanding (Ellis 1998, 1–2). The strict agriculture/industry divide of standard dual-economy models has been broken down, and scholars have recognized the implications, both theoretical and policy-related, of the existence and development of the “pluriactive” rural household that derives its income from a variety of sources alongside agriculture. Various ways of analyzing the nature and implications of agriculture/industry interaction within rural areas, and the economic activities of rural households that underlie them, have been developed, but central to much of the work on the issue has been a model of the “growth linkages” between agricultural and nonagricultural activity. This model seeks to demonstrate how backward and forward linkages between growth in agricultural output and the expansion of manufacturing activity in rural areas operate to produce a “virtuous circle” of expanding employment opportunities, rising and often quite equally distributed rural incomes, and improving standards of living.