Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan

Abstract

For centuries, scholars have wondered what daily life was like for the common people of Japan, especially for long bygone eras such as the ancient age (700–1150). Using the discipline of historical demography, William Wayne Farris shows that for most of this era, Japan’s overall population hardly grew at all, hovering around six million for almost five hundred years. The reasons for the stable population were complex. Most importantly, Japan was caught up in an East Asian pandemic that killed both aristocrat and commoner in countless numbers every generation. These epidemics of smallpox, measles, mumps, and dysentery decimated the adult population, resulting in wide-ranging social and economic turmoil. Famine recurred about once every three years, leaving large proportions of the populace malnourished or dead. Ecological degradation of central Japan led to an increased incidence of drought and soil erosion. And war led soldiers to murder innocent bystanders in droves. Under these harsh conditions, agriculture suffered from high rates of field abandonment and poor technological development. Both farming and industry shifted increasingly to labor-saving technologies. With workers at a premium, wages rose. Traders shifted from the use of money to barter. Cities disappeared. The family was an amorphous entity, with women holding high status in a labor-short economy. Broken families and an appallingly high rate of infant mortality were also part of kinship patterns. The average family lived in a cold, drafty dwelling susceptible to fire, wore clothing made of scratchy hemp, consumed meals just barely adequate in the best of times, and suffered from a lack of sanitary conditions that increased the likelihood of disease outbreak. While life was harsh for almost all people from 700 to 1150, these experiences represented investments in human capital that would bear fruit during the medieval epoch (1150–1600).

Japan and the great divergence, 730–1874

“…For further details, see text and appendix. Sources and notes: The urban population data for Japan excluding Ezochi and Ryūkyū (present-day Hokkaido and Okinawa) are taken from Kito (1996), Farris (2009a), and Saito and Takashima (2015;. They include persons living in settlements of at least 10,000 persons.…”

“…For the ancient period, the estimates of Farris (2009a) are derived ultimately from information on the number and average size of villages (for the year 730) or the cultivated area together with the amount of land needed to provide sufficient food to support a person (for the years 950 and 1150). For 730, Farris reworks the estimates of Sawada (1927) and Kamata (1984), based on the number of gō (villages or administrative units consisting of 50 households) in Rissho zanpen, an ancient penal statute compiled in the first half of the eighth century (Kondo, 1969).…”

“…To deal with this uncertainty, we provide data reliability assessments and sensitivity analysis. Here, we build upon the subjective error margins approach used by Farris (2006;2009a) for Japanese population and agricultural output. This approach has also been used in historical national accounting studies for other countries (Feinstein and Thomas 2002; Zanden and van Leeuwen, 2012;Broadberry et al, 2018).…”

Demography, trade and state power: a tripartite model of medieval farming/language dispersals in the Ryukyu Islands

“…Population growth in Japan slowed in the eighth century owing to smallpox and other epidemics; the years from 800 to 1150 saw demographic stasis owing to epidemics, famine and ecological degradation (Farris, 1985, 2017). A proposal made in the 1960s that there was widespread land clearance over the tenth to fourteenth centuries has been critiqued (Farris, 2009, pp. 69–73).…”