Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age (review)

In the field of pre-Tokugawa Japan, few scholars rival Wayne Farris’s production in English. From famine and agriculture to warfare, protohistoric kingship, and wooden tablets, he has now returned to what one might suspect is his true passion: Japan’s premodern history as seen through demography and farming, and through the eyes of commoners.¹ In Japan’s Medieval Population, Farris, true to form, asks questions that are relevant and essential for a broader understanding of Japanese society but also extremely challenging to answer. As he states in the introduction, “the difficulty of piecing the puzzle together is matched only by its importance, for it is solely through the solution to the mystery of medieval population . . . that we can comprehend the whole of premodern Japanese history” (p. 2). The challenge lies in the nature of the sources, which despite their general abundance for premodern Japan never address issues of population in more than indirect ways. Moreover, when they do, it is difficult to know the extent to which they can be applied to the Japanese islands in general. Provincial records tend to be distinctly local, and noble diarists were often far removed from the conditions they commented on. Farris’s assessment that Japan’s fragmentary and incomplete population records for the period under investigation are “equal or better than anywhere else in the world” (p. 264) reflects the difficulty scholars face when dealing with demography in early societies anywhere. The author’s point, then, is that poor documentation should not prevent scholars from taking on the kind of broad themes that are most likely to add important dimensions to our general understanding of premodern societies.

Thus confined to using a variety of indirect records and secondary sources as well as theories and ideas from the fields of climatology and demography, Farris argues that Japan’s population grew from between 5.5 and 6.3 million in 1150 to about three times as much in the year 1600. Although the numbers sound reasonable enough, one must be aware that the units of analysis are not always given. Farris understandably excludes Hokkaido and the Ryukyu islands, but records are uneven and much better represented for some regions than for others. One might also mention that the rationale for focusing on the 1150–1600 era is rather unusual, as Farris explains that he “adopted the traditional periodization merely because population totals can be adduced for 1150 and 1600” (p. 269, note 1). The 1150s may very well be as good a starting point for Japan’s “medieval age” as any other in the late Heian age, but a reference to the Yōwa age (1181–82) as “the introduction to the medieval age” (pp. 31–32) might confuse even the most informed reader.

Given the temporal scope, Farris’s analysis is remarkable, most of all because of his ability to balance the effects on population developments of short-term and long-term changes in society. In other words, he discusses both direct and indirect causes of population growth and stagnation ranging from epidemics to warfare, technological changes, and taxation practices. Although the language may appear too technical for the general reader, the author offers a superbly rich account of village life and farming in premodern Japan, bringing to life the conditions and hardships experienced by those who tilled the land and those who labored in and around marketplaces and cities in central Japan.

Farris begins his study with an essential introduction that surveys the field on Japanese premodern demography while explaining the central arguments of the book. Building on, and in many cases revising, the theories and conclusions of Japanese scholars, he divides the period under inquiry into three subperiods, which also serve as the organizing principles for the book itself. He devotes two chapters to each period, one focusing on demography and climate changes, and the second on technological and agricultural developments...