Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan (review)

William Wayne Farris is on familiar ground in his latest monograph. Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan is in many ways a remake of Farris's first book, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645–900, which was published in 1985.¹ It also serves as a companion volume to his 2006 study, Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age.² While working on the latter, it seems, Farris found it necessary to revise some of his earlier views on ancient Japan and conceived the present volume as a result. As if two monographs in three years were not enough, Farris has also incorporated much of the material from Japan's Medieval Population and Daily Life and Demographics into his new textbook on pre-Tokugawa social and economic history.³ Rarely in Japanese studies has one author written so much on a single topic. And rarely has one been so willing to jettison formerly cherished views when better evidence comes to light.

What is new in Daily Life and Demographics? In his first book, Farris argued—controversially at the time—that Japan's population failed to grow much in the Nara and early Heian periods because of recurrent epidemics (chiefly of smallpox, measles, and influenza) and generally primitive economic conditions. Things got better in the late Heian and Kamakura periods, when changes in disease ecology and the onset of a domestic agricultural "revolution" led to a virtuous cycle of demographic and economic growth. In Japan's Medieval Population, Farris adopted a more negative view of the late Heian and Kamakura periods, arguing that conditions did not improve substantially until the Muromachi era. The book presently under review constitutes the "prequel" to that story. Daily Life and Demographics argues that Japan experienced actual population loss, followed by a slight rebound, during the Heian period, and that the country's demographic woes were the result of high mortality (from disease and, secondarily, famine) and low fertility.

The book starts, almost in Japanese style, with a detailed historiographic overview. Here we learn what prior works from the Meiji period on had to say about ancient Japanese population and related topics. The material is well organized and informative, but it does not always make for lively reading, particularly since the rest of the book is also brimming with summaries of other people's research. (One is reminded at times of the "begat" sections of the Old Testament.) The introduction might also have benefited from a slightly longer explanation of why ancient Japanese demography is worth writing (or reading) about in the first place. I have no doubt that it is; demographic trends in Japan, as elsewhere in the world, have shaped and been shaped by social, economic, and political organization; culture; and even the natural environment. But readers unfamiliar with the topic might appreciate having a clear explanation of that up front.

In chapter 1, Farris calculates the population of Japan in the early eighth, mid-tenth, and mid-twelfth centuries, arriving at estimates of 5.8–6.4 million, 4.4–5.6 million, and 5.5–6.3 million, respectively. The methods he uses are generally sound, at least in principle. Although I will not get into details, the basic approach is to take surviving data on the acreage of land under cultivation and subject it to various multipliers relating to the amount of land needed, on average, to support one person and to the percentage of people not "on the books" or not involved in farming (e.g., infants, nonagricultural rural residents, city dwellers, and people living outside the authority of the state). Of course, the surviving data are fragmentary and questionable, while the correct values of the various multipliers are for the most part unknown. This forces Farris to make large numbers of assumptions, some of them inevitably rather arbitrary. (The author is also...