Ordinary Economies in Japan: A Historical Perspective, 1750–1950 (review)

A practitioner of intellectual history, Najita has produced much fine research on elite philosophers of Japan during the Tokugawa (1600–1868) and modern (1868–) periods. However, in this remarkable book, Najita takes the methodologies and concerns that he has developed over the years and applies them to the study of “average” commoners in villages and towns—people confronting daily economic problems from the latter half of the Tokugawa period through the first half of the twentieth century. Najita explores their notions of the ties between morality and economic behavior as they confronted natural disasters, oppressive feudal lords in the Tokugawa period, a capitalistic developmental state in modernity, and the various personal trials that affect all families. He centers the notion of “mutual assistance” (sōgo fujo) in his analysis because commoners did so in their rich and diverse thought about economy, often in conscious resistance to the oppressive ideologies of the authorities. Najita’s intellectual analysis benefits from his attention to their everyday social and economic contexts and activities, a method that given this book’s success, should also be employed more often to the study of elite intellectuals.

Confucian discourses favored by the elite samurai class tended to denigrate money and commerce as the realm of greed and as a bad influence on morality. In an earlier study of the philosophers of the Kaitokudō merchant academy in early modern Osaka, Najita made convincing arguments that the school’s teachers had particularly valuable and interesting insights into political economy because of their place as merchants.¹ In the current book, he comments, “When I wrote about these merchant economists, it seemed to me that they were somehow unusual in their conceptual acumen and that they developed their ideas as elite figures without much discursive entanglement with the less scholarly writers of ‘ordinary’ texts. But this turns out not to be the case” (37).

Najita focuses his exploration on kō, the local cooperative organizations that were independent of higher authorities but that variously served local communities to provide health insurance, loans to the needy, lotteries, investments, funding for pilgrimages and large projects, and many other requirements. In the diverse commoner discourses about these cooperatives, the ethical importance of mutual aid, honesty, and the need to keep precise measurements and records affirmed the moral nature of the pursuit of wealth and personal security through economic activity. Najita discusses the various philosophical and ethical issues in the context of discourses on knowledge and virtue produced by such scholars as Ogyū Sorai and Kaihō Seiryō.

Najita also discusses the fascinating activist, and commoner, Ninomiya Sontoku, who made it his business to restore economic viability to villages in distress, while preaching that work, planning, and mutual aid were the moral human response to the benefits of nature. Sontoku’s cooperatives and other kō continued to function in national modernity and ideologically resisted incorporation into the social-Darwinist and free-market ideologies of the modern elite, emphasizing the ethical duty of mutual aid in economic activity even as they gradually and variously evolved into savings and loan associations and insurance companies. Najita’s discussion of the debate between the cooperative leader Okada Ryōichirō and Yanagida Kunio as representative of the state is a brilliant exposition of the various stakes involved in national modernization.