Japan's Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundation of the Gono (review)

Japan's Protoindustrial Elite: The Economic Foundation of the Gono. By Edward E. Pratt. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. viii+260. $39.50.

This book is a major contribution to our understanding of early modern social and economic history. Edward Pratt's subject is the gono, literally "wealthy farmers," a class of rural protocapitalists that Pratt dubs Japan's protoindustrial elite. Historians have long been aware of the importance of the gono. They were the landlords, moneylenders, and entrepreneurs of rural Japanese society. They were critical in the spread of commercial relations to the Japanese countryside. Despite their importance, the gono have received only sporadic attention from American historians: the last book-length study in English was Thomas Smith's 1959 classic The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan. Pratt's study redresses this neglect with a careful examination of the role of the gono in Japanese economic development.

Pratt covers much the same ground as Smith: the spread of commodity production to the countryside during the late 1600s, the growth of rural markets, the diffusion of new crops and technologies, the rise of wage labor and credit. But Pratt's study breaks new ground in several ways. While Smith relied almost entirely on secondary sources, Pratt has done careful archival work on specific gono families. These case studies are his signal contribution. While Smith noted tremendous mobility, both upward and downward, of gono families, Pratt describes in human detail how fortunes were made and lost. The Ohashi family, for example, grew rich in the early 1800s by buying raw silk from local farmers and selling it to urban and rural merchants. They were also engaged in money lending and had extensive landholdings. But the family struggled in the mid-1800s: no capable heir emerged, the domain imposed a series of ruinous levies, and the area was hit by series of crop failures that made small farmers default on their loans. The family also had problems adapting to the new market opportunities presented by the expansion of foreign trade in the 1850s. As local producers began to ship directly to Yokohoma for export to Europe and the United States, gono families lost their established market networks. The Ohashi tried, but failed, to enter the export trade.

Pratt also enhances our understanding of the gono by extending his study into the twentieth century. Although this is, at heart, a book about early modern Japan, Pratt also shows how difficult it was for even well-connected gono houses to adapt to the new economic conditions of the Meiji period.

Pratt's major interpretative contribution is his focus on the symbiotic relationship between the gono and their clients. The gono profited from tenancy and from loans to poorer farmers. But destitute farmers could not repay loans, and farmers fled villages with poor soil and high rents. Rural poverty also meant declining revenues for samurai governments, and this made those governments more inclined to demand extraordinary levies from the gono. The gono thus had a vested interest in the general economic health of their villages.

With this nuanced approach, Pratt positions himself between modernization theory and Japanese Marxism (he nicely summarizes the Japanese Marxian debate in an endnote). In Pratt's work the gono are clearly exploitative but not malevolent. As local leaders, they were active in improving local conditions. As entrepreneurs they sought to profit from wage labor and tenancy, and did so in the context of fierce competition from other gono. By focusing on individual families, rather than an abstract class, Pratt conveys how precarious the gono felt. Wealth did not guarantee future wealth: changes in market conditions or the loss of a political patron could drive the most successful gono household to ruin in a few years.

Japan's Protoindustrial Elite is not without problems. The introductory chapters on regional production and markets are more encyclopedic than interpretive. The conclusion is far...