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  • Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan by Charlotte von Verschuer
  • W. Wayne Farris (bio)
Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan. By Charlotte von Verschuer; translated by Wendy Cobcroft Routledge, London, 2016. xiv, 356 pages. $145.00.

The place of rice in Japanese agriculture and civilization has been a contentious issue among scholars of all disciplines for 50 years or more. Sahara Makoto, the leading archaeologist of the Yayoi period (defined by Sahara as 300 BCE–300 CE), argued in his heyday (the 1980s) that rice was introduced to Japan during that period and overtook the islands almost overnight. According to Sahara, the chief characteristic of the Yayoi people was that they ate rice. On the other hand, Amino Yoshihiko, a historian of medieval Japan (roughly 1100–1600), told me once in a scholarly conversation that rice farmers comprised no more than 25 per cent of the population of Japan in the medieval period. Later, while I was doing research for Japan’s Medieval Population,1 I relayed Amino’s words to Hayami Akira, the dean of Japanese demographers specializing in the Edo period, who stated angrily [End Page 136] that Amino was a “fool” (baka). Such is the capacity of this issue to generate more heat than light.

Charlotte von Verschuer therefore deserves great credit for walking into this minefield. Moreover, she cites a basketful of primary sources and secondary interpretations in a scholarly narrative that generates more light than heat. That is not to say that her book is without flaws. The argument repeats much information already available in English while neglecting other points, presents a dubious chronology of agricultural development in Japan, and forces the reader through pages of undigested primary sources. Reading this book was a chore akin to boring through solid rock.

The contents may be summarized as follows. Rather than setting up the larger issue in the introduction, the author describes her conclusions and shows the differing routes by which Oryza sativa japonica and dry grains were introduced into Japan—rice from the south and unirrigated crops mainly from the north. I found the idea of dry crops being introduced from the north interesting and requiring more explanation while the discussion of wet rice merely repeated what is already known. Chapter 1, with its detailed account of the agricultural process and agricultural development from the Yayoi period through Edo times (1600–1868), is overlong. The side issues examined seem like digressions and do not receive the attention they deserve. Insufficient thought has been given to the presentation of primary sources. Chapter 2 offers a straightforward narrative of swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture, though one swamped with data (especially pp. 154–74). The conclusion (“swidden farming was a widespread reality in everyday life” [p. 185]) seems unremarkable. Chapter 3 is an interesting excursion into the world of wild plants harvested for food by Japanese farmers, with much information new to the English-language corpus. In chapter 4, the author seeks to calculate the average amount of rice consumed by the Japanese of the “early medieval era” (by Verschuer’s reckoning, 700–1200). There are many pitfalls to this type of calculation, but the unsurprising conclusion here is that wet rice supplied only 25 per cent of the caloric intake of the average resident of the archipelago. Chapter 5 deals with the place of rice in Japanese culture, proposing several new and tenuous readings of Japanese mythology. In place of the purported old view that all Japanese ate rice all the time, Verschuer argues that there was a “five grain” (gokoku) ideology and that Japanese commoners relied upon permanent crops, swidden grains, and foraging.

I concur with this general conclusion and amidst the author’s tortuous presentation found several additional valuable insights. For example, I was heartened by Verschuer’s discussion of the direct sowing of rice grains onto soggy lands (p. 32) because so many descriptions of rice agriculture merely assume that transplanting was the rule from the Yayoi period. The section on harvesting is intelligent and nuanced, as she considers whether the rice plant [End Page 137] was removed near the root with an iron sickle...

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