Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan by Charlotte von Verschuer (review)

Rice, Agriculture, and the Food Supply in Premodern Japan by the French scholar Charlotte von Verschuer is a much anticipated addition to the Needham Research Institute Monograph Series. Translated by Wendy Cobcroft, this volume is an updated and revised version of von Verschuer's 2003 monograph, Le riz dans la culture de Heian: Mythe et réalité. In this new form, accessible to the international scholarly audience, this book is a welcome and valuable contribution to the global and site-specific studies of the histories of agriculture, technology, and the environment, as well as to the histories of knowledge and science of East Asia. Needless to say, this book will also be indispensable reading for those wishing to study premodern Japan. The volume is accompanied by multiple illustrations, maps, and tables, as well as a very useful appendix, which includes a catalogue of edible and crop plants with names provided in premodern and modern Japanese, Latin, English, German, and French; a list of traditional measures used in Japan and East Asia; a chronological table that explains the book's timeline; a seventeenth-century agricultural calendar from one of Japan's northern regions; and calorific values of foods discussed throughout the monograph.

The book's main aim is nothing less than to revise and correct the long-received idea that rice has been the main staple of Japan's agriculture and diet for over two millennia. Drawing on an impressive array of premodern Japanese sources, which vary from eighth-century official histories and poetry to seventeenth-century agricultural treatises, as well as modern archaeological and ethnological data, the book argues in favor of discerning the various agricultural techniques and methods of food production and supply in premodern Japan. To that extent, the Japanese subtitle of this study, gokoku bunka 五穀文化 (the culture of five grains), although currently left untranslated in English, conveys an additional sense of how much premodern Japan's subsistence economy had been historically reliant on the country's biological, geographical, and climatic diversity and "the plant kingdom as a whole" (1).

Von Verschuer argues that the idea of Japan's traditional agriculture as based predominantly on the irrigated cultivation of rice emerged as a result of reading the surviving premodernwritten sources,mostly ofan administrative nature,which were produced by the elite and state structures and which privileged rice as a tax currency. This idea of rice cultivation as something intrinsic to Japanese history and culture received much attention in twentieth-century Japanese scholarship, starting with that of Yanagita Kunio (1875–1962), a founding figure of Japan's native folklore studies; in the post-WWII era, this idea became widely adopted into public discourse. Based on newer findings in Japanese archaeology, vonVerschuer'scurrentstudy challenges this viewby analyzing historicaldata, focusing on several different types of agricultural cultivation traditionally practiced in premodern Japan. These included not only irrigated rice fields but also nonirrigated (dry) cereal fields and permanent and shifting fields, as well as gardens with vegetables and fruit trees.

The first chapter, by far the longest, begins with a vista of the diversity of Japanese vegetation and climate. Based upon this, it then provides a farmer's view of the agricultural production cycle, along with its many techniques and aspects: fertilization, irrigation, transplanting, weeding, harvesting, hulling, husking, threshing, and storage. It is here that the author begins to introduce traditional Japanese vocabulary and technical terminology, as well as varieties of Japanese farming techniques, tools, and management of agrarian space. These fascinating details will, no doubt, draw the attention of readers interested in the history of East Asian science and technology. This chapter also surveys early medieval (eighth through twelfth centuries), late medieval (thirteenth through sixteenth centuries), and early modern (seventeenth through nineteenth centuries) historical sources and includes thirteen black-and-white illustrations from early modern woodblock printed Japanese books. These illustrations, although they are not always discussed in the...