Give and Take: Poverty and the Status Order in Early Modern Japan by Maren A. Ehlers (review)

For a generation, historians of modern Japan have recognized that in many areas the Meiji era marked a less radical change than the popular narrative says it did. Nor did things always become better for commoners after the Meiji Restoration: The women of Meiji often were more restricted than those in the Tokugawa era because of the new state's good wife/wise mother (ryōsai kenbo) norms. The pre-Meiji economy was livelier and more diverse than the early narrators realized. Pollution from the Ashio mines was taken more seriously in the late eighteenth century than in the late nineteenth century, when the industrialization craze led officials to ignore people dying from copper effluvia. Now we know, too, thanks to meticulous work by Maren Ehlers, that poor and blind people in rural Tokugawa were integrated into society more compassionately than they were in urban (or rural) Meiji.

Give and Take examines decision-making during the Tokugawa years in the small (40,000-koku) domain of Ōno located in the mountainous snow country of today's Fukui Prefecture near the Japan Sea. What sets the book apart from other studies of regional government at the time is that it focuses not on the interactions of elite groups but on the way officials worked and negotiated with marginalized people in their domain: tenant farmers, tobacco cutters, cormorant fishermen—and especially beggars and the blind. Using "responses to poverty as a lens on governmental practice" (p. 2), Ehlers argues that decision-making involved constant negotiation between officials and occupation-based status groups. Nearly all working people, whether poor or rich, belonged to these self-governing bodies, which evolved and changed over time until "the society of Tokugawa Japan resembled a giant ecosystem" (p. 12) framed by the interactions both among these groups and between them and the official world. Ehlers looks at almsgiving and relief programs in particular to understand how the ecosystem worked.

The research that grounds this work is impressive. Ehlers's grasp of the secondary Japanese scholarship on regional governance allows her to make frequent comparisons between Ono's practices and those of other areas, particularly the urban centers. And her use of documents in both the town and the domain of Ono is exceptional: she has worked through all of the surviving journals by town elders from 1740 to 1870, along with endless records, petitions, and other communications, much of it handwritten in the era's challenging sōrōbun or epistolary style. While some of the journal entries explain actions and decisions in detail, others contain only brief or cryptic references to poverty petitions or almsgiving practices that require a thorough grounding in the context or a careful reading against the grain in order to understand.

One of Give and Take's central conclusions is that the occupation-based status group was the era's "fundamental unit" (p. 16), which framed society generations before the Tokugawa began promoting the classical samurai-peasant-artisan-merchant status categories. For that reason, people at every level of society relied on the occupational group as their primary tool for interacting with officials, with each other, and with other groups. At one level, wealthy merchants in guilds for purveyors and brewers were used by officials for everything from securing loans to making sure alms were distributed to the poor. The merchants' motive for providing funds and services, according to Ehlers, "was probably fear" (p. 232). At another level, almost all poor people—prostitutes, fish hawkers, noodle vendors—were integrated into the system either through their own occupation-based societies or "indirectly . . . through their households and landlords" (p. 162). The beggars' and blind performers' guilds figure most prominently in Give and Take. For example, the Koshirō, or organization of beggar bosses, was tasked not only with controlling beggars but also, by the nineteenth century, with running...