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

This book is bittersweet in tone. Tetsuo Najita returns to the topic of commoner thinking during the Tokugawa period that he explicated so elegantly for the Osaka merchant academy, the Kaitokudō, but focuses this time on peasants. As with Visions of Virtue in Tokugawa Japan: The Kaitokudō Merchant Academy of Osaka (University of Chicago Press, 1987), he takes seriously the intellectual life of people who did not wield political power. Commoners in Tokugawa Japan fashioned a worldview that challenged the casual assumption made by samurai leaders that peasants were stupid and unable to plan ahead, a characterization that Najita demolishes in these pages. These early modern Japanese commoners not only rejected official Confucian insistence that the higher ranks of society were composed of morally superior individuals but also developed sophisticated ideas about the relationship between humans and the natural world.

Najita's fundamental argument is that peasants felt an ethical imperative to "save one another," through "mutual trust and aid," and that their economic thought was based on the moral platform that allowing another person to starve was simply incompatible with human decency. They championed a "mutually shared purpose" because this concept could serve as an egalitarian and horizontal mechanism by which peasants countered the "vertical society" system in which they lived. Moreover, this was not just a few rustic philosophers coming up with abstract ideas, even well-articulated ones. Peasants and merchants, with no help from political leaders, created their own mutual aid and insurance systems, called kō. As Najita himself explains, this book is about "commoners' thinking about commerce, their writing about it for other commoners rather than for scholars, and their strategies for meeting emergencies and reconstructing villages . . . with an ethical understanding of virtue" (p. 2).

It is surely a mark of Najita's success in changing the basic assumptions of Japan studies over the years that it no longer seems surprising to learn that commoners created an alternative worldview, one that rejected the lowly place they had been assigned by samurai theorists. Visions of Virtue rocked our little world when it appeared in 1987, but since then, many works have emphasized the richness and variety of Tokugawa plebian society, including the intellectual vitality of village life and, in particular, the ways that commoners developed rationales for precisely these kinds of "horizontal" associations. Subsequent books by Anne Walthall, Eiko Ikegami, Richard Rubinger, and Laura Nenzi all have presented smart and lively village people who thought deep and lived large, sometimes in surprising ways.¹ In a different vein, Susan Hanley also echoed one of Najita's underlying points, that comprehensive explanatory concepts such as "feudalism," without attention to the daily actions of commoners, are inadequate for capturing the Tokugawa, or any, era.²

For this reason, Najita's foray into analysis of the institutions as well as the ideas created by these economic actors is particularly welcome. Kō, or "economic and insurance confraternities," were designed to pool savings and manage risk. The cooperatives provided "inexhaustible compassion" (mujin) and valorized trust (shin), promise (yakusoku), and contract (keiyaku). One problem for rural commoners was that they could not count on the benevolence of their rulers. Tokugawa society, like all Confucian polities, was supposed to be governed by compassionate men who took a fatherly interest in the people they ruled. Samurai leaders, however, often put paternal benevolence toward peasants far behind their responsibilities to pay stipends to retainers, meet the financial demands of the shogun, and diminish the often-daunting size of tradesmen's bills for household expenses, especially in Edo. In that context, local institutions that encouraged self-help and mutual aid among commoners were highly practical.

But how to ensure that commoners who pooled their money would be repaid fairly and, more fundamentally, would trust each other with their precious funds in the first place? Najita argues that the spread of literacy was the first necessary precondition, while the next was a commitment to scientific accuracy and precision...