Social class and migration in two northeastern Japanese villages, 1716–1870

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of household social class called ‘mibun’ on the likelihood of migration among peasant men and women from their residing communities, focusing on two farming villages in preindustrial northeastern Japan. Using the local population registers called ‘ninbetsu-aratame-cho’ from 1716–1870, we analyze the relationship between social class of peasant household and different types of out-migration for individual men and women in agricultural communities.

We found large differences in landholding between households of titled peasants (honbyakusho) who owned land and those of mizunomi peasants who were in principle landless, suggesting that social class indexed the amount of wealth that a household possessed although considerable economic differences existed among households of titled peasants. These differences in household social class influenced the likelihoods of different types of out-migration of residents in the two farming villages. Regardless of reasons, mizunomi peasants were more likely to migrate out of their village of residence than titled peasants for both sexes. Further, the higher likelihood of out-migration among the mizunomi class was especially notable for male labor migration at the time of local economic hardships.

Keywords::

• migration
• social class
• household landholding
• family farming
• Tokugawa Japan

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Social Science History Association Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, 1–4 November 2012. The authors are grateful to Martin Dribe for helpful comments, and Akira Hayami and Saeko Narimatsu for making the original population registration data available. Akira Hayami also provided us with information on the nature of migration records in local population registers.

Notes

^1. According to Hayami (2001, p. 46), the rapid population increase in the seventeenth century was due mainly to large-scale cultivation of new land that took place across different regions of Tokugawa Japan. Hence, the seventeenth century is called the ‘period of great land reclamation.’

^2. Examining data on physical well-being and nutritional status of residents in large cities such as Tokyo and Kyoto, Hanley (1983) argued that the standard of living in mid-nineteenth century urban Japan was not only higher than in the eighteenth century, but also relatively high in comparison to the industrializing West. However, her arguments do not seem to be applicable to living standards in rural communities, especially those in the northeast.

^3. Saito (2002) reports that according to one source (Ogashima, 1894) there were 28 famines in the Tokugawa period, and according to another (Saito, 1966) there were 61 famines from 1600 to 1900.

^4. Sericulture became popular in the region at that time, and mulberry leaves were major cash crops. Existing historical records show that several neighbouring villages located in flat land had much higher proportions of fields used for growing mulberry trees (Narimatsu, 1985, pp. 53–54).

^5. According to a survey by the domain government in 1828 on the use of agricultural land, around 30% of the dry field in Niita was cultivated as mulberry field whereas only 5–10% of the dry field in Shimomoriya was used to grow mulberry trees (Nihonmatsu-shi, 1982 p. 581).

^6.Koku is the unit indicating the expected yield of rice from a given size of agricultural land. One koku is equivalent to approximately five bushels.

^7. The population registers in Shimomoriya and Niita, like all other localities in the Nihonmatsu domain, were ninbetsu-aratame-cho (NAC), rather than shumon-aratame-cho (SAC). Though similar in terms of information collected by these two types of registers, SAC was carried out, in its original purpose, to hunt hidden Christians whereas NAC was, as the name indicates, primarily for population registration and investigation (Narimatsu, 1985, pp. 11–14, 1992, pp. 10–12).

^8. The size of ‘de jure’ population can also be computed for both villages because records were kept as far as one's permanent (legal) domicile was in the villages. However, for persons whose legal domicile was in the village but who were not present (residing) there, information on individual circumstances including demographic events occurred while away from the villages are generally unavailable.

^9. Eighteen out of the 19 disappearances from Shimomoriya's NAC and seven out of the 13 disappearances from Niita's registers occurred during 1851–1870, the last years of the Tokugawa regime. For details, see Narimatsu (1985, pp. 54–56, 1992, pp. 32–38).

^10. In addition to chronological age (i.e., age according to Gregorian calendar) and NAC age, there is also the traditional Japanese method of counting age. As in the rest of East Asia, it regards a child as age one at birth and adds an additional year on each New Year's Day thereafter. Consequently, if counted by the traditional Japanese method, most new-borns, if they survived, appear in population registers at the age of two sai although in extreme cases they could be on the second day of life. If population registration was conducted on each New Year's Day (which was rarely the case), traditional Japanese age (in sai) minus one is equivalent to NAC age.

^11. For specifics of the discrete-time event history analysis model, see Allison (1984), Tsuya, Campbell, and Wang (2010), and Yamaguchi (1991).

^12. According to Guilkey and Murphy (1993), when records are repeated over five times, the problem of intercorrelation among observations becomes serious and affects the estimation results.

^13. The formula was independently discovered by White (1980) and is also known in the econometrics literature as White's method.

^14. According to Narimatsu (1985, pp. 166–167, 1992, pp. 146–155), this was due primarily to the increasing transfer of ownership of some land from households of titled peasants, who were unable to bear heavy tax burden associated with their landholding at the time of economic hardship, to those of mizunomi peasants who had been tenants of that land.

^15. If the unknowns were to be excluded, the percentage distribution of household social class for the sub-period of 1716–1759 would be 74.8% for titled peasant households, 23.2% for mizunomi households, and 2.1% for other households.

^16. When migration consisted of more than one individual (i.e., migrants did not move alone), we counted the event pertaining to each individual as one. For example, when a household of three members moved out of the village, we counted three events; and all three were used in the analysis. This multiple counting of events in the case of migration of a whole (or part of) household would not seriously affect the results of our analysis because a large majority (90%) of out-migration was by a lone individual.

^17. Except for absconding, we can mostly identify the destinations of out-migrants from the two study villages. A large majority of these destinations were within the Nihonmatsu domain, including neighboring villages and the growing market towns of Koriyama and Motomiya (Narimatsu, 1985, pp. 112–113, 1992, pp. 92–93).

^18. Aizu is the neighboring domain of Nihonmatsu (and the domain capital of Aizu was around 50 kilometers away from the domain capital of Nihonmatsu). Unfortunately, rice price series of the Nihonmatsu market are not available. Thus, we have to rely on rice prices in the Aizu market, as provided in Iwahashi (1981, pp. 217–224) which drew the data reported originally by Wakamatsu-shi (1942, pp. 200–213). Nonetheless, the Niwa family who had been the domain lord of Nihonmatsu was in debt to Aizu merchants from the late sixteenth century onward and the debt was never fully paid off (Nagata et al., 1998). Hence, the Aizu rice prices likely influenced the tax rates and finances of the Nihonmatsu domain government and therefore likely reflected changes in the tax rates imposed upon peasants in the domain in which our two study villages were located. Our earlier study (Tsuya & Kurosu, 2004) discussed in more detail the nature of the Aizu rice price used by this study.

^19. For details on various rice price series in early modern Japan, see Iwahashi (1981), and for the relationship between local rice markets and the Osaka central market in Tokugawa Japan, see Miyamoto (1988, pp. 386–430).

^20. The NAC registers recorded 24 years (out of 1692 years) of households whose mibun was recorded as mizunomi with landholding ranging from 0.001 to 10.53 koku during 1716–1759. We are uncertain as to why these mizunomi households owned land during the first sub-period, except for the fact that almost all of these mizunomi households with landholding changed their social class to titled peasants within one to seven years of obtaining landholding. Hence, social class was not entirely ascribed although it was so in most cases.