Economic Thought in Early Modern Japan

要旨

The title of this book comes from the title a conference held at Columbia University in 2009, by the Research Group, ‘Monies, Markets, and Finance in China and East Asia, 1600–1900: Local, Regional, National and International Dimensions’. This book is the first volume of the Research Group’s new series, ‘Monies, Markets, and Finance in East Asia, 1600–1900’ published by Brill. The book focuses on early modern Japan (including the Ryūkyū Kingdom) and deals with various topics such as the concepts of freedom and control, the ideology of ‘national interest’ and the economic thoughts of local entrepreneurs. Since a space constraint does not allow me to summarize all of the contents, let me focus exclusively on the one big question shared among the chapters. Put simply, the question is why were commercial activities less esteemed than other activities in early modern Japan? Raising this traditional (but under-contemplated) question is a big contribution itself, and of course, this book succeeds in suggesting new approaches to the study of economic thought in early modern Japan. Economic thought in early modern Japan was generally thought to have been dominated by—or at least grounded in—Confucianism. As the Introduction (Mark Metzler and Gregory Smits) mentions, it is common to assume that Confucian scholars were suspicious of commerce and the profit motive (pp. 12–13). While some Edo-period Japanese thinkers would acknowledge the useful role of commerce, many views of early modern Japan are still conditioned by traditional notions claiming that Tokugawa Japan was a Confucian society and that Confucian thought ignored or denigrated commercial activities. In contrast to this traditional view, Metzler and Smits insist that in fact, it is rare to find political or economic analyses that regard commerce as a social ill or as an occupation less esteemed than others, especially from the 18th-century onward. While I am afraid that is an overstatement because we can find ‘old school’ thinkers even after the 18th century—e.g. Buyō Yinshi (whose birth year is unknown, but whose article ‘Seji Kenbun Roku’ was written in the early 19th century), Yokoi Shōnan (1809–1869), and so on—it is true that the more sophisticated type of scholars—e.g. Ishida Baigan (1685–1744), Yamagata Bantō (1748–1821), Kusama Naokata (1753–1831)—appeared on the scene in the 18th century, and this latter type of scholar had come to justify commercial activities as a vital element of society. Given this situation, what we really need to understand is why commercial activities were less esteemed than other activities in the Tokugawa period, and how 18th-century thinkers justified them. This book gives us some useful materials to think about these questions. Related to these questions, Kawaguchi Hiroshi’s discussion in Chapter 2 and Bettina Gramlich-Oka’s discussion in Chapter 5 are very insightful. First, Kawaguchi argues that the criterion of social usefulness reflects the actual conditions and structure of early modern Japanese socioeconomic life (pp. 59–64). This discussion is famous as the ‘Theory of One’s Duty’ (shokubun ron) or ‘System of yaku’ (yaku no taikei). In the foreword to this volume, Yujirō Oguchi outlines the ‘Theory of One’s Duty’, explaining how, in the Tokugawa period, appropriate kinds of state service were imposed according to class—warriors with military service, peasants with tax levies, and townsfolk with town service (p. xiv). As long as those at each level of society fulfilled their assigned roles and kept to their prescribed status, the entire social and political system could remain stable. Obviously, the duty of townsfolk is not so clear compared to that of warriors or peasants. What is ‘town service’? What is the definition of ‘townsfolk’? While Takagi (1990) and Yoshida (1998) tried to explain the duty of townsfolk by the tax (cho ninsoku yaku) levied on them, they are unsuccessful in explaining the reason townsfolk’s activities, in partic

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