[Feature: Infectious Diseases in History] Japan as a Country of Flow: A Brief History — Markets, Population, and Infectious Diseases

The direct impetus for this article was an excellent report titled Proposal of BCG / Tuberculin reaction as a precautionary measure against second wave of Covid-19:from analysis of statistics, Japan Policy and Kawasaki Disease, which epidemiologically confirmed the relationship between tuberculosis and the new coronavirus. The author, Mr. Makoto Hayashibara (Keio University alumni), graduated from my seminar at the Faculty of Economics in 2000, obtained an MSc in Finance from Imperial College London in 2014, and currently heads a think tank based in Hong Kong. Looking at the relationship between tuberculosis and the Japanese people, even in the modern era alone, Japan had the rare experience among OECD countries of tuberculosis mortality rates rising again in the late 1930s due to "returning home with illness" (Mr. Masato Hanashima, National Research Institute for Earth Science and Disaster Resilience, Keio University alumni), from which many literary works were born with the motifs of urban factories and rural labor.

However, at the same time, a memory overlapped: "Wait. Isn't this the same as the mortality pattern of women returning from urban service in Saijo Village (Gifu) that Mr. Hayami studied?" Akira Hayami unfortunately passed away last winter, but his research achievements as a pioneer of Asian historical demography remain vital. Thus, it seems possible to trace the link between tuberculosis and labor migration back at least to the Edo period. If we include other representative Japanese infectious diseases such as smallpox and syphilis, the relationship between markets and infectious diseases seems to head toward even older eras. This became the motivation for this article. Furthermore, the following discussion overlaps with the content of the "Introduction to Economic History" lecture for first-year undergraduates offered at the Faculty of Economics, Hitotsubashi University. I would be pleased if those who read this current university lecture, especially older readers, recall those days. Now, let us begin from ancient times.

First, I start the beginning of the lecture with the phrase: "Let's set aside for a moment the stereotype that capitalism began in the modern era, when labor (another name for humans) and land (part of nature) finally became objects of market transactions." This is not because it is wrong, but because the relationship of mutual cooperation between markets/market economies and humans, built amidst the flow of all things, cannot be captured by cliché causal discourse. Markets are as old as human existence; they are mechanisms for moving people, goods, and information for the sake of supply-demand adjustment (price formation) and order formation. Generally, the initiation of movement is handled by power or institutions, and markets begin to function along with the movement of people and various goods. And along with those movements, viruses, bacteria, and parasites are also carried in. This must be one of the few empirical rules that economics should teach. Power and the state have incorporated these market principles, sometimes keeping a distance from them while shaping the era. This is clear from the Kofun period onward. The "Gishiwajinden" (Records of the Wa in the History of Wei) reports that "In the land of Wa, there are markets in various countries, where they trade what they have for what they lack, and the Great Wa is made to supervise this" (reading Great Wa as Yamai, it can also be interpreted as the country of Yamaichi). Correspondingly, the interpretation by Asian historian Hidehiro Okada is attractive: "Markets were created while being surrounded by fences and walls, Dosojin (traveler's guardian deities) were enshrined at the boundaries of the inside and outside to block evil spirits, entrance fees = so (the origin of taxes) were collected, and eventually they developed into ancient city-states."

The giant structures following the Kofun burial mounds are ancient temples and shrines. Many of the temple compounds and precincts built at provincial capitals (Kokufu) during the Nara period were vast. They were likely market sites (government-established) and also places for mourning the many victims of infectious diseases that occurred eventually (recorded from the "Nihon Shoki" onwards). Furthermore, the influence of temples already extended throughout the market economy. The influence on the control of weights and measures (market infrastructure) through the "Tera-masu" (temple measuring box), originating from Kofuku-ji and Todai-ji temples which were closely related to the Fujiwara clan, lasted long into the Edo period (Mr. Kazuo Mizutorikawa). Turning our eyes to labor migration, the labor market of the 8th-century workshops for the construction of Todai-ji was booming, but it also brought about the industrial accident of mercury poisoning. During the same period, the negative legacy of the market, such as the increase of starving people in the markets, was also growing. Although the era cannot be determined exactly, according to the "Iro Setsuden" of Ryukyu, a labor market akin to human trafficking developed around the markets, and the evaluation of labor there eventually became the standard for wages (legitimacy) in the labor market. In the "Nihon Ryoiki," in 9th-century households, the question of whether it was more rational to hire wage labor or employ family labor began to surface. These are nothing other than the traces of people's struggles involving the introduction, operation, and consequences of the market.

Sugawara no Michizane, a central official who could be called the culmination of this ancient Japanese market landscape, finally appeared in the 9th century. In the "Kanke Bunso" (published in 900), the "Ten Poems on Early Cold" clearly have the official Michizane's recognition of the market as an underlying theme. "Drought makes the price of salt cheap" shows a straightforward understanding of market principles: if the production (supply) of salt increases, the (standard) price of salt will fall. This was the bureaucratic education required of central officials and likely the governance technique for when problems occurred in the provinces. In this way, in places where market principles unfolded (markets and capital cities) in both the center and the provinces, the movement of people and goods was frequent. The world of fishermen was no exception. According to the "Shoku Nihongi," during the Tenpyo era, a fishing boat that went out into the Genkai Sea contracted smallpox and, upon returning to port, spread the epidemic throughout the country (according to Mr. Akihito Suzuki). The sea may also be an original landscape where market principles (where navigation becomes free by that virtue) apply.

As time progressed, the core of the economic structure of medieval Japan was the Shoen (manors). And the main entities of the donated-land type Shoen became temples and shrines. When it comes to markets, the sea, and Shoen, Yoshihiko Amino makes an appearance. Differing from Mr. Amino's interpretation, here we view it strictly as: because there are market principles, people walk freely, and along with that, goods and information move, and infectious diseases spread. The impression of the Shoen might seem to be the opposite, but its mechanism was such that it only had a Sho-dokoro (management office for agricultural tools, etc.), uncultivated land, and cultivated land within it; there were no exclusive farmers, and cultivation was left to the rent-labor (tenancy) of surrounding farmers (Mr. Mitsuo Tanahashi). Eventually, contract management to farm households and large-scale agricultural management, where the Shoen lord dispatched agents and directly hired surrounding farmers for wages, coexisted. It is said the ratio was roughly half and half. Both the farmers of the contracted households and the wage-labor farmers were originally Ritsuryo farmers who held Kubunden (allotted land) (Mr. Rizo Takeuchi).

In other words, small-scale farm households that received Kubunden faced an imbalance with labor, a constantly fluctuating factor of production, and being unable to pay taxes (So-Yo-Cho), they sought refuge in large-scale farm households. Eventually, public lands (Koeiden) decreased and private lands (Shieiden) increased, which significantly affected the ratio of provincial government lands (Kokuga) and Shoen nationwide (Mr. Keiji Nagahara). Looking closely, the Shoen system was a system that marketized the Kubunden, which had been fixed under the Ritsuryo land system, as one factor of production, and integrated labor, another factor of production, into it as a variable factor. In other words, it was a rational device for developing land and labor as factor markets. Conversely, it tells us how many farmers fled from their Kubunden to the extent that such a device became necessary. The mobile groups that Mr. Amino categorized as wandering people must have included not only specialized artisans but also many absconding farmers. While medieval population records are precious, looking at the "Suo Province Kuga District Kuga Village Census of the 8th Year of Engi (908)" (Ishiyama-dera back-side documents), although there are unnatural points such as households with no change, the records of adult males and the youth demographic were indeed very few (Mr. Akihiro Watanabe).

As the Shoen system progressed, as a consequence of that mechanism, the settlement of wandering people into rural areas began, either being incorporated into the Shoen system through local powerful families known as "Myoshu" or being absorbed into the management of directly-run private fields. The Nanboku-cho period was likely the watershed where the old power of the Shoen lords and the new power of the local "Myoshu" management were in equilibrium. As shown in the estimates by Mr. W.W. Farris, author of the fine work on medieval Japanese population history, Japan’s Medieval Population (2006), the total population of Japan likely increased at roughly the same rate (about 0.2% annually) from the late 13th century to perhaps the early 17th century. The main drivers were likely the population increase of wandering people who were captured by power and transitioned to settled farmers, and the rise in fertility due to the formation of households by settled farmers. The former trend continued, albeit in small numbers, even across the Meiji Restoration. Although not an accurate statistic, according to the "Survey within the Gamo Territory" (1593), said to be a comprehensive survey of the entire region north of the Shirakawa Barrier in Fukushima (where movement was primarily from south to north), the ratio of the population identified as "persons of uncertain status" was at most 10% or less (though expected to be higher in Central Japan where population movement occurred in both directions); furthermore, in the "Kai Province Current Population Survey" (1879) conducted about 280 years later throughout Kai Province, that ratio had dropped to around 0.5%. Numerically, this indicates a relatively gentle process of settlement over approximately 600 years. While it is difficult to empirically prove the specific process of wandering people becoming low-status servants (Genin), it is known that at the Tokikuni family in Oku-Noto during the early modern period, it took about 30 years for a wandering person to go from entering the household as a beggar to becoming a "hired hand" or "subordinate" and finally a hereditary servant (Mr. Hiroomi Sekiguchi).

In addition to this settlement process on land, one must not forget the settlement from the sea. Matakichi Habara, author of "Sea-Drifting People" (Hyokaimin) and closely associated with the Faculty of Economics, devoted much of his massive work "Economic History of Japanese Fisheries" (4 volumes) to pointing out the existence of commoners (fishermen) as carriers of the "Ebune" (houseboat) culture. The source of the Kuroshio Current reaches the Jiangnan region of China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It is an undeniable fact that houseboats in the Seto Inland Sea were active even into the 1980s. To assume that their heroic history connected to that did not affect the total population of Japan in each era would be an abandonment of responsibility by a historian. The emergence and flourishing of infectious diseases represented by temperate malaria (vivax malaria) should also be considered evidence of this. In Japan, climate warming and marine transgression also progressed, and as Kunio Yanagita introduced with the folklore example of the Yaminomori Hachiman Shrine (Nagoya City), "ponds and marshes" were formed in the dim forests of downstream river areas, which likely led to the breeding of malaria-carrying mosquitoes (Anopheles mosquitoes). The epidemic that was the object of incantations and prayers in the 11th-century "Mido Kanpakuki" and "The Tale of Genji" must have been "Okori" (malaria), and it has even been pointed out that in the Kyoto of that era, malaria, which was originally an acute infectious disease, might have settled as an endemic disease (Mr. Jun Maki et al.).

Now, it was none other than the three unifiers—Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu—who linked this convergence process of medieval Japan to the development of the market economy. Nobunaga's work boiled down to the development of market infrastructure. Above all, he did not alter the standards of weights and measures since the Fujiwara clan (the standard measuring box originating from Kofuku-ji had spread over a wide area). There is still no clear answer as to why the transition from the Kandaka system to the Kokudaka system occurred, but without the nationwide spread of the standard measuring box as a volume (weights and measures) standard (using specific gravity indicators, it could easily handle taxation and transactions based on the weight of rice or commodities), such a decision would surely not have been made. Furthermore, through the institutional reform of Rakuichi Rakuza (free markets and open guilds), he placed the market at the source of the people's happiness and sought to rule the realm through its expansion. Hideyoshi's greatest contribution was the nationwide development of the land cultivation system through the Taiko Kenchi (land surveys). As settled farmers increased and each became independent from the management of a master/Myoshu, the standard for cultivation came to be based on the fact of who was cultivating that piece of land (Mr. Makoto Numata) rather than ownership. The content of the famous passage "The mountains are deep, the sea is as far as the oars can reach" perfectly matches the process of executing new laws when applying R. Coase's theorem, as it is called in modern economics, to actual cultivation system reforms. Finally, regarding Ieyasu, his greatest contribution was the establishment of the monetary system, the lifeblood of the market economy. Since the Kangen Taiho, the last of the twelve imperial coins, Japan had entrusted its currency to Chinese coins (Song and Ming coins) as if it had abandoned the sovereign right of coinage, but with Ieyasu, coin minting finally resumed, leading to the establishment of the triple currency system.

The work of these unifiers was to stabilize the realm nationwide by institutionalizing the mobility of the factors of production, which is the lifeblood of the market. Subsequently, the Bakuhan system brought waves of technological innovation into each individual farm household, turning them into bases for industrial production and even achieving the import substitution of the long-standing issue of silk products. Along with this, the capital market for rural industry grew steadily, and in the Choshu Domain, a long-term and stable downward trend in interest rates was observed throughout the 18th and 19th centuries (Ms. Miho Tanaka). And that wave of rural industrialization proceeded powerfully from Western Japan to Northeastern Japan. The real money balance of the Shogunate began to have an upward trend leading to Modern Economic Growth (MEG) after the Tenmei Famine (1780s) (Mr. Shigeo Akashi).

The independence of farm households and their transition to "Honbyakusho" (regular farmers) progressed with the times. The population growth rate from the 17th to the early 18th century also reached 0.4–0.5% annually. The contribution of household formation to population growth was immense. And the household became the basic unit of life, including production and consumption. Rural sociologist Kizaemon Ariga positioned the farm household as the "last bastion of livelihood security" and considered it an organizational and social structure that could not be replaced by the market or market economy; however, in the formation of those stem families, they enlivened the surrounding labor market by producing collateral relatives. The Bakuhan system also designated the household as the unit of observation for social reform and implemented various institutionalizations.

However, at the same time, a newly emerged risk was the spread of infectious diseases centered on the household. In particular, the transmission of sexually transmitted infections such as syphilis was clearly a calamity brought to the household by the actions of its members. Due to the rise in household independence and the acceleration of distribution in the market economy, the speed of transmission increased all at once, first swallowing almost the three major cities and then spreading to surrounding areas. That momentum continued until the post-war period when the distribution of the miracle drug penicillin was achieved. Until then, at the level of the common people, treatments using Kampo medicine or Dutch-style (Ranpo) drug discovery were being sought. It was also discovered that an arsenic compound drug, the same as Salvarsan which was later expected to be a miracle drug, was being formulated at the Tekijuku school at the end of the Edo period (see references in my paper). The common people boldly confronted these risks. In that sense, they fully played their role as a center for the systematization of Asian knowledge, but they were still distinct from the Western knowledge system where causal relationships were organized in a logical and orderly manner.

What were the heads of farm households from the Edo period to the pre-war period fighting against? This is a question that naturally emerges when conducting research that links farm household finances with standards of living. In his work "The Family" (Ie), Toson Shimazaki of the Meiji era carefully buried the falling farm household as literature, intertwining it with problems inherent to farm households such as the large-family system of old houses, patriarchal attitudes, lineage, and heredity (linked to chronic infectious diseases like syphilis). The opponent that the head of a farm household fought against was not just this group of problems as a negative chain that can be fully discussed in modern literature, but the mission to protect the positive chain of life, production, and livelihood.

Until the pre-war period, the head of a farm household was immediately thrown into the vortex of a frequent exchange economy traded between village settlements. Administrative villages after the Murauke system (after the Land Tax Reform, the independence of household decision-making strengthened) were usually formed from multiple settlements. Homogeneous farm households sharing the same origin or surname gathered to form a single settlement, and daily life within it was managed through barter. However, goods and services that required adjustment across settlements were acquired through an exchange economy (labor organizations like "Yui" were also an exchange economy through the provision of meals) (Mr. Tsuneichi Miyamoto and Mr. Yoshiharu Nakamura). Factors of production such as land, labor, and capital were the central goods and services traded in such an exchange economy. In the Edo period, the village managed this under the Murauke system (after Meiji, systems such as tenancy were introduced).

In this context, the head of the household was forced to know the average prices of various goods and services generated within the daily exchange economy. As far as factors of production were concerned, the frequency of exchange transactions between settlements (using money when money was sufficiently supplied) must have been high. The emergence and evolution of these prices likely gave the head of the household an opportunity to reflect not only on his own labor productivity and labor pain but also on whether the labor productivity of family members and their living/upbringing costs were in balance. Furthermore, the decision to introduce rural industry into the home followed the same logic. In time, good household heads were distinguished from those who were not, rumors spread in the settlements and villages, and through various twists and turns, they created the history of that house.

By the way, another important role left to the head of the household is to protect the lives of family members. To utilize the expanding market, working away from home (Dekasegi) in urban areas was indispensable. Even if they remained in the household, with an unsatisfactory standard of living, it was necessary to decide whether or not to allow working away, even considering the risk of contracting chronic infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis in urban areas. Anyone in a village that had experienced urbanization knew that a reckless judgment like "let's just go work away" was something only an ignorant household head would do. It could be said that the judgment of a household head (actually after consultation with relatives) who possessed the capacity to ask who to raise how, and when and where to send them to work away, decided the fate of the farm household. In the Shimo-Ina region of Nagano Prefecture, the engagement of farm households in side businesses such as carp farming and sericulture significantly affected the physical growth of children (see my paper). Furthermore, the time when tuberculosis became an object of crisis management for farm household heads as an external risk should be considered to be after the Tenmei Famine at the latest; in that case, the implications of the Hayashibara paper mentioned at the beginning are historically very deep.

Akira Hayami, "Population, Economy, and Society in the Nobi Region in the Early Modern Period," Sobunsha, 1992

Kenichi Tomobe, "Population Strategies of Early Modern Society," in Akita et al. (eds.), "World History of Population and Health" (Minerva World History Vol. 8), Minerva Shobo, 2020, pp. 63–82

Ibid., "On the Causal Relationship between Venereal Disease (Syphilis), Stillbirth/Miscarriage, and Fertility in Early Modern and Modern Japan: Keio University, at the Center of its Possibilities," Journal of Modern Japanese Studies, Vol. 34, Keio University Fukuzawa Memorial Center for Modern Japanese Studies, 2017, pp. 1–38

Ibid., "Fluctuations in Physical Stature, Population, and Economy," in Japan Society of Socio-Economic History (ed.), "Encyclopedia of Socio-Economic History," Maruzen, scheduled for publication in 2020