When I was researching Japan’s Meiji era (1868-1912) for my novel-in-progress, Hai, most of the books I read concentrated on urban areas ca. 1900, especially Tokyo and Yokohama. Urban centers were the locus of all forward momentum during this period, while rural villages struggled to find a place in Japan’s project of becoming a modern nation-state. Some villages succeeded in asserting their dominance in key industries, like textiles, to the point of threatening the livelihoods of urban guilds, but crops still had to be planted and harvested as they had for hundreds of years, and many families owned land going back at least that far.

For my new novel, I’ve decided to go back to the beginning of the Meiji era, the early 1870s, and concentrate on persecution of Buddhist temples. I’ve also decided to abandon the cities and set this novel in a rural, mountainous region (probably in western or northwestern Honshu, the main island). So I picked up Thomas C. Smith’s The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan as a starting point for understanding village life. Even though the book was written in 1959, it is full of quotes from original sources dating back to the 1600s, including journal entries from peasant farmers across Japan! Here are some lessons I’ve learned:

Japanese families were composed of three circles of relations. At the center stood a nuclear family of 4 or 5 people with a male head of household. The nuclear family owned the most land and held the most political power in the village, which often was composed of no more than a few such families. Next came a middle circle of blood relations such as younger brothers and sons, as well as genin or fudai, hereditary servants who might have been with the family for many years. Finally there was an outer circle of tenants called nago. Many individuals in the two outer circles could be interrelated with the nuclear family by marriage or adoption. In total, these three circles might add up to 8-12 people, with some groups as large as 20+ people.

Land was owned by the nuclear family but worked by everyone. There’s a sweet spot in rice farming where a small group of people working a piece of land achieve maximum efficiency and productivity. If too many people spread out their labor on the same land, sometimes the land doesn’t produce as well. So let’s say a family has grown from 4-5 members to 7-8 members. The head of household might take 4 people and say, “Here, I am going to give you this tiny holding to work for yourselves. I’ll lend you my farm equipment and occasional help. See what you can do with it.” That new nuclear family, which is still subordinate to the main branch of the family, works as hard as it can to scrape out subsistence-level crops on the smaller piece of property, probably inducing the land to produce more than it ever did when it was just part of the larger property. Even crazier, the main branch of the family still expects the newly semi-independent family to contribute labor to the rest of the property in exchange for getting to borrow equipment.

The gift of a small holding might or might not include a house. Sometimes families were awarded property to work for themselves, but they still had to live in the main house. If they did get to move out into their own space, it was probably into a one-room hut around 40 x 20 feet in size that could accommodate 7-8 people.

Blood relations or not, everybody behaved like part of the family. One reason this agricultural system worked in Japan was because it was treated like one large extended family. Everyone in the three circles of family could expect the head of the main family branch to arrange weddings, births, funerals, and so on, for their well being and the benefit of the family. All family members contributed to honoring the family ancestral god(s), and they all expected to receive the benevolence and protection of the family gods. Also, the head of household handled administrative affairs such as paying taxes on all the crops, not just for the main holding but for all the smaller tenanted holdings, too. The head of household was also responsible for achieving consensus on political matters in the village in a way that served the family (and he was very likely the only person with the power to do so, since “new” families were not allowed the opportunity to be elected to any official positions!).

Poor families could sell family members, but rich families couldn’t. Rather than resorting to infanticide, poor families might sell their children or other family members such as younger sons of the head of household to wealthier families as genin. The wealthier families often wanted the help because agriculture is labor intensive. However, if a well-to-do family ended up with too many children or uncles, they usually had to shave off a tiny property from their main holding and “gift” it to the excess family members. As the Meiji era brought massive shifts in culture, such as by the introduction of new industries, it became harder and harder for rural families to sustain their labor needs. Lower-ranking villagers were tempted away to urban areas for better wages and opportunities. So gradually families had to grant larger and larger holdings to the people they wanted to stay and work the land, or they had to combine new industries with traditional crops, such as raising silkworms or ginning cotton.

Units of measure that might be of interest:

1 koku = enough rice to feed 1 person for 1 year (barely)
1 masu = enough rice to feed 1 person for 1 day

1 to = 1/10 koku
1 sho = 1/10 to

1 chō = approximately 1 hectare, or ~10,000 meters square
1 tan = 1/10 chō

In the Tokugawa era only:
10,000 koku = minimum yield of a fiefdom to qualify its lord for the title of daimyo
100-9500 koku = title of hatamoto
< 100 koku = title of go-kenin

A property might be described as having a “20-koku yield.” Three koku was considered a good yield off 1 tan, so I imagine most small holdings had to be at least 1.5 tan to handle subsistence-level farming for the average nuclear family. Non-rice crops would still use these units of measure, by the way, but they might be valued at less than rice for tax purposes. So, for example, the crop might only be worth one quarter or one half the same field grown in rice. Woods, wasteland, and pasture were equal to the value of rice because those resources were so valuable for agriculture.

Spring in the Rice Fields. Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1795 (link).