Customer Reviews

The Agrarian Origins of Modern Japan

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The Tokugawa Shogunate consolidated its power by making surveys of the land under its control and tieing the peasant population to the land. The surveys also allowed overlords to collect taxes directly and to remove the lower-ranking warriors from the villages and retain them in castle towns.

In one stroke, a major source of political instability was eliminated and the structure of social relations in rural japan set for the next 250 years. When Japan modernized in the nineteenth century, the complex system of family obligations by which land was exploited laid the ground work for the mechanisms of social change that brought the country so quickly into the industrial world.

This is a brilliant and beautifully written description of the role that these agricultural arrangements played in that modernization.

Lynn Hoffman, author of bang BANG