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Daily Life and Demographics in Ancient Japan . By Farris William Wayne . Ann Arbor : Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan , 2009. Pp. ixￂ +ￂ 137. ISBN 10: 1929280491 ; 13: 9781929280490.
We are gradually learning much more about the social foundations of classical Japan, thanks to a cluster of new and important studies on its population, agrarian technology, economy, and climate. In the book under review here, William Wayne Farris, who holds the Sen Soshitsu XV Distinguished Chair in Japanese History and Culture at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, has provided an extremely useful compendium of debates on demographic history, to which he adds new research, insights, and conclusions. The story provides the back story for his recently published Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006). The two are really companion volumes.
Farris's main conclusions, which he considers a hypothesis in need of further study, are these: the period from the eighth to the twelfth century saw either stasis, or more likely decline, in population due especially to foreign-borne epidemics. Drought, soil exhaustion, and meager irrigation facilities also led to frequent crop failures, while food shortages led to chronic or recurrent malnutrition. Even in the twelfth century, when some historians have argued that there was a significant expansion of the arable, Farris thinks that cold and damp summers led to frequent crop failures. If the population recovered in the twelfth century, he thinks it was only to eighth-century levels. Should his conclusions prove correct, they will significantly impact many of the ways we think about the Heian Period (794-1185). The work in this book is therefore foundational for future research.
In his Introduction, Farris provides readers with a useful overview of earlier debates concerning Japan's early demographics. We learn that, among others, in 1927 Sawada Goichi argued that the age of Shomu Tenno (r. 724-749) represented a high point when the population reached 6 to 7 million. More recently, Kito Hiroshi has hypothesized two distinct demographic cycles: one in Jomon times, followed by one encompassing the long span from Yayoi-Kofun times up to the twelfth century. Kito has also argued that demographic stasis began sometime in Yayoi or Kofun times, for...