Peasant Life During the Meiji

Peasant Life During the Meiji Restoration

The Meiji Restoration brought political, social and economic changes in the life of Japan that needed a period of sacrifice, like most of the changings following a revolution or a change of system in the life of a country. The transition from the Tokugawa to the Meiji period is considered a period of abrupt passing from a feudal Japan into a capitalist society. During that period, the rural population represented more than two thirds of the total population. The peasants were the main working force and sources of income for the country's resources. The industrial era was in its early stages and still running a long way until being able to take over from the agricultural sector.

The political and administrative changes were changing the entire Japanese society and the way it was governed: "The Meiji rulers inherited a Tokugawa legacy of bureaucratic rule by civilianized samurai. They extended its reach by eliminating domains[...]They gave the state a greater legitimacy and power than it had ever held in the past" (Gordon, 64).

The peasant life during the Meiji Restoration was considered differently, from various points-of-view, depending on the authors and the period they wrote in. Some labeled the village as the source of everything keeping Japan back from evolving into a modern society: "Farmers are the repository of all the "evil customs of the past" that Meiji Japan had renounced, an affront to the Meiji dream of Japan's economic, political and social transformation into a "first rate" country" (Nagatsuka, XVI). On the contrary, starting with the late 1970s, others' views on rural Japan were idealizing the village life during the Meiji Restoration: "the villagers lived in harmony with a bountiful nature; they ate safe uncontaminated food; old people were well cared for by the community, in contrast to rural Japan today, where the suicide rate among the elderly surpasses that of urban Japan" (Nagatsuka, pg XVII). The truth lies on neither side of such opinions since they are both at the opposite extremes.

The causes of change in the life of the peasantry, after the during the Meiji Restoration were first due the fact that the samurai lost all their lands and the privileges they had along, such as tax exemption. "By 1876, less than a decade after the restoration coup, the economic privileges of the samurai were wiped out entirely. The coup leaders expropriated an entire social class, the semi-aristocratic elite from which they came. They met some stiff, violent resistance, but they managed to overcome it. This remarkable change amounted to a social revolution" (Gordon, 64).

The second most important cause of change in the villagers' life came from the idea of building a strong army to protect the country from any external intrusion, especially under the circustances ofan increased international pressure. There was a military reform, following the European system: "By 1873 his[Yamagata Arimoto] arguments had prevailed. The government decreed a system of universal conscription. Beginning at the age of twenty, all males were obligated to give three years of active service and four years on reserve status" (idem, 66).

The third major change that will change the fate of the Japanese village forever came once the rulers turned their faces toward education. The Education reform was rapidly put in place: "the Meiji government instituted a new system of education with remarkable speed. With grand language, in 1872 it declared four years of elementary education to be compulsory for all children, boys and girls: "In a village there shall be no house without learning, and in a house, no individual without learning" (idem, 67). At the beginning, the new system was widely fought against since the financing of the schools meant a significant increase in taxes. People rioted and destroyed schools, but during the next thirty years, the situation will change dramatically, with the overwhelming majority of those of school age attending school as the laws required (Gordon, 68).

On the way to the modern era, Japan's new rulers started to change the sources for economic development and move them from the agricultural sector over to the industrial area. Capitalism was based on the achievements of technology and the modern means necessary to acquire the state wealth were supported primarily by the revenues still coming from the agricultural sector. The taxes collected so far from the villages were not based on a viable economic system of taxation. The tax system was also changed so that it could fit the new economic structure of a state that whose ruling class was decided to bring it into the modern world of capitalism. The new tax system "provided for a national land survey, conducted in the mid-1870s, that matched an owner to every piece of land and issued deeds. It also assessed the market value of all plots of land. Finally, it set the land tax at 3% of assessed value. The new tax system also brought the national government into a direct economic relationship with individual (male) household heads. It shifted the risk and the opportunity of commodity price changes onto the taxpaying farmer" (Gordon, 71).

The Tokugawa period was that of an essentially feudal state that was disseminating the rules of how to get the most out of the main labor force among the ruling class of the landowners. The peasants were only interesting because of the resources they represented for the wealth of those who were in control of the state of affairs of each feud. Among the peasantry, the ownership of the land at the beginning of the Meiji restoration was under the form of independent farmers. The results were remarkable considering that the productivity of the farms increased while the actual villages population decreased. The development of the industrial sector brought along improvements in the land work and animal breeding techniques, but these factors started to actually have a capital influence on the increase in farming productivity only after World War I (Bock, 50).

Compared to the contemporary Japan, the Japanese countryside changed tremendously since the Meiji era. but, the changes that took place between the 1868 and 1912 were slower in the lives of those working the land compared to those living in the cities. As previously shown, the huge resources needed for the construction of a viable industrial sector were coming mainly from the agricultural sector at first. The new schools, the railroad, the factories and the manufactory machines imported from abroad were financed with the money coming from the taxes paid by those who were owning a piece of land. "It took longer for the efforts to create a new Japan to impinge on the lives and opportunities of everyone in the country. For no group did it take as long as for the nation's farmers, not solely because there were so many of them, but also because most of the tax payments, foreign exchange earnings, and savings generated by the agricultural sector[...] were used by the state and by the Japanese entrepreneurs to promote the non-agricultural development of the country" (Nagatsuka, vii). The development of the rural life differed from region to region and from household to household. The villages that were in the vicinity of the new railroad were taking advantage of everything this revolutionary mean of transportation brought along. There were also some that were less fortunate and left behind, being bypassed by the railroad. Some other rural regions in Japan were even poorer due to the quality of the soil or natural calamities they were exposed to. The village described by Nagatsuka who was writing from his own experience was among those who were left behind by distance from the city that were difficult to overcome since the railroad was not passing by the village. The family of farmers his novel focuses on does not own land, but had to lend it and to add something to the family income from other activities as well in order to survive. Anne Waswo, the translator of the Soil, points out in the introduction of the book that the protagonists are not exceptions, but rather the exponents of the usual Japanese farmer family during the Meiji era (Nagatsuka,.xi). Those villages where most of those working the land were able to make just enough to help their families survive, like Kossho were still widely spread across Japan at the beginning tat the Meiji era. The wealthiest landowning family of the village was at the top of the village hierarchy and the poorer farmers were more or less dependable on the resources the family of the master and the mistress could provide as a supplement to their earnings. In those families that were not owning any land, the means for the family living beside the actual working of the land they were lending, came from the labor the man, the head of the house, did during the winter and the peddling of his wife: "It was her custom in her sparetime to go about from village to village peddling bean curd...Of course, her earnings were also meager, but it was better than relying on farming alone" (Nagatsuka, 1). Oshina, the wives' character in the novel, could be the impersonation of any hardworking farmer's wife during the Meiji Restoration in Japan. The hardship of the life in a village struggling to adjust to the wave of modernity swiping the country, but still very deeply rooted in the previous period was plausible in the case of those who did not own much land or the means to improve their living standards from other not farm-related activities. "At all hours of the day, as long as there was light, Oshina kept busy at one task or another; soaking straw from rope making, sweeping up leaves, her hands were never idle" (Nagatsuka, 1). The lives of the farmers like those described by Nagatsuka were subject to rapid change since the early stages of the Meiji Restoration, despite their initial set back. The example for the next generation of female workers in the factories of the modern Japan was set by women like Oshina. "Leke their mothers and grandmothers before them in pre-Meiji times, they have routinely seen female as well as male offspring of peasant families "going out to work" (dekasegi) in a place beyond commuting to the home village (Tsurumi, 10).

The description of a common farmer's wife in ethnographic studies about peasant life pre and immediately post Meiji restoration fits the mother character in the Soil. Patricia Tsurumi's research work, gathered under the title: Factory Girls, sheds some light on the lives of the common peasant women that will populate most of the factories where there knowledge to weave, spin cotton or reel silk was put to good use. The peasant family depended heavily on all the family members, male or female. The gender differences in the peasant life of the Meiji era continues to be manifested in the amount paid for the same kind of labor in many activities and in the places they plaid in the family and in society, but the women were nevertheless respected and praised for their role in the family and thus, when it came to the family life, they were able to take part in the decision making up to a certain level. This position extended to the village life as well (idem, 16). Interestingly enough, when thinking of the same period in Europe, the marriages among the peasants were usually left at the partners' will and the husband and wife were often even having sexual relations before the actual marriage took place. Unlike the samurai during the Tokugawa period and more recently, the landlords and the rich merchants, the peasants could not only choose whomever they wanted as their spouse, they could also divorce him or her if the situation asked for such a measure and remarry someone else (Nagatsuka, Waswo,; Tsurumi).

Another important source of information about the peasantry life in Japan during the Meiji restoration is provided by Anne Walthall's book: The Weak Body of a Useless Woman.

The book tells the story of Matsuo Taseko, a Japanese peasant who overcame her condition by becoming involved in the events that led to the Meiji restoration and those after that and she also became a poet. Matsuo Taseko was no ordinary woman, but her life is presented in the circumstances of extraordinary events made happen by ordinary people. The introduction to this book reveals the description of a typical peasant woman, born during the Tokugawa period: "Matsuo Taseko was born a peasant in the mountains of central Japan in 1811. She married at the age of eighteen, gave birth to ten children of whom seven survived to adulthood, raised silkworms, and helped her husband mange his family's affairs" (Walthall, 1). Being born into a richer peasant family, Matsuo Taseko had a marriage that was most likely arranged. The wealthier peasants used to tie knots with others that were having about the same economic situation by means of marriage. This was the way the Takemura and Matsuo families made an alliance. Like Nagatsuka Takashi, Walthall is also mentioning the habit of adopting sons-in-law in the case of families that were having only daughters, since the family affairs were usually to be overtaken from the head of the house upon his retirement or death, by a man. The Takemura, the family Taseko came from is described in the book as a family that had to use this custom for several generations since they had only daughters for some time. Another way of adopting a son into a family, beside the habit of adapting a son-in-law who overtook the family name along with the family responsibilities, there was also the possibility of adopting a son from a relative, like in the case of Taseko's brother who adopted one of her sons. The men who were marrying and adopted into another family were just as exposed to the difficulties of adapting to a completely new life as the women were. The difficulties of those men who came into a strange household of their wife's family, adopted as son-in-law, are described by Nagatsuka Takashi, in the Soil. Kanji married into Oshina's family and was adopted to overtake the family duties from his father-in-law: Uhei, who also came into the family as an adopted son. "Having entered the family by means of marriage, neither Uhei nor Kanji has the full authority of an inheriting son. Thus Uhei defers to Oshina's other relatives when her elopement with Kanji is discussed and although there were additional reasons for it Kanji defers to Oshina throughout their life together" (Takashi, Waswo, xiii). Ann Waswo is further pointing out the introduction to the book she translated that the marriages between peasants that were not wealthy, like Oshina and Kanji were free of arrangements between families. "In other respects, however, the situation of both men is fairly typical for the time and place. They had both married women of their own choosing, with whom they had premarital sexual relations and for whom they had a strong attachment" (idem, xiii).

A custom that came from the samurai and was already adopted into the commoners' families living in the country was that of a child's debt to his parents. Children were bound to obey, respect and support their parents in their old age in exchange for having been given life and nurtured. (idem, xiii).

The differences between the lives of a wealthy peasant family and those who were struggling to make just enough to survive are evident in the description of the wedding ceremonials in the Soil compared to those described in the Weak Body of a Useless Woman. When Taseko married into the Matsuo family, her first ride to her new home, her husband's family home, was in a palanquin. Not only were they superior to other peasants because of their wealth, but they were also having some warrior ancestors that gave them some privileges. Beside the offerings for the Gods at the wedding ceremony and the gifts for the family members, the brides coming from such families were given a dowry that was impressive and belonging to them only. The fathers of the brides received important amounts of money form the groom's family. The total costs of such a marriage, that was in fact an alliance were astronomical compared to what the majority of the peasants could earn in their whole lives (Walthall, 64).

During the Meiji period, there were also changes made in the Civil Code that were regarding the habit of keeping a wife's family name. The common peasants already adopted the new system of her adopting her husbands' family name. It became official one the Civil Code was adopted, by the end of the nineteenth century.

The sentimental values of family life were felt in both cases of those who had arranged marriages, like Matsuo Taseko or in the case of Oshina and Kanji from the Soil who chose each other as a spouse. In the case of the latter, beside their strict and absolute contribution to the family earnings, the relationship between husband and wife brought compassion and warmth into the family. In the case of the former, there is evidence presented in the book the Weak Body of a Useless Woman testifying the deep feelings a daughter used to have for her family, even after she move into her husband's and the author points out that this was a common thing among the Japanese families (idem, 65).

The usual peasant family size was relatively small by the time the Meiji Restoration took place. The economic development that came along with the industrial economy gave the opportunities for commoners as well as for all those depending on the farming to have larger families. Their children were not bound to the same way of living as their ancestors, since they were offered the new opportunity to go work in a factory.

Another important source of information regarding everyday life of a peasant is provided by Nishida Yoshiaki, in his book Farmers and Village Life in Twentieth-Century Japan. He writes about information gathered from diaries kept by those living in the village, like Zenji who started writing his diary in 1893, at 15 years. Zenji started working for a farmer's family who had some land of its own and some rented land as well. He will marry into that family since they had only daughters, becoming an adopted son-in-law. The Goto family is one that manages to increase the family earnings and advance economically, remaining at the same social level of tenants. Their farming activities consisted mainly in cultivating rice, "but they also carried out a wide variety of subsidiary activities such as rice brokerage (i.e. purchasing rice wholesale for later sale at a profit, known locally as kedashi), seasonal work transporting rice to dealers in the coastal city of Sakata (known as dachinmai, 'rice carriage'), polishing rice, selling sake and brokering the ropes that local farmers made, and it is evident that it was the profits from these subsidiary activities that made it possible for them to acquire more land" (Nishida, 8).

The transformations that occurred in Japan starting with 1868 also influenced the religious life that was an important part of the Japanese people. "While Christianity was legalized, it was not the state supported religion. The government supported its religion of choice by opening up the Office of Shinto Worship that was ranked so highly that it was even over the Council of State. This also led to the reinforcement of the belief in divine ancestry of the emperor's blood line. By 1877 the government controlled all Shinto shrines, supported the Shinto teachers, and some of the Shinto sects were granted government recognition" (James). The Meiji restoration brought the complete separation between Buddhism and Shinto and the process of separation and replacement of the Buddhist with the Shinto in the State affairs took was partially violent. The systam changed once the shrines were ranked by the state and the commoners were now allowed to be registered at a shrine, at birth, becoming "parishioners" (Hardacre, 29). People had to be registered at the shrines in the vicinity of their residences. "Symbolically speaking then, each household became a "branch shrine" of the Ise shrines, thus linking all the populace to this cult center" (idem, 29).

A demographic analysis of Japan shortly before and after the Meiji restoration shows, according to Gordon, an important increase in population: "from 1880 to 1900, Japan's population rose from abut thirty-five to fourtyfive million people. At the same time, the rural, agricultural population declined slightly. As previously mentioned, it was a natural phenomenon that along with the industrialization, people were moving out of their villages into the cities to work in the factories. Susan B. Hanley points out that the demographic changes in the Japanese society were not as impressive as it might have been expected. She emphasizes the birth control methods used by the Japanese people from all ranks of society since early on in history that were greatly influencing the way society developed demographically speaking. "Japan did not undergo a tremendous shift in demographic patterns from the Tokugawa period to the Meiji years of early industrialization" (Henley).

The fate of the Japanese peasantry was partially following the patterns of all those western societies that underwent economical changes and shifts from a mainly agricultural economy to the new industrial era. Authors like Norman, that are critically assessing the effects of the Meiji restoration on the Japanese peasant population from a Marxist point a view draw conclusions toward a rapid loss of land owned by the peasants in favor of their accumulation in the hands of powerful landlords. There are other who contradict Normans' vision on the fate of the Japanese peasantry, like TC Smith who "points out that a landless peasantry was not the creation of the Meiji period, but that it had been in existence during the seventeenth century, and even at that time constituted "a substantial part of the total population" (Morris, 368). Nevertheless, the taxes coming from the agricultural, although steadily decreasing in percentage, continued to represent the most important part of the state tax revenues until the beginning of the twentieth century (Gordon, 95). The Japanese countryside became an important part of the Japanese economy due to the amount of taxes paid but also to the sources of export it provided: tea, silk, working force.

Most of the historians writing about the Meiji Restoration agreed on the fact that the peasantry did not play an essential role in the overthrowing of the Shogunate in 1968, but they did have their share in the events. Peasant revolts were not unusual in the years preceding the Meiji Restoration. Thoams P. Kasulis calls the peasants along with some of the landlords, "agents of change"(Kasulis, 132). Social change is the traditional model of historiography in Japan, when it comes to the Meiji period (Wilson, 7). "It has been basically Marxist, and it views the outcome of the Meiji Restoration as a flowed bourgeois revolution carried out by elements of the dying feudal aristocracy in league with nouveau riche lower-middle-class types in rural and to a lesser extent urban Japan" (Wilson, 7).

The tendency in asserting the relationship between tenants and landlords is to point out the net superiority in the mechanisms the landlords had in controlling and completely enjoy their rights over their properties, compared to what the tenants had. Michael Smitka uses the example of the Niigata prefecture as a counterpart to such opinions concluding that the tenants were absolutely dependent on their landlords good will. "Tenants in Niigata Prefecture, operating through village-wide mechanisms of rent determination and field allocation, frequently exerted substantial control over the conditions of tenancy. These mechanisms were survivals of the system of landholding which dominated this part of Japan until the mid-nineteenth century: periodic redistribution of arable land among cultivators" (Smitka, 91).

Beside the economical, demographical, marriage life and religious aspects of the analysis of life peasantry led during the Meiji Restoration, there were also the social aspects that were treated by various authors. The Bakufu regulations during the Tokugawa period were prescribing peasants to be "deferential to their superiors, diligent in their agricultural pursuits, and frugal in their everyday lives" (Walthall, 71). Those who could not afford the tee, the tee ceremony, travels, sake or tobacco did not need the regulations to keep them from ever enjoying them and those who could afford all of this were easily transgressing the law without being punished. "The objects necessary to make the ceremony a momentous occasion took considerable effort to acquire and the expense could be ruinous. On the other hand, the tea ceremony gave peasants an excellent excuse to get together. As with the poetry meetings, it provided a space where likeminded people with enough money could meet and talk about business, philosophy, politics, or whatever else interested them" (Walthall, 72). The peasant women, like the men, were also drinking sake and smoking tobacco; the samurai women did that, too, but to a lesser extent (Walthall, 72).

The life of the Japanese peasantry changed a lot after the Meiji restoration, but the process was painful and irreversible. Classes had bee abolished, commoners were allowed to marry people from higher ranks and wear any kind of cloths. The unrest among the farmers did not stop once the Meiji reforms were on their way. Common people were paying high taxes to their landlords and were forced to work even harder to gather the high tax they had to pay in order to avoid the army service that became mandatory. But the development in education, technology and the informational support helped them increase their farms' productivity as shown before and the revolts remained local and never spread through the entire country. but, the potential for amassing uncontrolled forces as a result of the inequalities that were produced by the system of land lords and tenants remained until the Land reform of 1946-1947. "In order to eliminate all dangerous socialist tendencies in the countryside, it was necessary to return the land to the tillers, that is to transform the majority of agriculturalists into small property owners. This rural "middle class' would hopefully become a conservative political force, thus ensuring that Japan remained in the anti-communist camp"

Thus, in spite of the technical and economical advancements, the life of the rural Japan was still based on a system that was highly risky on a long-term in the twentieth century. Peasants had now the liberty to choose which crops to cultivate and they could sell or buy land, but the earnings of most of those who worked the land did not offer them the opportunity to develop too much economically. Prices for rent and taxes cut a large amount of what they earned and left little to put away. Families like the Goto family, described in Zenji's diary were among the very few that succeed to make a step further in their social condition. "Such an advance into the upper ranks of Japanese farmers was highly unusual at the time, especially in the Tohoku region, where a widening disparity between the economic status of landlords on the one hand and of tenant farmers on the other had been the norm. Yet it was an advance made at the cost of 'ceaseless labor' by people working for the GotA?, none more so than Zenji (Usami 1977a: 16)" (Nishida, 9). Te entries of Zenji's journal are not mentioning any social unrest. The life of the Toyohara village revolves around the monotonous activities involving rice growing and others related to the rice crops and there does not seem to be anything else that could disturb the hard but peaceful life of the village, until 1912, the end of the Meiji period (Nishida, 9). Beside relationships between the family members, the rituals, the accounts of every day life in the village, just like Zenji, Nagatsuka Takashi emphisizes in the Soil the high dependency of thee tenants upon the will of the landlord. "This was a time when tenant farmers could not survive hard times of one sort or another unless their landlords benevolently reduced or deferred rent payments, a fact that is supported by the records kept by the Nishiyama family in Niigata Prefecture, which report that in almost every year between 1902 and 1914 one or another of their landlords benevolently consented to reduce rents" (Nishida, 11-12).