From Village Moneylender to Rural Banker: Changing Credit in Protoindustrial Japan

Abstract

Well before the opening of Japan’s ports to unlimited foreign trade and the advent of the Meiji industrialisation, Japan had entered an ‘age of protoindustrialisation’ in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A money economy was so far advanced that in some regions even rural households derived half or more of their income from wage labour, cottage industry, and other non-agricultural pursuits. Indeed, a money-and-market orientation had progressively altered rural economic and social structure, promoting a differentiation of primarily agricultural villages from increasingly industrial ones. The latter relied on the market for ever larger proportions of their income, for a growing portion of the raw materials for production, and for their consumption needs in food, fuel and fibre. These changes favoured smaller farm and household size, increased use of purchased materials and labour, and cash-crop outputs. As employment opportunities in the villages grew more numerous and attractive, urban centres began to lose population to the protoindustrialising countryside.