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Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, & Warfare in a Transformative Age
FARRIS William Wayne
'Wayne Farris provides a challenging, well argued, and impressively documented study of what he calls a 'medieval Japanese meta-morphosis', the key element of which was population growth. He contends that, while Japan's medieval age may have been marked by warfare, famine, and disease, it was, overall, a period of great social and economic growth and transformation. His book is a thoughtful examination of the variables that may have affected and derived from the increase in population. This is a major contribution to Japanese historical studies, not just medieval Japanese studies' - Martin Collcutt, Princeton University This volume charts a course through never-before-surveyed historical territory: Japan's medieval population, a topic so challenging that neither Japanese nor foreign scholars have investigated it in a comprehensive way. And yet, demography is an invaluable approach to the past because it provides a way - often the only way - to study the mass of people who did not belong to the political or religious elite. By synthesising a vast cache of primary and secondary sources, William Wayne Farris constructs an important analysis of Japan’s population from 1150 to 1600 and considers social and economic developments that were life and death issues for ordinary Japanese. Impressive in his grasp of detail and the scope of his inquiry, Farris makes the argument that, although this age initially witnessed the continuation of a centuries-old demographic stasis, a far-reaching transformation began around 1280 and eventually gained momentum until it swept through the Japanese archipelago. Between 1280 and 1600, Japan's population approximately trebled, growing from 6 million to 17 million. Crucial to the demographic breakthrough was the resolution of two central problems facing both the rulers and the ruled. The first was how to supply a burgeoning population with sufficient food; the second, how to keep the peace. Japan's Medieval Population will be required reading for specialists in pre-modern Japanese history, who will appreciate it not only for its thought-provoking arguments, but also for its methodology and use of sources. William Wayne Farris is Sen Soshitsu XV Chair in Traditional Japanese Culture and History in the Department of History, University of Hawai'i.
