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A High Standard of Living in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Fact or Fantasy?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Susan B. Hanley
Susan B. Hanley
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Japanese Studies and History, University of Washington, Seattle, Washington 98195
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Abstract

In an effort to begin to solve the continuing controversy over how high the standard of living was in Japan prior to industrialization, this paper goes beyond the inadequate quantitative data and examines also qualitative and local evidence. Information on housing and food, urban water quality and waste disposal, and life styles is examined along with representative family budgets and two sets of real wage estimates. The evidence, taken together with life expectancy estimates, suggests that the standard of living in mid-nineteenth-century Japan was not only higher than in the 1700s, but relatively high in comparison to most of the industrializing West.

Type
Papers Presented at the Forty-Second Annual Meeting of the Economic History Association
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , March 1983 , pp. 183 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1983

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References

1 The three budgets discussed here are only three examples out of hundreds available. Many in Japan were richer, both samurai and commoner, and many were poorer, especially the daily laborers. But note that the farmer was a tenant and not an owner farmer, and the carpenter an artisan working for wages and not the owner of a business. The budgets were selected because the patterns they show are supported by the majority of economic and social evidence that exists.Google Scholar

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