Aspects of Mobility in Pre-Industrial Japanese Cities

Abstract

A very great deal of our knowledge of urban life in Tokugawa Japan relates to the “happy society” of Genroku in the early 18th century, to the life of the theater and the gay quarters, and to the activities of the great merchant houses and the more extravagant and colorful of their heads. Extensive coverage is given theories of the state, administrative arrangements, and the discrepancies between the actual and theoretical positions of the classes of Tokugawa society. Ordinarily, mobility is treated in passing, partly because vertical social mobility is rightly presumed to have been a minor feature of that society until at least its closing period, and partly because the materials required are so difficult to unearth and so resistant to rigorous analysis. Bellah's observation that “…mobility was largely within classes rather than between them,” is apt, although Taeuber reminds us that “…movements of surplus youth from the rural areas to the cities were adjustments of population to resources and employment opportunies that ante-dated modern industrialization by some centuries.” Lampard completes the thought with respect to its implications for the transition to industrialism in his remark that “…old commercial-administrative centers [provide] ready markets, some tradition of urban life, and constant pressure to secure a livelihood from non-farming activity.”

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