Osamu Saito interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 9th March 2010

0:05:07 Born in 1946; my father was a medical doctor with a surgery in downtown Tokyo but the air raids forced him to evacuate to the countryside to the area where he had been born; I knew none of my grandparents; I was born of a second marriage for both my father and mother; I was in effect an only child though I found that three of my mother's pregnancies ended in the death of the child; when my parents had remarried they were already pretty old which is why I never knew any grandparents; my father was aged about fifty and mother, forty; I discovered that my family had a typical pre-modern demographic structure with a lot of infant deaths; my brother was the first son of my father's previous marriage; he survived childhood and went to medical school with a view to succeed his father, but died just before completing his MD of a type of leukaemia; again, I discovered this much later; my sister in law died of tuberculosis just before the War; I never felt that my own interest in historical demography was prompted by my own family history; I do think that my family background was influential in one way because when I went to school I did notice differences with other children; when my parents came to school events they were much older than my friends' parents; at that time my brother was still alive and he looked just like my father should; I probably became very good at detecting differences which is perhaps one of the legacies I got from that peculiar family background

6:13:20 Unfortunately my father was very sickly; when I went to secondary school he was already over sixty and became pretty ill; my mother was still active, helping in his surgery, so a typical self-employed business; my mother's father was a vet doctor in the army; he died before the War but was not really interested in a science-related professor nor the army, but was more interested in art and music; my mother also liked music and at high school tried to learn the violin; my father was the third son of a farmer thus was not going to inherit the farm so had to go out; he went to college, first to a teacher-training college and became a teacher, but for some reason he decided to leave; he took a year off, came to Tokyo and went to a crammer to get into medical school; I guess he had a fixed plan to do this and had saved his teaching salary to fund it; his second brother went to the University of Kyoto but the eldest son never had any higher education; this was a quite widespread pattern in the Japanese countryside

9:26:11 I inherited my mother's interest in music which I started developing when I went to secondary school; for example, my mother liked Beethoven which I also liked, and we had on gramophone records; unfortunately I was too clumsy to play an instrument; music continues to be important to me; one of the reasons why my daughter said that she would like to go to music college is possibly an indirect influence from my mother; the kind of music I like is chamber music rather than orchestral or opera; I find music compatible with concentration, for example, reading and sometimes writing; I very much like Bartok's chamber music which is similar to late Beethoven, and also Bach's chamber music

12:16:18 When I was in my first year of school and heard the bell ring for going in, I apparently saw that the swings were now empty so went there instead; I was repeatedly told this tale by my mother and others so forms my first memory; by the time I went to school my family had returned to Tokyo and my father had another surgery in an area of small workshops in Ota Ward, one of the southernmost wards of Tokyo; in the 1950s Japan was still very poor and the small engineering workshops looked very shabby; it was not a residential area and there very few middle-class people, but it was fantastic because there were a lot of empty spaces, the legacy of bombing, where we could play; I remember that period in terms of space; if you go back to that area now it is packed with buildings and workshops; I remember my first school; because of the poverty of the time there was little room in the school, and when in my third year there was an influx of children from elsewhere, it was really congested; they needed a new building but there was no money so they imposed a double timetable, either going in the morning or the afternoon; this was the effect of the post-war baby boom and I still remember how sudden the change was; I went to secondary school in 1958 so this was 1954-5; I don't remember teachers very well; what I do remember clearly was the library; there were very few books but I quite often went to borrow one; I would visit it to see if any new books had arrived which interested me; I went to secondary school, a private, fee-paying school, at Keio which had been started by Fukuzawa, rather oddly named Keio Ordinary School; my brother had been at Keio and probably my parents wanted to put me there in the hope that I would go on to Keio Medical School; also I liked Keio, partly because my brother was there, but also because everybody said that Keio boys' school was very good; its great asset for me was its fantastic library in contrast to that of my primary school; even though this was just for the lower school - 12-15 - there was a huge amount of books there; also the books were not just abridged versions but the full texts of novels etc., such as those of Natsume Soseki; that opened my eyes; I was also influenced by  friends in my class who had mature minds and were already aware of famous writers; intellectually I received a huge influence from the school; I don't know what influence Fukuzawa exerted on the school but he may have been influenced by the English public school [O.S. I checked the school’s history and found that the school was never formally ‘founded’ in a usual sense; initially Fukuzawa’s juku (academy) included secondary school-age pupils as well; when the university courses were separated from his juku the rest was called a ‘ordinary-level’ one; I therefore made the statement less specific]; it was a day school, and that is probably the only important difference; now there are some boarding schools in Japan, but at that period there was virtually none; we all commuted to school, some from far away; we did play games but it was not compulsory; I did some sumo wrestling and kendo, which was part of P.E.; as far as I know there was no corporal punishment; the post-war period was very different and there may have been corporal punishment before the war

25:17:00 The subjects I enjoyed were history, some social studies, but I didn't enjoy science at all; the good thing was that I didn't need to sit entrance exams to the upper school or to Keio University itself; I do remember a really good history teacher who taught us for three years; he covered all aspects of history, not just Japanese; the tiny bit of Japanese history started with the archaeology and ended in the fourteenth century; however, he was fantastic and gave us all sorts of homework such as publishing our own newspaper; I started with the headline 'Conspiracy!' and the story took a number of absorbing days to write; I thought I would get a really good mark but did not; there was B on the front page but A on the back, possibly for an item on trade with China and a map; the teacher told me later that he was a bit concerned about my interest in details, particularly in political history, and was too fond of historical stories; he wanted to show me that history was different from story telling

29:59:10 I have always liked reading and continued to read novels and sometimes poems at university; I was not interested in drama; one of my children is now in a theatre so has not followed me; my father was interested in kabuki and quite often took me as a child; because he was busy he would just choose to see one act; there was no seat so I just used to lean on the railing to watch; I don't think that I really enjoyed the experience; modern education is very stressful but when I was at Keio there was no rote learning; to enter Tokyo University the exams require you to memorize vast amounts of material, but I didn't need to do that; in my spare time I just read, borrowing a lot of books from the library; when I was in the upper school I started doing some sort of research, mapping ancient and medieval estates; this was the beginning of my later interest; I didn't much enjoy other lessons so had a lot of spare time; my reading included non-Japanese literature as well

35:42:09 I wanted to read history at Keio but there was a fight within the family; my father had already died when I was sixteen so that reduced the pressure to do medicine; I began reading modern history books; in the 1950s and 1960s Japanese history writing was very much influenced by Marxist discourse so I subconsciously absorbed some Marxian messages; that led me to realize the importance of economics so I decided to read economics rather than history; Akira Hayami was teaching there; quite fortunately the economic history at Keio was very strong at that time; there were many teachers, several who had just come back from the West having absorbed all sorts of new things, so I really enjoyed their lectures; now I think that I made the right choice; Japanese universities have a sort of seminar system based on the German idea, so a class that allows discussion and some sort of tutorial is provided; I chose Hayami's seminar and decided to write a B.A. thesis in Japanese economic history; at that time he had just come back from Europe where he had encountered historical demography; this had changed his view of Tokugawa Japan and he had just started lecturing on that idea; he had originally wanted to study Japanese-Portuguese relations in the sixteenth century but he changed under the influence of Louis Henri's work to historical demography; the research itself had just started but by the time I went to graduate school some of the first results had started to come out; he came to Cambridge to attend the 'Household and Family' conference organized by Peter Laslett so that was very much a formative period; he and Peter worked quite closely together and that was why I chose Cambridge when I was able to go abroad; I think Hayami is really good at identifying sources for his own research projects; the reason why he got interested in population is probably because he had known of the population registers already; his teacher had already started making use of them; as soon as he encountered historical demography he realized that it would be a really useful source; that sense is really wonderful and proved correct, even richer than he had thought; then he started working on family and household as well as population; historians ought to have a few abilities and a good historian probably combines two of them; he definitely has the sense for the source and his second ability is hard work; he started the work in the pre-computer age, so it was important to work out how to organise the research; he had to have an image of the whole process of the manual work, and came up with a card system that was very useful

44:19:19 At that time the Marxist interpretations were very strong and the Tokugawa period was usually seen as a dark age where peasants were really poor and had no access to markets; there were wealthy merchants in Osaka and Edo but the peasants were immobile; when Hayami started looking at population registers he found there was much more mobility, with children going to Kyoto as servants before returning home; that showed him a totally different aspect of village life in Tokugawa Japan; he is not very interested in market aspects of economic history, but certainly as far as movement and migration, also the population variables, changed the interpretation of economic history in the Tokugawa period; his work on different regions of Japan benefitted from the use of population registers; historians tend to work on a particular area but he is probably one of the first to try cross-sections of population registers; this gave him the sense of geographical variation, particularly during the Tokugawa period when the whole country was divided up among the daimyo; if an historian specialized in one area with one daimyo, then he will only be aware of that clan's history; this then gave a biased image of the Tokugawa period; it could be corrected by reading books and papers of others working on different areas but Hayami could get a first-hand observation; one of the differences between Japanese and Western historians is their focus on very particular topics or places; there are probably several reasons for this; one is that Tokugawa Japan was itself divided up, also, for the modern period too, we don't have a good national archive; for example, censuses - the first census returns were destroyed, partly because of the war as they had to move the archive into the countryside, but also there is a tendency for civil servants to destroy the originals; archives tended to be kept in the daimyo districts; there is now a national archive but it still often has less than the local archive; also, in history we have had two strong influences from the West, one is from Ranke the other from Marx, and they are totally different; Ranke's influence is on narrative and details; the way the Japanese historian receives the lessons from Ranke was probably different from historians in the West; most historians think details are important, and the relationship of detailed facts with the source are essentially different; on the other hand they have no way to interpret their findings; then came the Marxian influence which gave them the jargon and big picture, so some of them although trained in traditional history absorbed Marxian frameworks; there are these two big influences but in between we didn't have a middle path; there was not the equivalent of British Whig history, but what Fukuzawa left was something like it; unfortunately that was not taken up by professional historians

53:58:13 After doing a B.A. I went to graduate school and did a two-year M.A.; I started working with early Meiji data which I thought was the crucial period as it was very close to the Tokugawa; it later made it easier for me to cross the boundary between them; many historians stop at the end of the Tokugawa period and the Meiji historians never go backwards because the sources are different; I think that I made a good choice; my theme was migration, the regional labour market, that sort of thing; I started with the labour market which could lead to particular research, but could also lead to household and family studies; at that time I did not know where the research would lead me; with the M.A. I was chosen as an ‘assistant’ and got tenure at Keio aged twenty-four, so very young; although termed assistant, my only duty was to look after the students in Hayami's seminar; when they chose me I thought that everyone would think of me as successor to Hayami so I decided not to work on population, but rather on economic themes, so as to distance myself from him; however, that sense of succession is still very strong in Japanese universities; because I moved university, I did not have a successor at Keio; I became a research professor at the Institute of Economic Research (IER) at Hitotsubashi, not in the faculty, so I have no successor there; one thing that I am really grateful to Akira Hayami for is that he did not treat me as his successor and try to organize my life as some professors do; also I got an offer from Hitotsubashi well before his retirement at Keio; my leaving did upset his colleagues as everybody thought I would stay at Keio; the offer came out of the blue because even economic historians outside Keio thought I would never move because of my strong connections with it since childhood; Hitotsubashi’s IER  is primarily a research institute so I had no undergraduates but only research students with whom to work