Second Part

0:05:07 I moved to Hitotsubashi in 1982; I was married and had been to Cambridge in the 1970s with Nobuko, my wife; the psychological reason for accepting the offer was quite simple; I had then undergraduate classes, lectures, and by that time was spending a huge amount of time on administration and university duties at Keio; I felt fed up with this and was still very young, too young to combine different things together; I thought a research institute would be paradise; my acceptance certainly upset my colleagues, but surprisingly not Akira Hayami; he was not that sort of person, so I am really grateful to him for not saying anything about my move; I still remember telephoning him after having heard from the institute; he just listened and said OK, and that when I had made a decision to let him know; my coming to Cambridge in the 1970s was to work with the Cambridge Group; I got a scholarship from the Fukuzawa Memorial Fund; I could have chosen any country; Akira Hayami had suggested France as at that time the Annales school was really powerful, but I couldn't read French so chose Cambridge; fortunately, Hayami knew Peter Laslett so I came to the Cambridge Group; another good fortune was meeting Peter; he asked lots of questions every time I met him; some were irrelevant but two-thirds were about Japan; still, he made me think very seriously, leading me to topics and connections that I had never thought of; also, I started working, unexpectedly, on English material there; at an early meeting with Peter I told him of my work on work, labour, that sort of thing; I wondered if it could be done with English material; he told me to just do it; I went to the library and looked at the listings; by that time they had already collected about five hundred; I found two which I could use for the plan I had and started working on it; Peter was very pleased and continually asked about my progress; also, that made me think about how individual-level information is tied up with other big pictures; that was the way in which the Cambridge Group  work on household and family was done, relating the small picture to wider hypotheses; I really learnt a lot from my experience with English materials at the Cambridge Group

7:54:24 I got to know Tony Wrigley very well from that period; during my stay at that time I was working on occupation so was not particularly interested in demography; I really don't know why I started working on demography but it happened in Japan rather than Cambridge; thanks to my knowledge of what the Cambridge Group had been doing it was quite easy for me to get on with historical demography, and particularly because Hayami was there; eventually I came to work on both economic history and historical demography; Roger Schofield and Tony and others helped me; the differences between Japanese and English materials were quite straightforward; when I started working on English materials I could see what the family looked like; they were definitely small, nuclear families; when I looked at the Japanese population registers there were more complex households; at the same time, the difference in the family and household structure must have been related to some other differences; working on work and labour, labour supply, for example; in the Tokugawa period, labour supply, covered children going into service and their return home; these were part of the mode of household formation and structure, so from the comparison I learnt a lot; both England and Japan had servants, but in the latter girls tended to go back to their natal village to marry; the more fundamental difference was that they became self-employed as part of the household economy, whereas in England they became agricultural labourers; men's experience was probably more diverse; some came back to be adopted by others; adult adoption is another difference between Japan and England; for boys, adoption was a very good job opportunity for them, particularly for the non-inheriting sons; obviously, one option is just to go to the city and to become an apprentice, but adoption was far more important; I looked at the demographic parameters and these suggested that this was a big opportunity for them, and some came back just to be adopted; adoption was something like arranged marriage; the key persons within a kin or social network would be aware of people needing to bring in adopted sons; there is some anecdotal evidence that in big merchant houses they adopted one of the servants despite sometimes having sons; they would marry a daughter to a bright servant and adopt him; although the numbers are very small, certainly it shows that these strategies worked; when I was looking at the population registers I came across several divorce cases and all took place with inheriting daughters, so all related to adoption; a man was married in, then divorced, and the next year they adopted in another; there was a pattern of a succession of divorces

18:43:05 I am good at relating things in economic history to the study of household and family and demography, and vice versa; also placing some Japanese findings in a comparative perspective with Western Europe; I can easily apply that sort of methodology to China; since the publication of Pomeranz's 'The Great Divergence', and his findings that the standard of living in East Asia had been comparable to those in the West in the eighteenth century; I am now convinced that if we look at household income of the bottom group, the peasants, in Tokugawa Japan or China compared with the agricultural labourer in England, I think he is right; the living standards of those people are comparable; however, if you compare just real wages, they are very different; England was a high wage economy whereas Japan was a low wage economy; this was possible because Japan had a very different mode of household economy; the household is a place where various economic activities were combined within the same household; the by-employment gives you some idea that it was because they were so poor that they were forced to take up some low-paid by-employment; in fact it was simply because they were flexible and had some idea of planning; they already had the notion of a planned calendar; in that way we can explain the gap between living standards measured by wages and that measured by household income which is a mixed income; that is one of the conclusions I reached recently; Susan Hanley's idea of living standards in Japan is much broader as she brought in environmental aspects and disease into her argument; I do not need these but can stick to economic measures for my argument; I still think the more important thing was the way the economy worked; in my recent lectures I did say that if you look at the bottom level, England and Japan look very similar in terms of the economic concept of living standards, but if you go up the social strata there are huge differences; England has a much thicker middle-class at that time and the average household is much wealthier; the whole domestic market was much larger in England than in Japan; the third measure is if you calculate per capita GDP it is much higher than in Japan in the Tokugawa period; it is a bit ironic to say that in England high economic inequality and economic growth were integrated; that implies that in Japan, because of the smallness of the middle-classes, that Japan was a low-growth economy during the Tokugawa period; as Adam Smith said, the division of labour was limited by the extent of the domestic market; I think I can explain within exactly the same framework that if you look at the bottom the Japanese living standards are comparable to the Western labourers, but within the same framework I can explain why the growth is so different between England and Japan; probably that was an aspect that Susan Hanley didn't have in her argument; on the debate on the great divergence, if you look at the quantitative measures of living standards there are some similarities and differences, and on balance we can probably say that both countries experienced early modern growth; however, if you look at deeper, structural, aspects, we definitely have a divergence which took place much earlier; the statement that England was a high wage economy means that it is not simply saying that England had a higher living standard, it ought to be a high wage economy because so much is spent on hired labour; the whole household economy ought to be geared to supplying labour, so a long time before gave up having family farms; we think the divergence took place in the medieval or very early modern period; that is a very real structure of divergence, especially between Japan and England; there is a connection between the high wage economy and the greater reliance on non-human energy as a way in which labour activity is enhanced; since in Japan it was a low wage economy there is no need to make that connection; at the same time what was higher in Japan was land productivity and that was the cornerstone to the whole economy; already by the end of the Tokugawa period the per hectare productivity was higher than some of the levels found in the post-war Asian rice growing economies; so if you had one hectare of paddy field you can calculate the food from it; to achieve a very high level of land productivity you ought to combine various productive activities such as a second crop, or even a cash crop; they started sowing within the rows a winter crop, so the utilization of land ought to be increased; that is the sort of process Japan saw over two or three centuries or even longer; Hayami's contrast between Japan having an industrious revolution and Britain, an industrial revolution, is relevant; however, I have a quibble with the term revolution; I don't think there was a revolution during the Tokugawa period; Japanese were already industrious at the beginning of the Tokugawa, and engaged in very intensive agriculture