Description: This book outlines the development of the rural economy in Japan from pre-industrial times up to the Pacific War, demonstrating that rural households contributed to the country's industrialization and laid the foundations for the shape of the economy after the Second World War.
Review Quotes:
'Francks challenges the image of Japanese farmers as victims of industrialization. Applying the tools and concepts devised for analyzing economic development in the contemporary Third World and other micro-level research, she portrays them as post-peasant small-scale producers who exploit both the knowledge of their agricultural environment and whatever scope their household resources allows them for securing and improving their livelihoods.' - Reference & Research Book News
'Useful and thorough book...I would happily assign this one to my students.' - Monumenta Nipponica
'Penelope Francks has written a fine overview of the history of Japanese agriculture from the late Edo period until 1945. Drawing on a wide variety of English and Japanese-language secondary sources, she has made important contributions to our understanding of modern Japan, and of its economic and rural development.'
'A reader who wants to read a synthesis of Japanese agricultural development from 1800 to the Second World War, that is, just before and during Japan's prewar industrialization, can do no better than turn to this book.'
- Economic History Society 2007, Economic History Review, 60, 1 (2007)
'Despite a vast body of research on the Japanese countryside, few English-language scholars have been bold enough to attempt a comprehensive history of rural Japan in the modern era. Penelope Francks has written an excellent book with a reach that extends far beyond its economic focus, offering an outstanding synthesis of the Japanese- and English-language scholarship on the Japanese countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The variety and complexity of the issues Francks tackles is awe inspiring." -- Simon Partner, Journal of Japanese History, V. 34, No. 1, 2008