Between Lord and Peasant: The Longue Durée of Prewar Japan’s Landlord Class

• In Event: 285 - Regular Session. Comparative Historical Sociology: The Changing Structure of Geopolitics and the Global Political Economy

Abstract

Claims about the landlord class of prewar Japan have been central to debates over alternative interpretations of Japan’s economic and political development following the Meiji Restoration of 1868. Landlords have, alternatively, been described as the parasitic beneficiaries of a system of “semi-feudal” tenancy and as the linchpins of a long-term process of commercial development in the countryside stretching back into the eighteenth century. Indeed, Japanese landlords did combine two sets of social features that seem hard to reconcile: on the one hand, a great deal of continuity in “traditional” patterns of economic organization and, on the other, prominent participation in the “modern” trends of the economy and political institutions of prewar Japan. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to untangling the multiple threads of this class’s historical development from Japan’s early modern period into the twentieth century. The narrative of this paper shows how, unlike their counterparts in Europe, Japan’s modern landlords were not descended from a landed nobility, at least not in the immediate past. Instead, landlords had been locked out of the feudal ruling class at least since the seventeenth century. They thus did not themselves possess direct political power over their tenants, yet lacking access to a state apparatus to reliably enforce their property rights, neither could they be called capitalists, at least under the old regime. Only with the legal reforms and state-building of the early Meiji era could landlords rely on absolute political backing for their rights over land.

Author

• Mark Cohen, New York University