Agriculture and food productionI have been engaged, in recent years, in efforts to learn how much rice the Japanese ate during
the premodern period. I have analysed household registers and other administrative documents
from the eighth century, and compared the production of the individual farmers’ rice plots with
the one of public holdings or temple estates. I have also calculated the figures of yields, produc-
tion, taxes, deduction of seeds, and have measured daily caloric needs of rice, using the records of
the daily rations of craftsmen and subordinate workers at the Nara court. And I have further
calculated the actual rice earnings of farmers in terms of volume and calories.
From this, it is clear that there are significant variations, on the one hand, between different
IPVTFIPMET
EVFUPUIFJSTJUVBUJPOT OVNCFSPGQFPQMF
BSFBTXPSLFE
TPJMRVBMJUZ
BOEPOUIF
other hand, within the same household, depending on the years (climate, natural disasters). In
terms of calories, balancing the consumption patterns between well- off households (with 43
percent of needs supplied by rice) and poor households (with 10 percent of needs supplied) yields
an average of 26 percent. It therefore seems reasonable to say that in the eighth century, rice
provided, as a general average, one- quarter of the caloric needs of the Japanese population of
commoners.^27 In other words, rice was not the main staple food of the Japanese population in the
eighth century and probably never was, at any time during the medieval period. More research
is, however, needed to know what then was their staple food and what the diets of the medieval
Japanese did consist of.
We lack detailed information about the nutrition of the population of commoners in the pre-
modern period, although a variety of records on food, dating from the seventeenth to nineteenth
centuries, have survived. For the Edo period, historians distinguish between the elite of the ruling
warrior and merchant classes, on one hand, and the tenant farmers that made up the core of the
Japanese population, on the other. Postwar historians from the 1950s promoted an image of a peas-
antry that was fairly poor and rarely tasted steamed rice, while better- off social groups ate up to one
koku (180 litres) of rice a year, which accounted for between half and 60 percent of their diet.
But more recently, historians have begun to consider the difference between diets of the
various social classes to have been narrower than once thought. According to Arizono Shōichirō’s
calculations published in 1997, the population of tenant farmers of the seventeenth to eighteenth
century must have eaten between 0.34 koku and 0.5 koku of rice per year per person, which
would account for one- quarter of their needs, this figure being similar to the one I calculated for
the eighth century. For élites—the privileged classes of well- off farmers, high- and middle-
ranking warriors and merchants—consumption amounted, according to Arizono, to 50 or 60
percent of the food, the rest being made up by barley, barnyard millet, foxtail millet, buckwheat,
and soybeans. For the nineteenth century, which followed important technological improve-
ments and a rise in agricultural output, Arizono quotes figures at the national level from the
“Farming Statistics” (Nōji tōkei hyō) of 1861, and from it infers the following proportions for the
average daily nutrition: rice 47 percent, wheat and barley 28 percent, other cereals and starches
25 percent. To Arizono, rice therefore supplied, by the late nineteenth century, half the dietary
needs, even for the majority of the population that did not belong to the privileged classes.^28
From the data of the eighth century and the Edo period we can infer that throughout the
medieval period rice covered about one- quarter of the nutritional needs for the rural population
of Japan, and that a large part of their nutritional needs was covered by other grains and by wild
plant foods. In other words, food was very diverse but it was never abundant throughout Jap-
anese history. We know indeed of innumerable cases of famines and natural disasters.^29 As in
many other countries, food security was the very first concern, and the primary occupation, of
Japanese daily life. Bowls of freshly steamed white rice probably very rarely appeared on the
menus of commoners in classical and medieval Japan. Instead their diets were made up by mix-
tures of grains, leaves, roots, as well as a variety of nuts, seeds, and other wild plants.