360 THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONSJapan's decision to isolate itself from the outside world, to return to
tradition and live in a bubble, appears no different from China's refusal
of the West. If anything, it was more adamant in its principled rigor.
But how different the outcome! It was the Chinese who, though
changing in detail and passing from one political challenge to another,
remained the same in substance; and the Japanese who, clinging to old
ways, so changed that they had every prospect of industrializing, even
without the Western challenge, on the eve of the Meiji Restoration.
One may distinguish two aspects of the paradox: ( 1 ) the forces mak
ing for change within Japan; and (2) the effect of contacts with the out
side world.
To understand the first, consider Tokugawa Japan as an approxi
mate, rough miniature of medieval Europe. It had one overall gov
ernment, the Bakufu or shogunate—something like the empire or the
Roman Church, but stronger—and a host of provinces (han). These
were rather like separate nations—not sovereign, to be sure, but en
dowed with all manner of autonomies and capable of initiatives in law
and in the regulation of the society and economy. Society in turn was
ordered hierarchically: at the top, a landless nobility of warrior-retainers
whose stipends were defined and paid in quantities of rice; toward the
bottom, a new, "rising" mercantile class. In between, the peasants, re
spected for the food they grew, and craftsmen, for the quality of their
work. At the very bottom were the marginal, hereditary "untouch
ables," in particular the eta or burakumin, contaminated by their work
with dead animals or humans. (Ironically, the samurai, who did their
fair share of butchery, were honored for it.)
In medieval Europe, feudal lords owned land and took most of their
revenue in kind or in labor (which produced income in the form of
crops). Over time, however, with the rise of a new world of cities and
towns and exposure to strange things and people, the seigneurs and
their ladies conceived new needs and wants. To satisfy these, landlords
converted more and more of their traditional income into money,
which could be spent as one pleased; hence a long-run tendency in
western Europe to commute manorial dues into money rents (the key
to peasant emancipation).
In Japan, the same. The fiscal system ran on rice, in other words, on
the principal food staple, and this arrangement (kokudaka-sei) was de
signed to take care of the ruling elite. The lord (daimyd) took roughly
30 percent of the harvest, kept much of it for himself and his house
hold, and distributed the rest to his stipendiary samurai retainers. Un-