Everyday things in premodern Japan

by Susan B. Hanley

Japan was the only non-Western nation to industrialize before 1900. Its leap into the modern era has stimulated vigorous debates among historians and social scientists. Were the Japanese people somehow better prepared for industrialization than people of other countries? In this book, Susan B. Hanley looks to life in Japan before industrialization for answers. Hanley focuses on the level of physical well-being of ordinary Japanese people in the three centuries prior to the modern era (the Tokugawa period, 1600-1868). Whereas others have used income levels to conclude that the Japanese household was relatively poor in those centuries, Hanley examines consumption patterns - of food, clothing, and housing - and discovers that the overall level of well-being there was much higher than previously understood. Analysis of hygiene and public sanitation shows Japan to have been at least as healthful as nineteenth-century England, nearly a century after industrialization began there. Perhaps eve