農業賃金の趨勢 : 徳川中期から大正前期にかけて

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概要

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• The purpose of this paper is to survey the trend of agricultural wage-rates in Japan for two centuries between 1720 and 1920. The source materials are gathered from two different regions, Osaka and Suwa. Money wages and real wages (expressed in rice) of agricultural day labourers in the area around Osaka and the Suwa region are shown in Tables 1-2 on pp. 184-5 and Figures 1-3 on pp. 173-5. (note that the eighteenth-century series in the Osaka region is not linked with the nineteenth-century wage-rate). In the area around Osaka, both money and real wages continued to rise during the eighteenth century. Considering the rates of increase, however, we can note their diminishing trends in the latter half of that century. During the next fifty years the money wages were stationary, so that the real rates fell sharply from the 1820s to the Restoration. After the prompt recovery, there was a trough from 1891/95 to 1901/05; even the money wages fell slightly from 1886/90 to 1891/95. The full-scale rise began with the turn of the century, and it was followed without a break by the boom in the latter half of the 1910s. For the Suwa region, a center of sericulture and silk reeling in the Meiji period, we have only fragmentary information about wage-rates in the later Tokugawa period. Nevertheless, it seems safe to say that there was also a rising trend from the end of the eighteenth century to 1820; in particular the increased rate for female workers was notable. Between the restoration and the 1890s there was no such trough in the series of real wages as seen in the Osaka region; nor in the series of money wages (except a slight stagnation during the Matsukata deflation). On the contrary, it is the next twenty years that might be called the sluggish period. It would be worth saying something in addition to chronology for further study. (1) In both regions there was an upswing phase during the later Tokugawa period. This might have had a closer connexion to each regional economy than other phases had; in other words, there might have been many regions which had not experienced such a phase before the Meiji industrialization. (2) In the first half of the nineteenth century, the movement of money wages in the area around Osaka, the most advanced region, was stationary. This is true, not only of agricultural day labourers, but also of builders in Kyoto. A similar phenomenon is also observed in the case of one-year hokonin near Edo (see Figure 4 on p. 181.) (3) We have seen a contrast between the movements of the wage-rates of two regions in the Meiji period. This phenomenon must be connected with the structure of the manufacturing sector and the pattern of its development in each region. (4) Looking at Figure 3 on p. 175, we notice that the lower section of the various wage levels was more stationary than the upper section during the Meiji period in the Suwa region. It was mostly immigrant labourers that formed the lower section. This bring us to another factor: there might have been a high population pressure and a low wage level in the areas from which such labourers came. These areas, perhaps, could not experience any upswing phase during the later Tokugawa period. (For Tables and Figures, see text.)

• 1973-06-25

著者

• 斎藤 修

  慶応義塾大学

関連論文

• 農業賃金の趨勢 : 徳川中期から大正前期にかけて
• 安藤良雄編, 『近代日本経済史要覧』B5・二二五頁、東京大学出版会、一九七五年、一五〇〇円
• 書評 W. Wayne Farris, Japan's medieval population: famine, fertility, and warfare in a transformative age

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