The Journal of Japanese Studies

The role of the landlord class in Japan’s prewar economic and political development has been widely debated. Moving beyond conflicting arguments of landlords as semifeudal exploiters or as the linchpins of rural market development, more recent research has emphasized the nonmarket institutions, often inherited from the Tokugawa era, in which the contractual relations between landlords and tenants were embedded. However, this research has overemphasized the continuity of the rural economy. Rather than a smooth development, the historical trajectory of rural economic growth followed the “double movement” of capitalist development identified by the historian and economic anthropologist Karl Polanyi.