Real Wages and Wage Differentials in the Tokugawa Period, 1827-1830

Abstract

There has long been a tacit but general agreement that real wages were rising from the early eighteenth century to the 1820s, when the wage curves began to move downwards. Moreover, a suggestion has been made that wage differentials observed between towns and rural areas were narrowing pari apssu with the rise in agricultural real wages. As for the trend from the 1820s we have fairly sufficient grounds for accepting it. On the other hand, the evidence for the tendencies before the 1820s is scanty and far from being indisputable. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the traditional view critically, based on our new estimates of wage series for builders (carpenters and thatchers) and agricultural day labourers in a Kinai village and the Kyoto series for carpenters and town labourers, and to give an interpretation on the facts observed from these sources. First, real wages rose up to the early 1760s, and then stagnated till 1820; and in the former phase farm labourers' wage-rate advanced faster than builders' and town labourers'. It is clear, therefore, that the traditional view is no longer tenable: from the 1760s to 1820 real wages showed no upward trend and there was no change in differentials. Secondly, the narrowing of rural-urban wage differentials in the first phase consisted of two types of change. One is geographical; the levelling of wages between farm and town labourers would belong to this type. The other is interindustrial; a case in point is the one observed between agricultural and the building trades. It should be noted, however, that not every aspect indicated a narrowing trend. The rural-urban difference of builders' wage-rate hardly changed throughout the first and second phases of the period, cxcept for a slight narrowing in the earlier years. Thirdly, it appears that the second phase of the period reflects an equilibrium situation of the Kinai labour market. One of the reasons is that the abovementioned rigidity in the wage differential structure of the building trades was not maintained by any institutional measures such as town guild restrictions. Moreover, the wage level of town labourers was kept, except for shortterm deviations, at the lowest level of agricultural day labourers; this would mean that there existed an equilibrium between towns and rural areas in terms of wage-rates for unkilled occupations.