The Collapse of the Rural Textile Industry in Nara Prefecture

Abstract

The rural textile industries declined in many of the traditional textile industry districts after the end of the Meiji Era when the industrial revolution began in Japan. These industries had made a huge labour demand on the rural districts, and it was believed that their collapse heavily damaged the peasant economy and affected the landed farmers movement. But such opinions have never apparently been demonstrated as historical facts. The aim of this paper is, firstly, to analyze how the collapse changed agricultural production, and how the latter hastened the former. Secondly I wish to clarify the relation between the emigration of rural labourers and structual change in the rural employment market. Analysis of the textile industries in Nara Prefecture, where the cotton weaving industry decreased in its market share after the Taisho Era, shows that the decline was due to the lack of capital accumulation, the failure to improve quality, the emigration of rural labourers and the spread of a compound cropping system. The remarkable expansion of the Hanshin industrial district drew away the rural workers and increased the demand for vegetables, fruits and so on. Owing to the new cropping system, which produced such agricultural products, the peasants got more money and the seasonal redundancy of labour became relatively small. It became difficult for textile manufacturers to organize agricultural workers as seasonal workers at low cost and at will, so that the costs of the textile industry in Nara continued to stay higher than those in other textile industry districts. It can be concluded that the collapse affected the peasant economy, but that it was affected more by the expansion of the Hanshin industrial district than by the rural textile industries.