Poor relief and emergency funds in the early Meiji period, 1869〜1871

Abstract

In 1869, the newly established Meiji government was confronted by a bad harvest. In this article the author analyses how the prefectural governments it had set up responded to the resulting famine. At first, the prefectural governments followed the practice of the Edo period by inducing wealthy people to aid the poor. But such policies of forced redistribution had reached their limits by this time. The strategies of poor relief and emergency funding that were adopted by prefectural governments developed as alternative ways of dealing with the crisis. The first alternative was to enlarge the areas of redistribution from a village to a village union or to a prefecture; the second alternative was to introduce opportunities for commercial distribution. Neither alternative was successful, but the attempts indicated the possibility of overcoming the limits of forced redistribution. The Meiji government continued to pursue both directions of welfare policy throughout the 1870s.