Regional Pattern of the Cocoon Production in Japan (1890-1939)

Abstract

The object of this paper is to clarify the regional characteristics that distinguish eastern Japan from western Japan concerning cocoon production in the early stages of Japan's economic development. The analysis will be proceeded bearing in mind that once raw silk was one of the most important exports from Japan until the early Showa era, and the expansion of the cocoon was encouraged to increase silk exports.
First, the author attempts to outline the development of sericulture prefecture by prefecture. Some typical patterns of changes in the acreage of mulberry fields are depicted in Figure 1. Prefectures in the western Japan generally show relatively large fluctuations, and also the growth of mulberry fields. When the letters p, a and y stand for annual growth rate of the cocoon output, area of mulberry fields and land productivity respectively, p≈a+y
These figures are shown in Table 3. The rapid increase of the cocoon production in the western prefectures, clearly depends on both a and y. Whereas p-values of the eastern prefectures are smaller than that of the west and are largely dependent on y. The need to increase the acreage devoted to mulberry fields led to a decrease in that for ordinary food production while technical progress brought some increase in productivity. As mixed result of these two factors, the total output of food declined only a little.
Secondly, the regional differences of the data used for the estimation of production function are examined by means of the discriminant function. The results shown in Table 5 prove the possibility of discrimination of the two regions.
Finally, estimates of the production functions are made for the two regions (Table 6). The analysis of these results leads to the following conclusions.
(a) The output elasticity of land in the eastern region is very low and not different from zero significantly. On the other hand, that of the western region is about 0.34, a rather high value. The elasticity of labour is also high in the west (.47) and low in the east (.17).
(b) The sericulture in the western region is considered to be characteristic of the production of more labour intensity and of higher cost. As pointed out in the previous studies, there was a large number of small scale sericultural farmers in the western region which provided large part of increasing cocoon supply to the silk-manufacturing industry.
(c) The rates of summer and autumn rearing and shoot rearing may be treated as shift variables of the production function.