Book Review: Japan's Medieval Population

Wow. That's all I can say about the stunning amount of stats and figures that William Wayne Farris manages to stuff into Japan's Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility and Warfare In A Transformative Age (2006).

There are so many charts, tables and graphs that it's actually hard to read the text in the book. Speaking of the text, there is a lot of jargon here. Farris is incredibly intelligent and he really knows his stuff. This is definitely a book that shouldn't be picked up unless the reader has a good background in Japanese history.

Some of the stats presented in the book are really bewildering. Thankfully, Farris spends a good amount of time discussing how he has come to certain figures. The whole basis of the book is to discuss Farris' theory on what Japan's population was like in the period between 1150 and 1600. Farris uses many different techniques to formulate his theory:

• Farris draws his own conclusion by comparing and contrasting past works on Japan's population of this period. The most notable of these works is that of Akira Hayami.
• Land registers are used to find out how much land was arable and what exactly the land produced and how much of that particular item was produced.
• Death registers are used to measure, well, death. Farris really does a great job with these register. He breaks them down year by year, month by month, and even male to female.

Some specific areas of the book I found interesting included the discussion of the Kangi Famine from 1229-1232. This was a particularly devastating famine (Farris calls it the worse in Japan's history.) that wiped out a significant part of Japan's population.

I also enjoyed Farris' discussing of the Sengoku Period. (Of course) A set of tables discussing the frequency of military expeditions by both Uesugi Kenshin and Takeda Shingen were exquisite. Farris even spends a significant amount of time on case studies of both the Mori and the Takeda.

The one thing about a William Wayne Farris work is that the reader (or at least me) is always left with some unanswered questions. There were a few minor ones in this work as well. The major question mark I had was with the concept of "fukuro mochi." Apparently, these men went around kidnapping people to become a warrior's servant in the 13th century. Farris only spends one paragraph on the subject, and I can't find any other material on it. I don't know the prevalence of this practice or if it even existed. My best guess is that Farris took a literal translation of something that could simply mean "bag carrier." Farris says that these men were described as carrying "squirming people" in bags thrown over their shoulders. Hmmmmm......

3.5/5.0

I liked this book a lot. For something that I have little to no interest in, Farris does a decent job of grabbing my attention and keeping it. However, the jargon used in this book bordered on boring in certain sections. Also, the fukuro mochi segment just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.