Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization

Sericulture and the Origins of Japanese Industrialization TESSA MORRIS-SUZUKI The opening of the silk trade with the West is one of the best known of all episodes in Japanese economic history. The story, as told in countless school histories and academic texts, goes something like this. At the very time when Matthew Perry and his black ships were breaching Japan’s isolation from the rest of the world, the European silk industry was falling victim to a devastating silkworm plague—the pébrine. During the 1850s and early 1860s this disease reduced Italian silk production to little more than half its previous level and French production to a mere fifth of the peak attained in the early 1850s. As a result, Japan was fortuitously presented with ideal conditions for its entry into world trade. Exports of silk and silkworm eggs grew rapidly and provided Japan with its principal source of foreign exchange earnings during the final decade of the Tokugawa period and early part of the Meiji era. This “accident of nature,” as one historian has called it, therefore played a vital role in helping Japan to take its first faltering steps on the road to industrialization.1 Historical accidents, however, are rarely as accidental as they seem, for it is the best-prepared individuals or societies that are best able to take advantage of chance. As Claudio Zanier has pointed out, there were several reasons why European silk producers looked to Japan as their salvation from the consequences of the pébrine.1 For one thing, there was a long-standing attitude of respect for East Asian agricultural and silk-raising techniques, which can be traced back to the Chinese influ­ ence on the French Physiocrats of the 18th century. China itself was caught up in the political turmoil of the Taiping Rebellion, so European merchants in the 1850s tended to turn instead to the newly accessible and more politically stable trade ports ofJapan. Dr. Morris-Svzlki is senior fellow in East Asian history at the Australian National University. She is currently writing a study of Japan’s technological history since the 18th century. lG. C. Allen, A Short Economic History ofModemJapan, 4th ed. (London, 1981), p. 40. 2Claudio Zanier, “Japan and the ‘Pébrine’ Crisis of European Sericulture during the 1860’s,” Bonner Zeitschrift fürJaponologie 8 (1986): 51 —63.© 1992 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040- 165X/92/3301-0003$01.00 101 102 Tessa Morris-Suzuki But a further element in the growth ofJapan’s silk trade may have been even more important and is worth examining in some detail: the improvement of Japanese silk-farming techniques. To put it simply, we can argue that it was technological developments in Japan and Europe, and not the vagaries of nature, that provided Japan with its opening in the world silk market. Two points about these develop­ ments are particularly interesting. The first is that, even though Europe and Japan both imported the basic techniques of sericulture from China, and even though both embarked almost simultaneously on the process of improving and refining those techniques, the ways in which they refined them were distinctly different. The second is that, even before the opening of the Japanese ports, some European observers had begun to recognize the value of Japanese sericultural techniques and to seek in them lessons for the West. Sericulture thus became the source of Japan’s first export of technology. Bonafous and the “Transfer” ofJapanese Technology In the past few years historians of Japan have begun to pay increasing attention to the role of indigenous (zairai) as opposed to imported (gairai) technology in the process of Japan’s industrializa­ tion.3 The trend perhaps tells us as much about contemporary Japan as about the country’s technological history. Interest in zairai technol­ ogy reflects, on the one hand, a nostalgia for craft techniques that are rapidly disappearing and, on the other, the new perspective of a Japan that has begun to be recognized abroad as a technological innovator as well as a technological imitator. Whatever its motives, however, research into indigenous technology has produced fresh insights into the processes of...