Property and Risk: Peasants in the Rise of Modern Japanese State

Under the Tokugawa shogunate, 1603-1868, registered peasants were guaranteed their residual claim to crop from their land, but shielded from the market risk. Provided with incentives for productivity increase but protected from the market risk, millions of peas-ant family continuously managed their family farms more than two centuries. The Meiji Restoration from 1868 defined peasantsf claim as the modern property right. Exposed to the market risk, more than half of parable land came under tenancy contract by the 1900s, and landlords segregated tenancy peasants from the market. This research inquires this institutional change in modern Japanese state following Moritaro Yamadafs work.