Matsuzawa Yūsaku's A Social History of Modern Japan - Social Groups and a Market Economy, 1868-1914 offers a sweeping overview of Japan's modern period. Bookended by two chapters on the breakdown of the early modern social order and the emergence of "contemporary" (gendai) society in the aftermath of WWI, the core of the book covers a wide range of material -- from changes in the rural economy to new developments in information technology -- organized by theme and economic sector, rather than chronology. Significantly, Matsuzawa limits his discussion to the Japanese main islands -- more specifically, the areas that shared a common "early modern" (kinsei) legacy of Tokugawa rule. Central to Matsuzawa's understanding of modern Japan, then, is the early modern period.

Matsuzawa sees the shift from the early modern to the modern period in terms of a fundamental reconfiguration of "social groups." In the early modern period, status-based social groups (most significantly, the village (mura) and urban neighborhood (chō)) organized households (not individuals) to perform duties for the samurai state in exchange for certain sets of rights and privileges. The legal and political backing provided by this system of duties and privileges worked to moderate internal disputes, as social groups were subject to collective punishment for the behavior of their members, and helped to regulate the relationship between society and the market. With what Matsuzawa describes as the almost accidental breakdown of the Tokugawa status system in the early Meiji period, however, households found themselves adrift without the formal protections formerly offered by their status groups. As they sought stability in this transition period, households looked to create new social groups. But unlike early modern status groups that existed within a broader political and legal framework that generally fixed and stabilized socio-economic relationships, the new "modern" social groups (think councils of cotton mill owners or multi-village commons management associations) existed on a purely volunteer basis.

In other words, no external power guaranteed adherence to the internal rules and regulations of a given social group. That made modern social groups, in contrast to early modern status groups, what Matsuzawa calls 抜け駆け可能な社会集団, literally "social groups where it's possible to steal a march on other members." Modern social groups, through their voluntaristic nature, opened themselves up to the increased risk of a tragedy of the commons and exposed poorer members to a greater degree of exploitation. A key point of emphasis for Matsuzawa is the basic discontinuity between Tokugawa and Meiji village society. While under the village collective taxation system of the Tokugawa period wealthy local officials often covered the unpaid taxes of poorer villagers and protected customary rules surrounding the restoration of land to its original owner, the Meiji system of individual taxation weakened the collective enforcement powers (as well as social ties of charity and aid) of the village community. On a more general level, Matsuzawa depicts the early modern to modern transition as characterized by the retreat of social relations dominated (and stabilized) by the role of the state and the rise of a world where contractual ties between individuals became the main means by which people secured their livelihood. Modern Japan was a freer but colder world.

Matsuzawa acknowledges the existence of a market economy in the Tokugawa period, but sees market relations as basically mediated through state power via status groups. Taking up the example of the pottery industry in modern-day Gifu Prefecture, he contrasts the Edo-period structure of the industry, where the state guaranteed merchant control over craftsmen through the organization of a guild with monopoly privileges, with that of the modern period, where contractual relations of debt and credit bound craft workers to wholesaler capital independently from state authority.

But did the control of Edo-period merchant guilds over industry depend exclusively or even primarily on the formal privileges they received from the samurai authorities? Based on my understanding of the work of scholars like Hayashi Reiko, contractual credit and debt relations were key to maintaining the control of urban, privileged merchants over their rural supply networks. The end of their superior access to capital marked the end of their dominance over the market. Over the late 18th century, capital accumulation by the countryside agents of urban privileged merchants shifted trade away from networks dominated by the guild merchants and into new circuits of commerce that directly tied different regions together. The shogunate even abolished the guild system in 1841, reinstating it in 1851 on a new basis, opening up membership of the organizations to all applicants and eliminating the requirement to pay dues/taxes. In effect, this ended the system of "duties for privileges" (at least, for the guilds) that Matsuzawa and many others see as the key distinguishing characteristic of the early modern status system.

By the late Tokugawa period, the idea that state-guaranteed privileges primarily structured the workings of the market would have seemed absurd. And given that for much of the 17th century, private trade between regions rather than urban guild monopoly-based commerce was the rule, the period where privileged merchant status groups dominated the economy was actually a rather brief one. Nor were the samurai authorities as devoted to preserving the privileges of status groups as Matsuzawa seems to think, especially as the pressure to raise revenues ratcheted up over the late Tokugawa period. Yoshida Nobuyuki, who Matsuzawa draws on extensively for his understanding of the status system, even argues that a breakdown in the "logic of [monopolist] merchant wholesaler hegemony" (tonya hegemonii no ronri) occurred over the last decades of the Edo period, as a new "logic of individualistic trade" (jibun nimotsu no ronri) came to the fore. A view of the Tokugawa economy as fixed within the status system (and defined by state power) neglects how the power of contract and capital already characterized early modern society in significant ways and blinds us to the dynamic transformations within Tokugawa society during the 18th and 19th centuries

In this light, the "collapse" of the status system post-1868 becomes a much less traumatic, and far more gradual, development than Matsuzawa describes. Matsuzawa sees modernity as the process of stripping individual households from the firm but comforting embrace of their status groups, exposing them to the whims of the market and contract relations. In this, he follows in the tradition of the sociologist Ferdinand Tonnies. It makes for a compelling story. And it is hard to disagree with the fact that the modern period saw a significant weakening in the enforcement capacity and cohesion of traditional social groups like the village community. But I am not sure if this can be blamed on the retreat of the state and of the law. After all, it is the modern state that first guaranteed through law the right to individual property and the ability to enforce contracts in court. In contrast, customary rights and alternative notions of justice in the Edo period made it quite difficult for creditors to enforce their claims to the letter. It is the Meiji state that gave capitalists a winning hand in their "individual" contract relations. If we consider "market relations" as at least in part the creation of legal systems, the Meiji period actually saw an increase in the presence of the state in everyday transactions. The economic and social chaos of the first decades of Meiji, then, can still be characterized, following Matsuzawa, as the transition to a new, market-based organization of social power relations. But it becomes, crucially, a story where the state and the law, far from "retreating" from the market, actively worked to create the new conditions for a world governed by individual contract rrelations -- most importantly, over expectations surrounding property and debt.