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What and how are we sharing? Academic landscape of the sharing paradigm and practices. Objectives and organization of the book -- Home-based food provision and social capital in Japan -- Food provisioning services via homegardens and communal sharing in satoyama socio-ecological production landscapes on Japan's Noto peninsula -- Non-market food provisioning services via homegardens and communal sharing in satoyama socio-ecological production landscapes on Japan's Noto peninsula -- Sharing experiences and associated knowledge in the changing waterscape: an intergenerational sharing program in Mikatagoko area, Japan -- "Sustaining Diverse Knowledge Systems in SEPLs: Sharing Tacit Knowledge of Apiculture and Mushroom Production with Future Generations -- Can new digital technologies and traditional sharing practices be inte-grated? The case of use of natural resources in Palau, Micronesia -- Solidarity Economy in Brazil: Towards Institutionalization of Sharing and Agroecological Practices -- Sharing knowledge and value for nurturing socioecological production landscapes: a case of payment for ecosystem services in Rejoso watershed, Indonesia -- Sharing Place: A case study on the loss of peri-urban landscape to urbanization in India -- Cow-Sharing and Alpine ecosystems. A comparative case study of sharing practices and property rights -- Synthesis: Can sharing enhance the sustainability and resilience of our society?

AbstractWhile early-modernists tend to believe that the period around 1600 saw a structural break in Japan's economic history, research by medievalists since the mid-1970s has suggested that a market economy was on the rise from the 14th century onwards. This article examines several listings of occupations and commodities compiled between the 13th and the early 17th centuries to see if a proliferation of non-agricultural activities was underway before c.1600. As Adam Smith envisaged, the separation of one productive activity from another, i.e. an increasing division of labour, will lead to economic growth. Since this type of market-led change, often called Smithian growth, has been considered an 'early modern' phenomenon by economic historians, it is worth examining if there were signs of an increasing division of labour in late medieval Japan. The article's findings indicate that some signs of occupational and product differentiation appeared by the 16th century. As far as Smithian growth is concerned, therefore, the article concludes that there was some degree of continuity between the medieval and the early modern periods.

This personal reflection of more than 40 years' work on the supply of labour in a household context discusses the relationship between social science history (the application to historical phenomena of the tools developed by social scientists) and local population studies. The paper concludes that historians working on local source materials can give something new back to social scientists and social science historians, urging them to remake their tools.

This article addresses the question of growth and inequality in the great and little divergence trajectories on both sides ofEurasia. A social table constructed for TokugawaJapan in the 1840s is compared with two cases with high levels of inequality,StuartEngland andMughalIndia, and the subsequent changes in the three countries are traced to the modern era of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Japanese pattern in the early modern period can be characterized by comparatively modest growth with a relatively egalitarian distribution of income between the social classes, but the pattern changed during the subsequent half‐century to one with an increased tempo of growth and a substantial rise in the level of income inequality. The implications of this finding are discussed in terms of the concept of Smithian growth and are placed in the comparative context of the divergence debate.

This paper addresses a question raised by Jan de Vries' on the relationship between industriousness and the rise of the market in East Asia. Was the growing industriousness in Tokugawa Japan, as de Vries suggests, a substitute 'for the absence of markets'? The examination refers to two versions of Chayanov's peasant farm model and their empirical relevance to the Tokugawa agrarian history, with special reference to the formation of labour‐intensive peasant farming (Akira Hayami's version of an industrious revolution), product specialisation, and the markets for production factors, land, and labour. Its implications for the Great Divergence debate are also discussed.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the markets for land and labour in traditional Japan, where peasant families accounted for 80 per cent of the population; it focuses on the extent of these markets and how they operated. The survey of evidence, both literary and statistical, indicates that, while the size of the factor markets was small and limited, lease arrangements for farmland and the markets for seasonal labour and the rural–urban transfer of manpower functioned rather well. It is therefore suggested that market forces must have played an indispensable part in the process of Tokugawa Japan's proto-industrialization and Smithian growth.

Since the publication of the seminal book of essays Household and family
in past time in 1972, much research on the history of the family has
concentrated on the situation in western and eastern Europe, and relied
almost exclusively on census-type documents. It is, for example,
established that whereas mean household size was small, the mean age at
first marriage fairly high and neo-localism (the formation of an
independent household on marriage) dominant in western Europe, almost
the opposite applied in eastern Europe. Yet these findings do not preclude
the possibility of discovering regions where in statistical terms the mean
household size was not large and the proportion of complex households
not particularly high, but where the neo-local mode of household
formation was not the norm. Such a region could have a preference for
joint families (two or more married sons co-residing with their father) with
a low-fertility demographic regime, or stem families (one co-residing
married son) with that of intermediate to low fertility.Traditional Japan is an example of just such a stem-family society.
There the household, not the individual, was perceived as the basic social
and legal unit of society. This unit was called ie and its headship, authority
and property were expected to be handed down from the father to a
particular son, enabling the household to follow alternating stages of
'simple', 'multiple' and
'extended' forms over the developmental cycle,
more or less in accordance with the predictions of Lutz Berkner. As
articles in the section of Laslett and Wall's Household and family on Japan
have already shown, the mean household size in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Japan was not higher than that in England, but the
mean age at marriage was lower than in the English population.
Moreover, household formation and succession rules under the Japanese
ie system were not compatible with the simple family mode.

John Hajnal's classic essay published in 1965 on European marriage
patterns contrasted western with eastern Europe in terms of age at
marriage and proportion never-married. In a more recent article, 'Two
kinds of pre-industrial household formation system', which is indeed a
development from his 1965 essay, the life-cycle is taken into explicit
consideration by use of the concept of household formation. In addition,
he makes some geographical alterations to his previous argument: the
'West' is narrowly defined to cover 'north-west' European countries,
whereas the 'East' now extends beyond the eastern European boundaries
to Asian countries such as China and India.To this formulation there can be two kinds of response from scholars
specializing in the Far East, especially traditional Japan. One is concerned
with the lack of full discussion of a stem family system in Hajnal's article.
He suggests that while some versions of this system are 'compatible with
the general north-west European household formation rules' and some
others are not, '[n]o kind of stem family system can be classified as a joint
household system'; but unfortunately, no detailed stem family household
formation rules are specified, nor is there any discussion of Japan's family
system, which has been regarded as a typical example of the stem type.

This paper questions the view that rural industrialization stimulated family formation through a decline in the age of women at first marriage, and hence led to a rapid growth in population. A survey of the literature, and an analysis of countrywide cross-sectional data for late nineteenth-century Japan show that the impact of rural industry on population increase was weak. This is closely related to another finding, that the division of labor between the sexes within the farm household was persistent even where rural industry had taken root. In other words, the structural effects of proto-industrialization on demography and the peasant family economy were not strong. It is suggested that these differences between Japanese and Western patterns are best understood by looking at the initial conditions of proto-industrialization.