Akira Hayami interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 22nd October 2009

0:05:07 Born 1929 in Tokyo; father was  a philosopher but had no teaching job in his life until the end of the Second World War; he was always at home and that made it rather oppressive; Hayami was my mother's family name and her family had no successor and my father was adopted in as husband and heir and came into my mother's home; after the marriage a son was born to her parents, so my father and mother left the house but were given money to set up their own household; my father studied at Kyoto University, then moved to Tokyo and lived without the necessity of working; my father was a Hegelian and finally wrote philosophy and published several books; his elder brother was a famous economist, and his younger brother was a bureaucrat; my mother's family were landowners, managing forest land, and sometime were pawnbrokers; my mother was gentle;  I was the elder son and also have a brother and three younger sisters, still alive.

6:33:00 My first memory was the eclipse of the sun in 1934 when I was at kindergarten; I was very frightened at the disappearance of the sun; I was then in Tokyo and almost all my life has been spent here apart from ten years in Kyoto; as a child I had lots of interests; I like music, mainly Western classical music, and am a fan of the German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler; we had some records in my home which I listened to as a child; during the War I used to listen to Mozart to counteract the noise of bombing; I collect CD and DVD which can now show Furtwangler? conducting of Beethoven and Brahms with a very high quality of sound; my favourite is Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and I listen to it at least once a month; another hobby I have is railways; I like locomotives and railway timetables; my second childhood memory is of watching trains near my home; sometimes I would go to Hokkaido or other places to takes pictures of steam trains which still survive; from this hobby and my interest in railway timetable came my idea on how to present demographic data using the Tokugawa Buddhist registers; in these all persons had to be listed every year and for some villages they exist for more than a hundred years; the name of the household head, age, temple he/she belongs to, then wife, age, coming from which village, and the names and ages of children; at first I transcribed each household onto one sheet; I made two copies, one by year and the other by families, then analysed the results; it was not an easy method to use and very time-consuming; the model of the train timetable came to mind and I developed a sort of spread sheet of all the information that could then be computerized; these records start in 1671 for almost all of Japan and end in 1871, so for the best we can trace two hundred years of people's behaviour; sadly there are no notes on occupation, but births, deaths and marriage are reflected, also divorce and adoption

21:22:15 I never had an interest in model railways; last year we had a gathering of alumni of my elementary school; I remember the teacher for my first and second years very well; he trained us in good manners, was very kind and if a boy failed to come to school he would go to his house to enquire about him; he cared about us; I was not very adept and while my friends could play ball games I could not join them; for study, I was top of the class; usually there are six years spent in elementary school in Japan, but the teachers and my father decided that I should only do five years before going to middle school; in Japan, middle school was for five years but can be shortened to four years; unfortunately I dropped down in middle school because the gap of a year is huge, both physically and in knowledge; this middle school was the top one in Tokyo with 250 pupils; every term we were graded; I was between 150 and 180; I had lost confidence in my ability and in my home there were lots of novels which I spent my time reading, thus I did not study for examinations at all; at school my preferences were to read European literature and listen to European classical music; in the fourth grade of middle school, during 1944-5, we mobilised to work factories and did not go to class; I was delighted at this; I found persons with similar interests to myself and we formed a group; we wrote essays and poems for pleasure

30:33:15 The heavy bombing of Tokyo began 10th March 1945 although there had been bombing earlier; in March it affected the eastern part of Tokyo, in April, the southern part, May, the central part, even the palace burnt out; fortunately my family left Tokyo and went to my mother's home, but I had been mobilised and had to stay there, even though my factory was burnt out; I was left with nothing to do but read Tolstoy and listen to Beethoven; politically I was not mature but my family was liberal; my father had not been abroad by my uncle had been to the United States and Europe, and he said that the difference between the West and Japan was so great that Japan could never win; my uncle was the advisor to the Minister of Agriculture and he told us that the war would end in a few days and it was important just to survive and Japan would need its young people; in 1945, if a middle school student had not gone on to university he would be mobilised for more dangerous work; I was keen to get into any university but as my grades were not good Keio was the only university I could enter; before the War, the national universities were the best, then came Keio and Waseda; it was impossible for me to get into a national university; university education was in two parts so I entered into the elementary stream of Keio; I studied economics; the best departments at Keio were medicine and economics at that time; my earlier interests in reading and music continued through Keio; for the first two years Tokyo was totally flattened; European-style buildings of stone remained but the Japanese buildings of wood and paper had almost all been destroyed; Keio's buildings were damaged and several classes destroyed; Keio had some famous economists - Koizumi Shinzo, the intermediary with the Crown Prince, also Professor Takahashi Seiichiro was an expert on British mercantilism, and Professor Nomura, an economic historian who studied at King's College, Cambridge; these three were very respected but did not teach the preparatory course; during that course I was idle; the other day my ranking paper was found at home, and my granddaughter noted that I had no As but only Bs and Cs

43:58:22 I went into the Faculty of Economics after the preparatory course, suddenly my eyes were opened because the library was restored; I went to see the European economic historian, Takamura Shohei; he had asked the class for the titles of their papers; as I was a railway fan mine was 'English Railway History'; after three or four weeks my teacher brought a large book in - Clapham's 'Early Railway Age' - but I found his English very difficult; Clapham was at King's and had been Professor Nomura's teacher; because of this difficulty I changed my subject from the industrial revolutions to the sixteenth and seventeenth century mercantilism; fortunately there were a lot of books in Keio on mercantilism, and my final topic was the debate between Thomas Mun and John Wheeler on mercantilism; I found this really exciting and worked in the library every day, and felt that such research was what I wanted to do and that I should become an academic; I began to realize the value of primary sources in history although I had depended on secondary materials for my paper; I was lucky to go to the Institute of Economic History and Anthropology known as the Attic Museum; there I could read handwritten historical sources and I was guided to investigate the life history of the common people in Japan; I spent three years there but when the Korean War ended, the Government cut the budget to support such study in the institute; I talked to my guiding professor about having lost my job; he said that Keio was recruiting two assistant professors and told me to apply; there were three applicants but fortunately I got one of the posts and became a Keio academic in 1958 and taught there until 1989; I hate teaching undergraduates, but liked the graduate course; the undergraduate courses in a private university have over one thousand students who have to be ranked; most Japanese university have seminars, which are not so unpleasant, as there are then only thirty or forty people; in seminars I taught there were around twenty people so I can remember their faces; these seminars were optional so people came if they wanted to; at first thirty to forty came and I told them that they must write papers each week on economic history outside Japan, and that if they failed to attend class for even a week they would not be allowed to continue; I always found I had a smaller, more manageable group by the end of term; this was enjoyable, but lecturing to a huge audience was not; I had some good PhD students, including Osamu Saito, who was my best student; he was clever and did not follow me but always chose his own subject and used his own method of analysis; when his PhD was examined I was the main interviewer in the faculty; after reading his dissertation I felt that I was like Salieri and he was Amadeus

Second Part

0:05:07 In Japan the PhD at that time was taken some twenty years later; my interest in historical demography developed gradually; my first topic of study at Keio was a land survey of Japan around 1600; Hideyoshi had unified Japan and started a survey similar to the Domesday Book; I am just publishing a book about it; after writing some initial papers I lost my way as there was no subject that I was following; fortunately, in Keio, there was a system that allowed for study abroad; after the War it was difficult for professors to study abroad, but a new president of Keio decided later to establish a system whereby younger scholars could to so; he established the Fukuzawa Foundation and I was fortunate in being the second to go under this scheme; I left Japan in 1963 and spent a year and a half abroad; I went to Europe; at the time Japan was not rich and this might be my only chance to see the outside world; I stopped in Teheran, Damascus, Beirut, Cairo, Athens etc.; I climbed a pyramid when it was still possible to do so; at the top an idea struck me about the success of the ancient civilisation of Egypt; in Japan at that time there was the idea of progression from ancient, medieval, capitalist and, maybe, socialist history; at the top of the pyramid, this idea seemed totally incorrect; I thought of the several roots of development; an ancient civilisation can disappear; my intention had been to go to Portugal and to do research on the Portuguese-Japanese relations, particularly in trade in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; I went to the overseas archive but I found that, although I spoke a little Portuguese, I could not read the early documents; I realized that I would need at least five years to do something there, but in one year I could do nothing; I was very confused but was introduced in a bookshop to a Portuguese scholar, V. M. Godinho,; he had a French PhD but had been purged by Salazar; he understood my English and we discussed Portuguese expansion, but it was useless to stay if I could not read documents; before I left Japan I had learnt a little Portuguese from a Portuguese diplomat; one day he took me to a diplomatic party and introduced me to several diplomats; one Belgian diplomat was very kind and we became friends; I wrote a letter to this person about my dilemma and said I would like to study in Belgium; I had bought a book in Lisbon written by a Belgian economic historian, Charles Verlinden, who taught at Ghent University; also the Dutch historian Huizinga had the inspiration there to write the ‘Waning of the Middle Ages’; I drove from Lisbon to Ghent through the Pyrenees in November 1963; unfortunately, when I arrived at the university I found that Professor Verlinden was on sabbatical and was abroad; however, I became friends with another Belgian historian Craebeckx who introduced me to the demographic work of Louis Henri in France; I read his book with the help of a dictionary and instantly realized that this was a revolutionary book on population history; at that time in Japan nobody knew about historical demography; the Belgian diplomat that I had met in Tokyo was able to get a scholarship for me so that I could stay in Europe for a further six months so I returned to Japan in summer 1964, just before the Tokyo Olympic; I then began collecting materials for a population history; I knew about the ‘Shumon Aratame-Cho’·through Professor Nomura; he had already published two books of basic data on Tokugawa Japan and had planned a third book on population data; I had assisted him on that so had been made aware of the materials; I then started to write articles but got no reaction to them in Japan, so translated them into English and sent them to Thomas C. Smith in the United States; in 1968 I received a letter from the International Economic History Association about its fourth conference in Indiana inviting me to give a paper and offering to pay my travel costs; this was my debut at an international conference and I was so nervous that I was shaking; I lost my place in my paper and afterward felt very depressed; however, after the session a person came and asked me if he could publish my paper; it was Le Roy Ladurie and he published my paper in Annales·in 1969; it produced many correspondents, and in 1969 Peter Laslett invited me to his conference on households so my world was expanding

21:12:11 At that conference the two Japanese contributors were Chie Nakane and myself; our views on household were quite different; Nakane believed that family structure had not changed and was always a stem family society; my empirical studies showed that in the early days of the Tokugawa, Japanese families were extended and during the Tokugawa period they changed to stem families; my view proved correct; my idea is that human beings first lived in joint family systems and in some parts became stem families and in others, nuclear families; there are still places where the joint and stem families remain

24:25:10 I think my most important work, which is just being published, is a chapter: 'Migration: The Intersection of Interclass Mobility and Geographical Mobility'; migration is normally from rural to urban for the lower classes; for the higher classes, several migrations happened but a core of them remained rural; those lower classes who went to urban areas died sooner; if they went back to their village the age at marriage was delayed so that the number of children was limited and several families died out; for the upper class as few migrated, the branch family developed; this has its own hierarchy so that the lower branch is poorer; this meant that the lower class was kept going by downward migration within the village rather than by those returning from urban areas; this is an eighteenth to nineteenth century pattern

28:46:12 The work done by the group in Kyoto was based on three areas of Japan North-east, Central and South-west; we analysed the micro data and showed the areas of depopulation and increase in population between 1721-1846; it showed that population in Japan is very varied; I have always said that Japan is not one – it varied in size of household, number of couples in a household, age at marriage; I made some simulation for three areas on household size, generations within a household, number of couples per household, and most recently on the productive percentage of persons per household; the findings show that in northeast Japan there was a low age at marriage and early end of childbearing; this is contradictory; if a population is to be limited, marriage must be delayed; the fluctuation in the centre were much greater between population growth and decline; how can people survive in such circumstances?; in central Japan there are mutual banking systems which developed in the Kyoto-Osaka area; those who became very poor were supported by this mutual system and when they recovered they could pay back what had been loaned

39:41:15 My next plan is to study the long span of migration patterns to Japan; we should study the DNA; in Japan there are nine kinds of mitochondrial DNA whereas in Europe there are seven; this indicates wide migration patterns; there are still strong localities, dialects, facial differences; I do wish to make a big project with DNA scholars to unite the observations through the historical documents and the results of analyses in behavioral genetics.

42:36:04 In Japan the goal of raising living standard was realized by working hard; in the West, particularly in England, it was realized through the use of machinery; Japanese agriculture was not easily adaptable to the use of machines and rice is planted in small, level, fields; wheat can be grown in large fields and does not require flat land; the “Industrious Revolution” is the key phrase for Japan since the seventeenth century.