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William Wayne Farris is Sen Soshitsu XV Distinguished Chair in Traditional Japanese Culture and History in the History Department, University of Hawai'i.

Works by William Wayne Farris

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Gender
male
Nationality
USA
Places of residence
Hawai'i, USA
Occupations
professor (Japanese history)

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Japan's original Heavenly Warrior, the Emperor Temmu, declared in 682, "In a government, miliary matters are the essential thing." Farris's detailed descriptions and maps of major battles from the Korean Wars of the sixth century through the thirteenth century Mongol Invasions underscore the validity of that jdugment. Finally, Minamoto no Yoritomo triumphed as "the chief of all warriors," and established his Shogunate in 1185, giving a firmer political base to Japan's warrior elite.
 
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MWMLibrary | Jan 14, 2022 |
Farris, William Wayne. Japan’s Medieval Population: Famine, Fertility, and Warfare in a Transformative Age. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006.

Farris is a scholar that has published on a wide range of topics regarding pre-modern Japanese history. His first major monograph, Population, Disease, and Land in Early Japan, 645-900, sought to explain why the Chinese bureaucratic system disintegrated in Japan through a careful assessment of demographic data and a corresponding discussion of technology and rural life. Two decades later, Farris has returned to demography to try to make sense of Japan’s population during its so called “Dark Ages,” when reliable statistical data is all but non-existent. Training at Harvard under Dr. William McNiel, Farris campaigned vigorously for scholarly work that traces the history of common people in pre-modern Japan.

The most fundamental object of this work is to demonstrate that something can be said about Japan’s population during the half millennia between 1150 and 1600. What is said, presents a challenge to the extreme productivity of the Tokugawa period by demonstrating that latent growth trends were already well underway. Farris organizes this period into three sub-periods: 1150 – 1280, 1280 – 1450, and 1450 – 1600. For each of these periods Farris uses two chapters to discuss possible negative influences on population growth along with other background socio-cultural phenomena that may have had a positive, balancing force. The middle period is claimed as an especially important stage of development which produced diverse factors that permitted Japan’s population to grow past its earlier stagnation. By focusing on population, Farris is essentially undermining political evolutions as the primary source for change during this period.

Farris makes use of a wide variety of evidence, from temple death records to personal journals of famine, along with numerous other sources of fragmented evidence. He also implements a wide variety of Japanese secondary literature. The evidence used to demonstrate the effects of famines or certain epidemics is fragmentary and local, but this seems to be all that is available. Yet, it is hard to accept that, for example, the death records of a temple would necessarily represent an entire region. While much of what he has to say about the range and effect of various diseases seems to be abstract speculation, what Farris has done by bring so many shreds of evidence together is commendable for its contribution to an understanding of daily life practices of individuals outside of the court. It is this evidence that I found the most interesting. Discussion of technology implementation and local population strategy that get at how the masses of Japan lived out their daily lives is exciting.

While the work provides an excellent starting point for future debates and discussions of life during Japan’s medieval period, there are two places where Farris could have gone a bit further. Although maybe more revealing of my own limited knowledge, as a non-specialist, his introduction may have benefited from more direct engagement with demography as a field and the particular theories that he is borrowing from it. What’s more, since the conclusions about Japan’s population growth are based on subjective interpretations of the effects of disease, famine, and war, he seems too limited. What happened in other parts of the world such as medieval Europe or Sung China could shed light on his three mortality factors. Finally, his Epilogue provides observations that almost no one would contest, particularly his claim that there are multiple paths to modernity. Although he acknowledges that population growth does not necessarily equate with progress, the relationship between rulers and the ruled is seen as growing ever more tolerable and predictable, is this necessarily true? Nevertheless, Farris has left a lasting contribution to the way we understand the daily life of the masses during a period of Japanese history that remains poorly understood.
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John_Somerville | Oct 12, 2011 |
Pretty readable objective overview of the historical and archaeological record of ancient Japanese history.
 
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neomarxisme | Feb 17, 2008 |

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