Real Wages in Late Medieval Japan: Changes and Differentials

Following the lead of a recent effort by J.-P. Bassino et al. to provide a long-run series of real wages（rice wages）for the unskilled in an attempt to estimate GDP per capita for pre-modern Japan, this paper aims to broaden the scope of exploration of the wage and price database utilised by J.-P. Bassino et al. Our emphasis is placed on the distinction between skilled and unskilled wages and between payments in money and in kind （rice）: our attention is thus focused on the impact of monetary changes on rice wages of both skilled and unskilled workers over the period between 1348 and 1593. No medieval political authority issued its own currency, as a result of which price levels were dependent on the supply of currencies from China, which included privately produced, low-quality coins. The fifteenth century thus saw the domestic money market stratified into a multi-layered structure with differing grades of currency. When the supply of Chinese coins stopped in the late 1560s the use of low-quality currencies expanded, driving the fine-quality ones out of the market. One obvious consequence of this change was inflation but the value of the low-quality coins soon started to rise, making the grain market of this period extremely turbulent. Another change that accompanied the monetary turbulence was the increased use of rice in place of coins on the labour market, particularly for the skilled. By estimating new series of rice wages, therefore, this paper attempts to show how those monetarily induced changes exerted differential influences on the real-wage levels of the skilled and the unskilled over the 250-year period.