Simple pleasures: food consumption in Japan and the global comparison of living standards

Contrary both to Pomeranz's argument for the comparability of pre-industrial living standards across Eurasia and to the accumulating evidence of the extent of growth in the Japanese economy in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, quantitative historical comparisons of living standards consistently place Japan on a level with the least developed parts of Europe and imply that the living conditions of ordinary Japanese people only began to approach those of the industrialized West once imported modernization had been absorbed. This article uses concepts derived from comparative consumption history to go deeper into this issue, arguing that, from at least the late eighteenth century, Japanese living standards were changing in ways that paralleled equivalent developments in Europe. Through the consumption histories of a set of ‘transformative’ products – rice, tea, tobacco, and sugar – it seeks to demonstrate the potential for comparative qualitative analysis of living standards and to show that, in Japan as in Europe, the ‘transformation of desire’ paved the way for industrialization.