Why Were There No Severe Famines in Fourteenth-Century Japan? Social Change, Resilience, and Climatic CoolingKeisuke Itō and Paula R. Curtis

Excerpt

Climate history is of interest for what it can tell us about how changes in temperature and precipitation affected societies in the past and for the hints it may provide regarding what makes societies vulnerable or resilient to such changes or, by extension, other external shocks. In the present article I focus on climate change in medieval Japan in an attempt to elucidate the relationship between changes in temperature and precipitation, on the one hand, and the occurrence of famine, on the other.

Medieval Japan was a predominantly agricultural society whose institutions and technologies were fine-tuned to fit prevailing climatic conditions; as a result, in some cases fluctuations in temperature and precipitation had huge effects on social conditions. For example, there was a sharp decrease in temperature and an increase in precipitation starting in the thirteenth century. As one might expect, cold summers typically led to poor harvests, which led to shortages in the food supply and ultimately to famine. Oddly, however, for about a century starting in 1280, Japan experienced similar climatic conditions, including ongoing cooling, and yet was not beleaguered by famine. The purpose of this article is to explain what made fourteenth-century Japanese society relatively resilient to extreme weather events.