A High Standard of Living in Nineteenth-Century Japan: Fact or Fantasy?
利用住房、食品、水质、家庭预算和实际工资等定性与定量证据，评估19世纪中期日本的生活水平，发现其不仅高于18世纪，也高于多数工业化西方地区。
In an effort to begin to solve the continuing controversy over how high the standard of living was in Japan prior to industrialization, this paper goes beyond the inadequate quantitative data and examines also qualitative and local evidence. Information on housing and food, urban water quality and waste disposal, and life styles is examined along with representative family budgets and two sets of real wage estimates. The evidence, taken together with life expectancy estimates, suggests that the standard of living in mid-nineteenth-century Japan was not only higher than in the 1700s, but relatively high in comparison to most of the industrializing West.