The fifty-fifth session of the Japanese Politics Online Seminar Series (JPOSS) took place on June 19, 2025. Amy Catalinac (NYU) chaired the seminar and moderated the Q&A session.
Shusuke Ioku (University of Rochester) presented his paper which offers a formal theory and quantitative historical evidence of the role of exit by tax subjects on the extractive capacity of the state. Responding to the literature’s primary focus on confrontational forms of resistance against state taxation, the author identifies the exit strategy as a consequential form of passive resistance. He constructs a georeferenced village-level dataset of 838 acts of resistance by 2,390 (out of 46,086) village nested in hundreds of domains in Japan during the Tokugawa period. These domains present comparable state units with varied tax rates. Using a twofold analysis, the author first presents evidence for the role of a village’s peripherality, measured by the ratio to its home capital vis-à-vis the capital of its neighboring domain, on its choice of the exit strategy. Next, he finds a positive relationship between the average peripherality of villages in each domain and the tax rate levied. The analysis remains robust across several alternative specifications, including the pull factors of migration in the neighboring domain.
Francisco Garfias (UC San Diego) and Chiaki Moriguchi (Hitotsubashi University) offered insightful comments on the exposition of the theory, its equilibrium outcome, as well as issues of endogeneity and possible use of exogeneous geographic features for analysis. During the Q&A session, participants furthered discussions on the implications of the theory, validity of village peripherality as a measure of exit costs, and possible approaches to causal inference.
The organizers would like to thank the presenters, discussants, and participants, as well as the staff at the Harvard Program on U.S.-Japan Relations, who provided administrative support. We look forward to seeing you at the next session of JPOSS: https://jposs.org/.