In early modern north-western Europe, real wages were on the decline while per capita GDP increased. In contrast, wage growth in Tokugawa Japan went hand in hand with output growth. Based on the author's own new estimates of real wage series, this paper examines several factors that are thought to have accounted for this contrast between Japan and the west: urban growth, overseas/long-distance trade, rural industrialisation, agricultural growth and an 'industrious revolution' in de Vries's sense. It is suggested, firstly, that the common denominator found in both European and Japanese cases was Smithian growth - a productivity growth associated with the proliferation of trades, which often took the form of the functional separation of the manufacturing of intermediate goods from other branches of the trade and, hance, of increasing market competition. Secondly, however, in Tokugawa society the upper and upper-middle layers remained thin: mercantile capitalism and the samurai were the losers in the process of economic change. Thirdly, at the bottom layer of the structure was the resilient and flexible peasant family, which could cope with both agricultural intensification and rural industrialisation without disintegrating. These accounted for the absence of any gap between real wage growth and per capita GDP growth in Japan's pre-modern economic development.