Fortunately, Linfamy is one of the few youtubers producing history content on youtube who is completely transparent with his sources (some of the people purporting to produce more serious, “documentary”-type content should follow this example, really).

This video is effectively based entirely on the work of Amino Yoshihiko, of whose massive oeuvre only one book was translated to English (1). This makes it quite easy for me to type up an answer, because I can just reference a few things from it :)

People commenting below the video appear to define “agrarian society” by the percentage of the total population that engaged in agriculture. In this context, this is quite off the mark. What we're talking about is ideology: the agrarian society is diametrically opposed to the modern=industrial society. In other words, industry, commerce(=capitalism), urbanization, also the introduction of plural views on things such as morality defines the modern condition, whereas the opposite will define the premodern, agrarian, condition. The latter is characterized by self-sufficient communities, low spatial mobility, a shared tradition. This view is quite dependent on Marxist ideas, of course, although the latter—the distinction between a morally ambiguous and fluid society vis a vis a morally coherent traditional, and thus static, society—lends itself splendidly to Conservative/right-wing discourse. It is also an integral part of a Eurocentric, or Orientalist, East-West discourse, which is for example integral to Colonialism.

The identification of premodern Japan, the only Asian nation that modernized itself and joined the Western colonial powers in record time, with being an agrarian(=not-modern) society served to distinguish the “new” Japan from the “old” Japan, emphasize a myth of rapid progress, break with the past, and thus lend itself to the construction of a narrative of the modern Japanese nation state (cf. Amino 2012, Translator’s Introduction, xvi–xvii).

Therefore, what Amino was attacking was not some statistical numbers game (despite most people in the comments of the video mentioned exclusively disliked the content on these grounds).

Indeed, there were a huge number of “farmers” or “peasants” out there. He was attacking narrative, and the power of how words link to concepts and shape our ideas about the past: would you associate “peasant” with a person that engages in maritime commerce, or proto-industrial production? Probably not. He attacked an idealized idea of the past, a narrative, in which almost all of Japan was mostly peasants who all did the same thing (agriculture) and thus were all the same, homogenous people, and this is then connected to "being" Japanese:

“The dominant view has been that simply by living in this island nation the Japanese—with their homogeneous and uniform language and rice as the basis of their diet in a society based upon wet paddy agriculture—developed a unique culture in these islands.” (Amino 2012, xxxiv)

Moreover, a rural community is idealized as being, due to its relative isolation, immobility, and self-sufficiency, as being pure, and personal. The urban space of the city, in contrast, is one of chaos, flux, and alienation (Amino 2012, Translator’s Introduction, xvii–xviii). Amino thought in a more nuanced way, and perceived even regional markets as urban spaces, and by doing so, he attacked this dichotomized view. He also was critical revolutionary narratives of breaks and emphasized underlying continuities by focusing on gradual, not radical, change.

What Amino (2012: 4–5) pointed out in his first chapter is that history textbooks at his time (the late 1950s, early 1960s) spoke of “farmers” whereas the research they were based on spoke of “hyakushō.” The former is an occupational denominator, the latter describes a specific social status, which refers to the owner of a homestead outside of the major urban centers (mostly castle towns) in the Edo-period: effectively, a “villager” as opposed to “townsfolk.” The numbers of the statistic he cites, population of Kubota-han in 1849 (2) is as follows:

Warriors 9.8%

“Farmers” (=Villagers) 76.4%

Townsfolk 7.5%

Clergy 1.9%

Merchants & Artisans 4.2%

Hinin / Eta 0.1% (3)

He also noted that the textbook did barely talk about any occupations but (rice-)agriculture, so, no mentions of fishing, salt-making, and so on. This means that the illusion is being created that 76.4% of the population produced rice. This is the initial target of his argument. To give one example from the same chapter (Ibid. 14-16), he notes that the town of Wajima in Outer Noto consisted of 621 households of which 71% did not own any land. The remaining 29% produced an average of 4.5 koku (roughly enough to feed 4.5 people in a year), which also rules these out as employing the others on their fields. Since Wajima was not a poor town, the question naturally arises what all these people actually did; after all, the majority of them was filed under hyakushō status and thus “must” have been “farmers”.

Nothing of the underlying argument, the actual argument, came through in Linfamy’s video, but the type of content he makes—little funny videos that try to be a bit educational at the side—is not suited for something like this.

If this piqued your interest, I encourage you to just read the book referenced, because for practical reasons, I’m not going to summarize more of it. Nevertheless, I think this should sufficiently explain what the video (not very successfully) tried to be about.

(1) Amino, Yoshihiko. Rethinking Japanese History. Michigan Monograph Series in Japanese Studies. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, The University of Michigan, 2012. Originally published in Japanese in two volumes 1991 and 1993.)

(2) It should be noted that in Linfamy’s video, my impression was that he was talking about a very long span of time, whereas in the book mentioned, Amino was more directly attacking the idea of an Edo-period society that was mythically rural outside of its major urban centers. Obviously, this statistic is a bit too recent to refer to “medieval” Japan. ;)

(3) I did change a few names in this table: in the original, the farmers and villagers are obviously split into two different lists with the same numbers, the Merchants & Artisans was referred to as "Misc." (although it denoted people identified by social status as such), and the Hinin / Eta component - discriminated people - was referred to as "Nonhumans."

I was going to write a long pre-amble on that the question isn't actually the point of the video, or at least its source. But /u/Morricane did better than I could have in the post on that above, so just go read that.

Now, keeping that in mind, and even farmers for whom farming made up the greater majority of their labour/income, much less those who had important side-gigs, would have done stuff like sold their own crops (commerce) or sewed their own clothes (crafts), here are some statistics.

According to post-war Japanese agricultural census and population estimate:

	1950	1955	1960	1965
Farming Families
_Main occupation	3,086,377	2,105,300	2,078,124	1,218,723
_Side occupation	3,090,042	3,937,645	3,978,506	4,446,040
Total	6,176,419	6,042,945	6,056,630	5,664,763
Population
Engaged in independent farming as an occupation
_As main occupation			14,541,624	11,513,989
_All		19,320,925	17,656,100	15,443,345
Farming families (including children and elderly)	34,137,272	36,347,290	34,411,187	30,083,252
Total	83,200,000	89,276,000	93,419,000	98,275,000

From this we can do some math:

	1950	1955	1960	1965
Percent of Population
Engaged in independent farming as an occupation
_As main occupation	-	-	16%	12%
_All	-	22%	19%	16%
Farming families (including children and elderly)	41%	41%	37%	31%
Per Farming Family
Engaged in independent farming as an occupation
_As main occupation	-	-	2.40	2.03
_All	-	3.20	2.92	2.73
Population	5.53	6.01	5.68	5.31

Given that, especially prior to mandatory basic education and retirement age, it doesn't make sense to separate the young and elderly of a family from it's occupation, I think it's a fair assumption to classify all members of the family as also it's occupation. It is probably also a fair estimate given the above and compared to other periods and locations in history, to say on average a farming family had 5 or 6 members. Could be a bit more, could be a bit less. If we used 5 and 6 as our numbers and applied it to the first few data points of the agricultural census, this is the result:

	1904	1906	1908	1910	1915	1919	1924
Farming Families
Main occupation	3,776,798	3,809,624	3,748,157	3,694,970	3,748,020	3,837,080	3,880,284
Side occupation	1,639,905	1,584,264	1,661,847	1,721,967	1,703,169	1,644,107	1,668,315
Total	5,416,703	5,393,888	5,410,004	5,416,937	5,451,189	5,481,187	5,548,599
Population if 5
Main occupation	18,883,990	19,048,120	18,740,785	18,474,850	18,740,100	19,185,400	19,401,420
Side occupation	8,199,525	7,921,320	8,309,235	8,609,835	8,515,845	8,220,535	8,341,575
Total	27,083,515	26,969,440	27,050,020	27,084,685	27,255,945	27,405,935	27,742,995
Population if 6
Main occupation	22,660,788	22,857,744	22,488,942	22,169,820	22,488,120	23,022,480	23,281,704
Side occupation	9,839,430	9,505,584	9,971,082	10,331,802	10,219,014	9,864,642	10,009,890
Total	32,500,218	32,363,328	32,460,024	32,501,622	32,707,134	32,887,122	33,291,594

Finally, if we used the population estimate to calculate the percentage (first modern population census is 1920 second is 1925) the results are as below:

	1904	1906	1908	1910	1915	1919	1924
Population	46,135,000	47,038,000	47,965,000	49,184,000	52,752,000	55,033,000	59,737,000
Population if 5
Main occupation	40.93%	40.50%	39.07%	37.56%	35.52%	34.86%	32.48%
Side occupation	17.77%	16.84%	17.32%	17.51%	16.14%	14.94%	13.96%
Total	58.70%	57.34%	56.40%	55.07%	51.67%	49.80%	46.44%
Population if 6
Main occupation	49.12%	48.59%	46.89%	45.08%	42.63%	41.83%	38.97%
Side occupation	21.33%	20.21%	20.79%	21.01%	19.37%	17.92%	16.76%
Total	70.45%	68.80%	67.67%	66.08%	62.00%	59.76%	55.73%

So if we take the dictionary/mathematical definition of "majority" as over 50%, and farmers as "anyone who engage in farming even if it's a side occupation" then it's clear that even in the first decades of the 20th century majority Japanese were farmers.

In addition, given that:

1. the ratio of farming families that engaged in it as their main occupation to those as their side occupation was a steady 7:3 in the first quarter of the 20th century, even if we assume that ratio applies backwards and doesn't increase as we go back,
2. how close to half of the general population the families whose main occupation was farming made up in the first decade of the 20th century,
3. and it's probably safe to say before industrialization an even larger ratio of the population would've been farmers before 1904,

I'd say that while we don't know how high the proportion was at any time in history, it's probably fairly safe to say that "over half of Japanese families before the modern era engaged in farming as their main occupation."

Again, keep in mind that this is not the point of the video or its source. I just put the stats together because the question asked for it.

For /u/Right_Two_5737 as well.