Rural Economic Development in Japan

From the Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War

Penelope Francks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134207862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

In the historical literature on Japan, rural people have tended to be regarded as the exploited victims of the industrialisation process. This book provides an alternative view of the role and significance of the rural economy in Japan's emergence as an economic power prior to World War II.

Using theories and approaches derived from development studies and economic history the book describes the nineteenth-century development of a diversified, proto-industrial rural economy, focusing on the strategies employed by households as they sought to secure and improve their livelihoods. The book argues that rural people, through their 'industrious revolution', played an active part in determining the course of Japan's agrarian transition and, eventually, the distinctive features of industrial Japan's political economy, with the result that rural life still figures largely in the reality and imagination of contemporary Japan.

1 Rethinking rural Japan

Rural Japan sounds like a contradiction. The contemporary image of Japan is as the urban industrial society and culture par excellence, a world of high-tech factories, packed commuter trains and post-modern consumerism. When told that I am writing a book about Japanese farmers and the countryside, many people express surprise that such things exist to be written about. Yet much of what we think of as inherently ‘Japanese’ derives from a rural tradition: the purity and simplicity at which the tea ceremony aims are symbolized by the fake rustic cottage in which it is performed; the rural roots of Japanese culture and social organization are celebrated each year, as the Emperor plants his rice field in the grounds of the Imperial Palace, surrounded by one of the world’s greatest urban conglomerations; airport book-stores still sell manuals telling passing business-people that the origins of Japanese company organization lie in the village. Although, for most Japanese people today, the countryside is something glimpsed through a train window or pictured in a TV documentary, the idea of the rural furusato or native place – and the ‘nostalgia for the experience of nostalgia’ that it evokes – remains a powerful weapon in the armoury of Japan’s advertising industry.¹ While the rural population ages and dwindles and few Japanese people, compared with, say, British ones, aspire to the rural idyll of life in the real countryside, agricultural interest groups seeking support for continued trade protection and subsidy have been able to draw on massive and emotional public support for the preservation of the ‘traditional’ landscape and products of rural Japan.

Meanwhile, academic analysts have created their own images of rural Japan, as they too struggle to resolve the contradictions that it presents. In work dating back to the inter-war period, Japanese and Western scholars have tried to fit Japan’s rural history into the available general models of what happens to the rural economy and society as industrialization takes place. In the long tradition of Japanese Marxist scholarship, the growth of a capitalist industrial sector undermines the feudal class structure of preindustrial Japan and leads to the polarization of rural society into, on one side, a landlord class more-or-less in league with the capitalist bourgeoisie and, on the other, a rural proletariat driven into the factories by landlessness and poverty. For post-war ‘modernization-theorists’ seeking to explain Japan’s phenomenal economic rise, the rural sector, or rather agriculture, acts as the reservoir of resources on which industrial growth is based, the passive supplier of ‘surplus labour’ for mobilization through industrial investment, eventually to be transformed, as the stages of economic growth proceed, into a ‘modern’ agricultural sector of capitalist-style farms.

However, it has not proved so easy to find evidence on the ground of the real developments which would fit either of these schema: Japanese rural households have consistently refused to act like members of a landless proletariat and persisted in holding on to ownership or tenancy rights over the tiniest holdings, continuing as cultivators even as they also engaged in industrial work alongside farming; the specialist, large-scale farms of ‘modern’ agriculture which should have emerged as industrialization proceeded have failed to materialize in Japan to this day. Moreover, the role as exploited victims of industrialization – rural proletariat or surplus labour – which both models prescribe for the rural population is hard to square with that which has come to be played by farmers in Japan’s political economy since World War II. Can the Occupationimposed land reform alone explain the transformation of the apparently powerless and poverty-stricken villagers of the inter-war period into some of the most heavily protected and subsidized farmers in the post-war world?

However, the fact that Japan’s rural history presents contradictions that cannot be squared with standard models based on generalized Western experience of industrialization does not mean that it is therefore unique or inexplicable. This book starts from the premise that tools and concepts devised for use in the analysis of economic development in the contemporary Third World, along with ideas that have emerged from micro-level research into the economic history of other now-developed countries, can provide the basis for the synthesis of a wide range of recent research on Japanese rural history into a story rather different from that told by the standard models. In the study of developing countries today, agriculture is no longer treated as the neglected ‘traditional sector’ of the ‘dualeconomy’ model, significant only as the source of surplus labour and capital to expropriate for investment in industry. The rural population have been transformed from backward and exploited peasants into smallscale producers, ‘post-peasants’ (Rigg 2001: 41) utilizing both the knowledge of their agricultural environment without which no improved techniques can be made to work and the scope which their household resources give them for securing and improving their livelihoods. Mean-while, economic historians have come to recognize the significance of the rural ‘proto-industrialization’ that characterized the development of many parts of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the variety in the forms of rural change that have accompanied modern industrialization. Rural people are thus no longer seen as the invisible and voiceless inhabitants of the periphery, but rather as significant participants, through their economic, political, social and even cultural activities, in the determination of the path to development and modernization.

From such a starting point, this book will present an alternative interpretation to the ‘farmers as victims’ paradigm that has become part of the mythology of modern Japan. This interpretation, it will be argued, can help to resolve the contradictions that rural Japan presents to academic analysis and explain why, as popular reactions attest, the countryside still matters to an understanding of how Japan’s economy and society have come to be as they are. Such an interpretation is in fact more-or-less implicit in much post-war work on the rural economy in the pre-industrial Tokugawa period and on peasant rebellions and later tenancy disputes, many examples of which have challenged the idea that rural dwellers were always the passive recipients of whatever the state, the landlord or market forces might seek to impose on them. But, beyond this, it is the ways in which Japanese rural households were able to develop and follow their own strategies of survival, security and betterment, and thus to exert a significant influence over the political economy of Japanese industrialization, that needs to be explained. Undoubtedly there were times and places when rural people became enmeshed in the conflicts that economic change inevitably brings and suffered relatively and absolutely from the environmental and economic fluctuations and shocks that afflicted Japan in the course of its industrialization. Nonetheless, the book will argue, through technological and economic adaptation, flexible household strategies and the development of forms of political and cultural co-operation and resistance, they conditioned the development path not only of the rural economy, but also of the wider political economy and society with which it interacted. The remainder of this chapter will therefore set out the theories and concepts, derived from development studies and economic history, that provide the analytical basis for the story the book tells of rural change during Japan’s development.

Rediscovering the rural: the countryside in the analysis of development

The idea that economic development is synonymous with the growth of large-scale, urban industry, and that the ‘traditional’ sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and small-scale rural manufacturing, have no role in the process except to supply resources for and, in due course, be absorbed by the ‘modern’ sector, dominated development studies in the early decades of its existence after World War II. ‘Two sector’ or ‘dual economy’ models which analysed development as a process of ‘surplus transfer’ from the traditional to the modern sector or from agriculture to industry took pride of place in development textbooks, and development planning, in both socialist and market economies, was a matter of devising the means to ‘squeeze’ agriculture of the capital and labour resources required by modern industry.²

However, by the 1970s, disillusion with ‘big push’ industrialization strategies which, while possibly generating high rates of industrial growth, seemed to exacerbate inequalities and do little to bring about real improvements in welfare and living standards, was beginning to set in.³ At the same time, the spread of yield-increasing improvements in agricultural technology, eventually dubbed the Green Revolution, in significant parts of the developing world challenged the past neglect of agriculture as a source of expansion in output and employment, while the superiority of large-scale, capital-intensive industrial techniques over ‘appropriate’, and not necessarily urban, alternatives was coming into question. As a result, the focus of both research and policy in the development field has ever since been shifting away from the modern sector and towards the smallscale, the informal and the rural.

This shift of necessity led to change in the ways in which the activities of those who make up the rural economy are analysed. Under the assumptions about the ‘traditional sector’ on which the old models had been based, rural households produced for subsistence and contained more labour than they could effectively use. Markets and prices therefore hardly mattered to them and their activities were fit study for anthropologists but not economists. Once ‘take-off’ began, their ‘surpluses’ would automatically be transferred to the industrial sector as required, voluntarily through labour transfer, as soon as jobs became available in urban industry, and involuntarily through rents, taxation or other forms of expropriation. Since rural producers faced no economic choices – life was just a matter of getting as much as possible out of the land in order to survive – there was no point in devising theories or carrying out empirical research into how the economies of rural households actually worked. Equally, since rural people were perforce subject to the control of an elite that monopolized landownership and military power, they had to be assumed to be unable to develop their own autonomous sources of political, social or cultural strength. Just as economic development depended on the growth of urban industry, so the towns and cities were assumed to be the only sites of political, social and cultural modernization.

However, with the Green Revolution and the new approaches to industrial growth of the 1970s, development theorists and practitioners came to appreciate that an understanding of, for example, why farmers did or did not adopt newly available technology depended on micro-level analysis of how their household economies operated and of the wider social, political and economic structures that conditioned their decisions.⁴ Numerous theories were developed (or revived) to explain the principles of the ‘peasant economy’. For some, standard neo-classical economics provided an adequate explanation, so that the rural household could effectively be treated like any other small business in a market economy. For others, the particular conditions under which agriculture was practised within the context of Third World rural society – the high level of risk to subsistence and survival, the family-based organization of production, the salience of social and political, as well as economic, relations between the weak and the powerful within the village and beyond – necessitated different kinds of analysis. But in either case, the breakthrough had been made towards the treatment of rural households as active participants in economic change, operating according to rational and discernible principles on the basis of their own view of the world.

This breakthrough opened the way to research into a whole range of new issues related to the activities of rural producers and the political economy within which they operated. It placed the rural household centre-stage and focused new attention on its resource-allocation decisions and technological choices, within the constraints that wider economic and social relations imposed on it. As the ‘black box’ of the household was opened up, issues such as the gender distribution of work and the differing market and credit relationships of different kinds of household came under scrutiny. Moreover, as empirical research on the rural economies of a wide range of developing countries accumulated, it became increasingly clear that agriculture was by no means the only activity by which rural people supported themselves and engaged with the market. Rural households were observed to pursue ‘livelihood diversification strategies’, constructing ‘a diverse portfolio of activities and social support capabilities in their struggle for survival and in order to improve their standards of living’ (Ellis 1998: 4). Such activities might include, alongside cultivation of the household’s holding for subsistence or for the market, household-based non-agricultural work, non-agricultural work within the rural area, or wage-work away from home, involving more-or-less temporary migration and remittances back to the family in the country. Many rural households, in the developed as well as the developing world, could thus be defined as ‘pluriactive’, deriving income from a range of sources within and beyond agriculture.⁵

Diversification strategies clearly offer a means of spreading the risks to household livelihood posed by fluctuations in the agricultural environment and prices and reducing the seasonality of income flows. However, they may also have wider implications for the rural economy in general. By opening up ways for households to make better use of their resources, invest in increasing their agricultural or non-agricultural output and generally raise, as well as stabilize, their incomes, rural non-agricultural activities, alongside agricultural improvements, could lead to an expanding rural economy based on the pluriactive household, instead of the breakdown of peasant agriculture which would result from permanent migration to urban areas and the emergence of large-scale, specialized farms.⁶ China’s spectacular take-off following the introduction of the household responsibility system and the deregulation of the rural economy from the late 1970s is often attributed to the rapid expansion of rural industry, alongside agriculture, and other East Asian cases, including Taiwan’s and post-war Japan’s, are frequently cited as demonstrating the benefits, in terms of equality and welfare as well as output increase, of rural industrial-ization as a strategy.⁷ In parts of the world as diverse as Southeast Asia and southern Africa, non-agricultural growth is seen as producing not the ‘deindustrialization’ of the countryside, as the products of urban industry replace those once made by rural households themselves, but rather its ‘deagrarianization’, as rural households increasingly engage in industrial work (Bryceson 1996; Rigg 2001: ch. 9).

Such evidence therefore suggests the possibility of a different pattern of economic development, in the rural economy and beyond, from that implied by ‘two sector’ models driven by ‘modern sector’ growth. The original model designed to incorporate rural non-agricultural activities into a sectoral analysis of the development process, that of Hymer and Resnick (1969), was in fact used to show how a developing country’s opening up to trade would result in the disappearance of rural manufacturing, as producers switched to production of agricultural export crops and substituted imports for the products they had once made for themselves. Ranis and Stewart (1993), however, reworked the model to show that there were conditions under which rural non-agricultural activities would not be wiped out, but would instead grow and develop, while food production for the domestic market was maintained. These conditions involved, on the one hand, the existence of positive linkages between the agricultural and non-agricultural activities of rural households and, on the other, a wider economic and political environment that facilitated the operation of these ‘growth linkages’. Where such conditions prevailed, it was possible to envisage a situation in which an increase in, say, agricultural output generated an increase in rural household income which increased demand for the products of rural manufacturers employing workers from those households. The resulting rises in employment and incomes would in turn generate increased demand for locally produced food. Rising incomes would provide some rural households at least with the resources and security needed to undertake investment to increase output further, in response to rising demand. Thus, growth-linkage interactions could produce a cycle of rising rural employment and incomes, often described as a ‘virtuous circle’.⁸

This recognition of the potential for growth and development within the rural economy itself, along a path determined by the strategies of rural actors, can also be seen as part of a wider movement to understand and appreciate, in its own terms, the world of those once seen as peripheral to the urban-centred, top-down development process. Given the distinctive nature of rural life – for example, its relation to the seasonal and risky business of agriculture, the location of production within small-scale and often quite isolated communities and the role within it of organizations acting as units of both production and consumption – economic text-book theories designed to explain urban-industrial activities and based on the assumption of the atomistic, asocial and acultural producer and consumer might be inadequate to explain the actions of rural households. Hence, the rural community – typically the village – and its social, political and cultural features might need to be brought into any satisfactory analysis of rural economic change, and understanding of the strategies used by rural households might need to take account of their use of community-based activity and non-economic tools and sanctions in their pursuit of economic ends. As scholarly attention in general increasingly focused on ‘other’ cultures and societies and on ‘subaltern’ voices, so rural communities were recognized as possessing valid social, political and cultural ways of their own, a ‘little tradition’ distinct from the mainstream ‘great tradition’ of the urban centres of economic and political power.

The pioneer of this kind of approach to rural communities experiencing economic change has been James Scott. In his most influential work, The Moral Economy of the Peasant, Scott argued that, where households’ goals principally involved the insurance of security and survival, rural groups were motivated by the principles of their ‘moral economy’ to resist, in the last resort by rebellion, forces, such as the spread of the capitalist market economy, that threatened the kinds of intra-village, non-market relationships through which such insurance had been guaranteed (Scott 1976). Others produced evidence that by no means all peasant communities regarded the market as threatening their insurance of subsistence, some viewing it as offering opportunities fo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Conventions
• Glossary
• 1. Rethinking Rural Japan
• Part I: The Nineteenth Century: The Establishment of the Diversified Rural Economy
• Part II: The Agrarian Transition, 1890–1920
• Part III: The Inter-War Years: Crisis and Modernization