Farmers and Village Life in Japan

Yoshiaki Nishida, Ann Waswo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135786113
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Rural Japan during the twentieth century has been portrayed as a vast reservoir of conservatism in much of the literature on Japan's modern development, and Japanese agriculture since the 1960s has been treated as an artificial creation sustained only by protectionism of the worst sort. This book presents a range of original, in-depth work, including work by Japanese scholars, that seeks to move beyond such stereotypes to reveal the diversity and complexities of rural life in Japan from 1900 to the present.

1Introduction

Ann Waswo

The 1990s and early 2000s have been difficult years for many farmers in many parts of the developed world. Their incomes have fallen sharply, and may well fall further as the subsidies designed to boost food production in the aftermath of the Second World War are progressively withdrawn and agriculture is increasingly exposed to unfettered market forces in the national, regional and global arena. Their intensive, industrialized production methods, celebrated in the recent past, are now the targets of criticism on both environmental and food-safety grounds. Theirs is a steadily aging population, as their children vote with their feet and move to urban areas to take up ‘jobs with a future.’ Young men who do opt for farming find it increasingly difficult to find young women willing to marry them, even in some parts of the United States (New York Times, May 6, 1999; see also Country Living, August 1999 for a response to the bride shortage in rural England). There has been severe population decline in some rural areas, and an influx of former city dwellers in search of the rural idyll in others, who then object to the noises and odors of the farming that still takes place nearby. Protesting farmers have become a familiar sight on the nightly television news. Less visible, but certainly no less significant, is the rising suicide rate among farmers in at least some countries. A debate about the future of farming and of food – in some instances, about the rural landscape itself – appears to have begun among politicians and policymakers, farmers and farmers’ organizations, and consumers and consumer lobbying groups in virtually every OECD country. What the outcome of those debates will be remains to be seen, but it is likely that another great era of change for farmers and farming, comparable to the sea changes of the early postwar era, is in the offing.

In all probability, the future of farmers and farming in Japan will strike most of the intended readers of this volume as an eminently clear-cut case, lacking any of the ambiguities and anxieties that bedevil consideration of the fate of farmers and farming elsewhere. After all, to most observers of agriculture and agricultural policies in the contemporary, overwhelmingly western portion of the OECD, farming in Japan is inefficiency incarnate, sustained only by a very slowly crumbling wall of protectionism, and hence a prime candidate for extinction in favor of more cheaply produced food imported from abroad. That urban residents in Japan might benefit from better housing if given access to building sites on former farmland is seen as an additional benefit, and not only by Australia and other members of the so-called Cairns group of agricultural free traders. There is also a small but increasingly vocal constituency within Japan for the elimination of most if not all of Japanese agriculture, consisting primarily of macro-economists at present but possibly poised to enjoy somewhat broader support among business interests and at least some members of the Japanese public.

Moreover, to most western scholars of modern Japan – other than to a relative handful among them who study its rural society and economy – the countryside and its purported ethos are seen as overwhelmingly negative factors in Japan’s development past and present. Granted, the agricultural sector fed the nation for a crucial interval in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and made other contributions to the consolidation of the new Meiji regime and the launching of efforts to promote industrialization, by providing the major share of tax revenues, significant foreign exchange earnings from the export of raw silk and tea, and ample factory labor. But farmers themselves are widely characterized as a major source of problems for the modernizing ‘rest’ of the country, especially after the turn of the twentieth century. Their traditional ethos of communal solidarity has been portrayed as the linchpin of emperor-centered nationalism in the early 1900s, impeding the spread of individualism and other values deemed essential to a liberal political order. Overwhelming rural support is said to have enabled Japan’s ‘fascist’ or ‘militarist’ transformation in the 1930s and the reckless attempt to establish Japanese hegemony in Asia during the Second World War. Farmers’ interests as petty property owners in the aftermath of the Occupation-led land reform, combined with their ‘innate conservatism’ and the over-representation of rural districts in elections, are frequently cited as an obstacle to the development of a vigorous and healthy democracy in postwar Japan. Given these perceived problems, releasing Japan from the dead weight of its rural heritage might very easily be construed as offering socio-political, as well as economic, benefits.

A common feature of most western assessments of farming and farmers in Japan is sweeping generalization. The agricultural sector, the rural village, the Japanese farmer feature in the discourse, such as it is. At the very least, the contributors to this volume hope to muddy these suspiciously simple conceptual waters by providing evidence of the considerable diversity within rural Japan at any given time, as well as evidence of fairly constant processes of adaptation and change at the local level, and not only in response to directives from government officials or other elites. Our focus is not on the economics of Japanese agriculture past or present, although prevailing economic realities will figure in most of the papers. Nor will state policy receive more than passing attention. Rather, we seek to emphasize the actions and attitudes of farmers themselves as they have confronted and coped with new opportunities and new challenges during the twentieth century. In contrast to the modernist paradigm, which posits a sharp dichotomy between the ‘old’/rural/agrarian and the ‘new’/urban/industrial and which generally portrays the old as a drag on development, we seek to demonstrate that Japanese farmers played an active and largely positive role in Japan’s modern trajectory. Far from being ‘innately’ conservative, they have proven themselves consistently innovative, and their support for the conservative Liberal–Democratic Party (LDP) in the postwar era was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Japan Socialist Party (JSP) had been very active in the countryside in the first few years after Japan’s surrender in 1945, after all, and might well have made further headway among rural voters had its significant left-wing not decided after poor results in the election of 1949 that it should concentrate on being the party of the industrial proletariat, rather than a more broadly based party of the lower and lower middle classes as a whole. Conservative politicians then proved willing and able to fill the void the JSP’s retreat from the countryside created.

We focus in this volume on the twentieth century in part because a reasonably accurate portrayal of rural Japan in the late nineteenth century has found its way into textbooks of Japanese history and other western scholarship dealing at least in part with agriculture’s role in Japan’s development at that time. A further, and more salient, reason is that it was from the turn of the twentieth century that Japan’s industrial transformation began in earnest, posing for Japan as for other countries at other times the challenge of defining a place for farming and farmers within a dramatically changing economic order. It is in this respect that Japan’s experience may prove most relevant in comparative perspective, thus contributing to a better understanding of an important phase in the long history of agriculture itself.

In Chapter 2 Nishida Yoshiaki presents an overview of the century, based primarily on the diary of Nishiyama Kōichi, a farmer in Niigata prefecture. In Chapter 3 Ōkado Masakatsu introduces the neglected topic of rural women during the same period. In Chapters 4 and 5 Tsutsui Masao and myself discuss developments in rural Japan in the early 1900s and 1920s, respectively, each in its own way a time of increasing empowerment for ‘ordinary’ farmers, whether owner-cultivators or tenant farmers, within a stratified rural social order. Three chapters on the profoundly disruptive consequences of the Great Depression of the 1930s follow. In the first of these Kerry Smith explores the response of the overwhelming majority of Japanese farmers to the depression: working together for rural revitalization in Japan. Sandra Wilson and Mori Takemaro then examine efforts to promote rural emigration to Manchuria, a Japanese puppet state after the Manchurian Incident of 1931, and the decidedly lukewarm responses of Japanese farmers to those efforts. The next four chapters deal with the postwar era. In Chapter 9 Raymond Jussaume Jr discusses the evolution of part-time farming, or the pluriactivity of farmers, from its prewar origins to the mid-1990s. Iwamoto Noriaki examines farmers’ changing attitudes toward land and land use in the context of rapid economic growth and urban land price escalation in Chapter 10, and Kase Kazutoshi examines the impact of the same external developments on farmers’ enthusiasm for farmland and agricultural improvements in Chapter 11. In Chapter 12 John Knight considers the phenomenon of rural resettlement in a depopulated rural region and the implications of such resettlement for an agrarian future in Japan. In a concluding chapter the editors discuss some of the main themes that emerge from the preceding chapters and assess the prospects for farmers and farming in Japan at the outset of the twenty-first century.

Although rural Japan is the setting in the pages that follow, many of the issues dealt with will come as no surprise to observers of farming and farmers in the twentieth-century West. That said, however, there are certain distinctive features of the Japanese case that need to be borne in mind. Chief among these are, first, the relatively high proportion of farm households within the total population and total labor force of Japan, at least until fairly recently. Between 1868 and 1940, the number of farm households remained relatively stable at some 5.5 million, each with an average of about five household members, within a population that grew from some 35 million to 72 million persons. By and large, the nonagricultural economy in this period only provided new employment opportunities for the surplus (non-inheriting) younger sons and daughters of farm households, and no net decrease in the number of households engaged in farming occurred. That would not begin to take place until the early 1960s and the onset of Japan’s so-called ‘economic miracle’ of sustained high rates of growth and structural change, and it would gather speed both as the non-agricultural economy soared in the years ahead and as the early postwar generation of farmers/heads of farming households progressively aged. There had been some 5.7 million farm households in 1965. By 1985 the number had fallen to 4.4 million, and it would fall to 3.4 million in 1995. During those same years the Japanese population had grown from 98 to 125 million, and the total labor force had increased from 48 to 64 million. Roughly 70 percent of the total labor force at the turn of the century, and still 45 percent in 1950, farmers would constitute only about 10 percent in 1980 and about 5 percent in 1995.

Second, we must note the persistence of family farming on relatively small holdings throughout the century. The average holding of farm households before the Second World War was about one chō (.992 hectares or 2.45 acres) in size, and it remained one chō after the postwar land reform, which virtually eliminated farm tenancy but did not – indeed could not – address the problem of land scarcity in a mountainous and densely populated country. There were, of course, significant regional and local variations in the scale of holdings which average figures obscure, but, more importantly, both before and after the war there was significant potential for productivity increases even on such small holdings and, as we shall see, much of that potential was realized. What might well appear to be market gardening by the standards of extensive western agriculture could prove to be reasonably profitable in Japan, and certainly adequate to supporting a respectable standard of living, provided the cultivator either owned the land concerned or paid only modest rents.

The third feature concerns the centrality of one crop, rice, in agricultural production. In Japan, as elsewhere in Asia, rice has long been grown in flooded paddies, and located as Japan is on the fringes of the monsoon zone, rainfall alone could not be counted on to provide the necessary water as and when needed. A considerable infrastructure of irrigation and drainage facilities was required to service the paddies in a given locality. As a result, no one farmer could own or control all of the essential means of production himself, and needed the community in order to survive as a rice producer. Herein lay the basis for communal solidarity and cooperation in the rural settlements of Japan. Other crops were grown, to be sure, on drained rice paddies in the winter, where climate allowed (generally in the southwestern half of the archipelago), and on upland or dry fields (hatake) beyond the reach of existing technology for paddy rice or – more recently – on former rice paddies that have been converted to the raising of ‘upland’ or dry field crops. Throughout the twentieth century, however, the area devoted to rice production generally has exceeded the area planted to all other crops combined. Moreover, the varieties of rice grown were of a specific type, shorter-grain japonica rice, that would germinate at the lower temperatures prevailing in Japan than was the case with the longer-grain indica type of rice grown in monsoon Asia, and that differed in luster, texture and taste from indica rice (Francks 1983: 28; Ohnuki-Tierney 1993: 13). So long as domestic demand for that rice continued to increase, Japanese rice farmers prospered. When demand started to fall in the mid-1960s, a ‘rice mountain’ of surplus production began to accumulate, which no other major rice-consuming country wanted in any meaningful quantity, even if that rice had been sold at a discount well below the price the Japanese government was then paying its domestic rice producers.

Given the near equivalence between chō and hectares, the two measurements of area will be used interchangeably in the chapters that follow. As hatake fields are no longer confined to upland areas, they will be described as dry fields. The names of all Japanese persons cited in the text or as authors will be given in the standard Japanese order: surname followed by personal name.

References

Country Living. 1999. ‘Lonely Hearts Campaign: The Farmer Wants a Wife,’ August, pp. 54–6.

Francks, Penelope. 1983. Technology and Agricultural Development in Pre-war Japan. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press.

New York Times. 1999. ‘Scrambling to Find Cupid in a Haystack,’ May 6. Ohnuki-Tierney, Emiko. 1993. Rice as Self: Japanese Identities through Time. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

2Dimensions of change in twentieth-century rural Japan

Nishida Yoshiaki

Introduction

In this chapter I will discuss the many changes that occurred in Japanese villages and in the lives and livelihoods of Japanese farmers during the twentieth century, basing my assessment primarily on a diary kept by a farmer in the Nishi-Kanbara district of Niigata Prefecture. The diary’s writer, Nishiyama Kōichi, was born in August 1908 and died in December 1995 at the age of 87. His entries start in October 1925 when he was 17 and continue on an almost daily basis until the early 1990s, a span of some 65 years. At the beginning of this period, his family were pure tenant farmers, cultivating slightly more than two chō (one chō = 2.45 acres) of rented land in the hamlet of Koshin in the village of Sakaiwa. The hamlet was located between the Shinano and Nishikawa rivers, only about two miles from Niigata City on the Japan Sea, and the five tracts of marshland within its borders were held as common land to which all farmers residing in the hamlet had rights of access.

During Kōichi’s tenure as head of the family, the Nishiyamas made considerable economic strides forward, first acquiring title to the land they cultivated not long before the end of the Second World War and then thriving as owner-cultivating farmers for over two decades, even becoming ‘cultivating landlords’ for a brief period in the early 1970s. Stock market speculation by Kōichi’s son and heir thereafter, using the dramatically enhanced value of their land as collateral, proved the family’s undoing, however, and by the late 1980s they owned no land but that on which their family home stood and were no longer involved in farming.

Entries in the diary record the main daily activities of Kōichi and other members of his family and all their income and expenditure, giving us a clear record year by year of the labor they devoted to farming and to by-employments and hence of changes in their household economy. Kōichi was also concerned with the life of his village and hamlet, recording the major events and campaigns that took place in his lifetime. These entries make it possible to trace developments within the local community and to see how solidarity and mutual cooperation among residents were from time to time affected by tension and conflict. Although it is very definitely micro-data, this diary provides us with rare insight into the realities of rural life and is a valuable source for the study of farmers and villages during the twentieth cent...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• FARMERS AND VILLAGE LIFE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY JAPAN
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Dimensions of change in twentieth-century rural Japan
• 3 The women of rural Japan: an overview of the twentieth century
• 4 The impact of the local improvement movement on farmers and rural communities
• 5 In search of equity: Japanese tenant unions in the 1920s
• 6 Building the model village: rural revitalization and the Great Depression
• 7 Securing prosperity and serving the nation: Japanese farmers and Manchuria, 1931–33
• 8 Colonies and countryside in wartime Japan
• 9 Part-time farming and the structure of agriculture in postwar Japan
• 10 Local conceptions of land and land use and the reform of Japanese agriculture
• 11 Agricultural public works and the changing mentality of Japanese farmers in the postwar era
• 12 Organic farming settlers in Kumano
• 13 Whither rural Japan?
• Index