Farmers and Village Life in Japan

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The slow life in rural Japan is converting more young people

Toichiro Sone, an year-old resident, recalled the time after the quake. Big cracks had opened in the farming fields. That would have meant abandoning the community and the land passed down and protected by generations of their ancestors.

But the quake unexpectedly brought young volunteers to the community, and the villagers had a change of heart, Sone said. They also praised our settlement, which we had taken for granted, saying it was such a beautiful place. So I felt I wanted to hang on here a bit more.

Eventually, some individuals and a family moved to the community, boosting the number of residents to 24 in Sato started as a volunteer. But she was so intrigued by the settlement that she declined a job offer from an advertising agency and started farming there when she was just out of a Tokyo university six years ago. It was all she needed to hear.

Becoming a farmer herself, she thought, was one way to help stop the disappearance of the community and preserve what she had learned.

It was a rough start. On a few occasions, she had accidents in a light pickup truck or saw vegetables rot before she could store them for winter. Withstanding freezing weather with a stove at the school or shoveling snow for hours every morning were not what she had expected.

Sone said that he initially thought Sato might give up, because the farm activities required both physical strength and years of experience. Sato would meticulously write down instructions in a notebook, and with every new challenge she took on, he became more convinced she was there for the long haul.

After marrying a local man and giving birth to a daughter, she has continued her work. Although she is temporarily out of the settlement, she is commuting to her farmland from the same city and planning to rejoin the settlement after renovating her new home. There were individuals and families in the settlement who were my role models.

I wanted to become like them and I wanted to revive their community. Ideology, not just economic desperation, was a driving engine in other prefectures as well. But the rate of outmigration slowed after war broke out with China in , and Mori concludes that "Japan's wartime project to promote emigration to Manchuria was a total failure" p.

The historian Sandra Wilson adds a chapter on farmers and Manchurian settlement during , arguing that military and strategic motives underlay the official rhetoric promoting emigration as a panacea for village [End Page ] poverty: Ann Waswo, a historian, reprints her classic "In Search of Equity: At the local level, this government-led movement required "the reform of existing village institutions" p. Corroborating that revitalization and wartime mobilization benefited Fukushima, as elsewhere, Smith suggests how local innovations anticipated the more sweeping land reforms of Four chapters address changes in Japanese farm life since the American occupation.

The rural sociologist Raymond A. Iwamoto Noriaki, an agricultural economist, writes on the postwar land reform and local conceptions of land use, especially in relation to the family and hamlet as social institutions.

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He argues, with mixed success, that the idea of land ownership introduced by the reforms did not fare well in subsequent years p. But he is correct that "it was the dramatic increase in all land prices during the postwar era that exerted the most profound impact on farmers' attitudes toward their land" p. Kase Kazutoshi, a specialist on labor and construction, contributes a study of farmers' changing attitudes since toward rural public works, which were mainly intended to improve existing farmlands.

Achieving "unanimous support within the community was viewed as essential" p. Then, outlooks shifted in the s and s as certain fields became more valuable for nonagricultural purposes than for farming.

The vast programs of deficit spending on [End Page ] local construction carried out since to pump up the national economy have complicated farmers' attitudes still further. John Knight, an anthropologist, includes a chapter on organic farming in Wakayama, a depopulated region where ex-urban settlers have built a would-be self-sufficient agricultural community, with predictable mutual frictions as well as benefits in interactions between natives and newcomers.

The most interesting sections of the volume deal with depression and wartime, highlighting the long-term structural and institutional continuities in Japanese society despite wartime disruptions. The coeditors are right that farmers have played an active role in Japan's modern trajectory, but nobody can deny the sense of crisis plaguing villagers and national officials today.

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Close to hamlets disappear each year , remained in , paddy-field acreage decreased by 19 per cent between and , and self-sufficiency in food on a calorie basis fell from 79 per cent in to 40 per cent in lower, apparently, than any European country. Tom Havens is a professor of history at Northeastern University. He is currently doing research on Japanese cultural history, Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide.

Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus.

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