Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 2 (2009), p. 296

This volume is covers the role of agriculture in the political, economic and social development of Japan from the late Tokugawa period (1603–1868) to the present day. It is divided into seven chronological chapters and has been written by four very prominent Japanese agricultural historians. It is a sad reflection of the waning of agricultural history in Japanese universities that one essay is published posthumously and two of the other three contributors are now emeritus professors. The volume as a whole makes a major contribution to understanding the trajectory of the Japanese economy since 1850 and complements recent work that emphasizes the enormous importance of traditional sectors certainly until the First World War.

The volume begins with a detailed survey by the editor, which summarizes the contributions and sets them into a wider context of patterns of development. The first two essays, by Kozaburo Kato on the distinctive features of Tokugawa agriculture and Keiji Ushiyama on agriculture in the Meiji period (1868–1912), emphasize how much of Japan’s political, economic and social systems were profoundly shaped by feudal agriculture and its self-governing villages, and these first essays restate the importance of agriculture in Japanese political economy. Even in the mid-nineteenth century, 70 per cent of the occupied population was in agriculture and the peculiarities of the Japanese feudal system (with the feudal lords and their samurai warriors separated in the castle towns from the peasant farming community in the self-governing village) had encouraged the growth of a peasant commodity economy in which rice, silk and other agricultural products were exchanged for cash from the lords and samurai. The tensions between traditional and reforming lords and within an increasingly stratified peasant social structure spilled over into the growing crisis of legitimacy in the Tokugawa regime and helped shape the political settlement of 1868. The power of the feudal lords did not endure in the Meiji regime (1868–1912), not least because a land tax was the least problematic source of income for the new state and the feudal domains were abolished and private ownership of land recognized. Agriculture’s role in Meiji Japan was no less important. The imperialist powers forced Japan to open its ports but the Japanese managed to produce enough rice to remain self-sufficient in food, and exported simple manufactures (silk and cotton fabrics) – produced by young female factory labour drawn from the countryside – or agricultural and marine products (tea, rice and camphor). Thus Japan earned a balance of payments surplus to finance imports of machinery from the developed countries while simultaneously increasing the commercialized sector of the economy. The need to expand the supply of rice, other agricultural products and raw materials from the 1890s, as Japan began to urbanize quite rapidly, was an important factor in the emergence of imperialist pressures in this period.

The next two chapters are the work of the late Yuichi Hayashi and cover the period from the First World War to the end of the Second. The First World War gave an important stimulus to Japanese heavy industry and helped create a growing military-industrial complex with a rapidly urbanizing population as rural-urban migration flows increased. However, agriculture remained by far the biggest employer (50 per cent of the occupied population in the 1920s) and tensions over high agricultural rents dominated political debates in the early 1920s. Like every other primary producer, Japanese agriculture suffered during the world slump of 1929–32 and the efforts of the state to cope with rural poverty and agricultural distress formed part of the wider processes of centralized support and organization that marked an increasingly militarized society. Indeed, rural society formed the backbone of the Japanese army and its growing armaments industries from the later 1930s onwards.

The final three chapters deal with the period since 1945 and are all the work of the editor, Shuzo Teruoka. Chapter seven focuses on the land reform, giving tenants the right to buy the land which they had tilled at affordable prices. The US occupying forces insisted upon this measure to promote faster agricultural improvement and, with other measures, to create a more democratic political system. In the era of super-growth, Japanese agriculture made a powerful contribution by increasing output, especially of rice, while freeing labour for industrial and service sector employment. The accelerated rural-urban migration is but one part of this story, as Teruoka points out in chapter eight, in which he emphasizes the increasing tendency of farmers to seek part-time employment in non-agricultural occupations. The other important element in post-war agriculture has been the impact of trade liberalization from the 1960s, which has led to rising food imports and increasing problems in the countryside as the ageing agricultural workforce has been unable to prevent the abandonment of cultivated land.

In sum, this is a major contribution to the English-language literature on Japanese agricultural history. It sets agricultural developments firmly within their wider socio-political and economic contexts and provides an authoritative and convenient study of a sector that has been largely forgotten in the story of Japanese economic growth but which has played a critical role in that development.