Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870-1940

by Richard J. Smethurst

Overview

Richard Smethurst shows that the growth of a rural market economy did not impoverish the Japanese farmer. Instead, it led to a general increase in rural prosperity.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

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ISBN-13:	9780691610771
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #66
Pages:	486
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.90(h) x 1.00(d)

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Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870 â" 1940

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By Richard J. Smethurst

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05468-1

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CHAPTER 1

Agricultural Growth in Modern Japan

The Japanese countryside underwent a striking transformation between the formation of a modern government in 1868 and the outbreak of World War II. The governmental policies which created schools, universities, banks, constituent assemblies, corporations, factories, technical centers, new opportunities for social and economic mobility and a host of other accoutrements of the modern industrial society had their impact on the village as well. Villagers' levels of living, education, literacy, cosmopolitanism, and farming technology improved, and their attitudes about the degree to which they could control their own environments and livelihoods matured remarkably. By the decades between the two world wars, rural Japanese, in this modern milieu, had metamorphosed from peasants into farmers.

The basic evidence which demonstrates this development is data on the growth of agricultural production presented in Table 1-1. Value added per farm worker in current prices increased by nine and one-half times, a growth rate of 4.2 percent per year between 1879-1880 and the last prewar decade; real productivity per worker grew by three times, at an average rate of 2 percent per year. The enlargement of Japan's farm production and productivity in a half century was as great or greater than that in France, Sweden, Russia, Austria, Belgium, England, Italy, Switzerland, and Germany in comparable stages of industrial development.

What is especially noteworthy about this modern enlargement in productivity is that it came after several centuries of steady agricultural development. Even if one takes issue, as many economic historians of Japanese agriculture do, with James Nakamura's view that the Tokugawa growth was so great that Japan's rice output per hectare in 1878-1882, produced using manure and grass as fertilizer, far exceeded Korea's and Taiwan's in 1960-1961, produced using chemical fertilizers, there are good grounds to reject the idea of pre-modern stagnation. Kozo Yamamura and Susan Hanley calculate that rice production, including that brought about through the cultivation of newly reclaimed fields, expanded by at least one-quarter of a percent per year between 1645 and 1873. They and other writers have traced the expansion of the cultivation of cash crops, either food to be sold in castle towns or raw materials to be fabricated in the developing rural and semi-urban "factories." These "proto-industries," moreover, provided secondary job opportunities for farmers. The rapid growth in the 1870-1940 period, therefore, should not be viewed as a new trend, but as the broadening and deepening with systematic government encouragement of a process already begun several centuries earlier.

The legacy of Tokugawa farming to modern agricultural growth was not only one of expanding production. When the countryside entered the modern era, many of its farmers already cultivated crops for commercial markets, paid taxes, and, in some regions, rents set at fixed amounts (rather than percentages of yields), which often motivated cultivators to increase production since they themselves could sell the entire surplus, had an interest in technical innovation, and received pragmatic educations. And, more important, large numbers of rural Japanese, in spite of a trend toward economic polarization between rich and poor in the Tokugawa era, were ambitious; farmers were willing to work long hours and to experiment with new crops and techniques because they aspired to upward social mobility. What led to the greater increases in productivity and the more extensive social change after 1868 was that Japan, instead of being ruled by several hundred semi-autonomous feudal domains with varying commitments to development, had a single government dedicated to making the nation strong and rich, a policy which helped make the countryside richer as well.

The Meiji Reforms and Agricultural Development

The Meiji government, as is widely recognized, introduced a variety of programs which speeded economic growth and social change in rural Japan. It abolished seigneurial rule and the ruling warrior class's legal preeminence; established military conscription, universal compulsory education, systematic local and national government, a legal framework for modern forms of economic organization, banking and financial institutions, a new tax system, and a host of other new organs of society; and encouraged technical and entrepreneurial activities which stimulated economic growth. But some of these reforms touched rural Japan more than others and must be treated at greater length.

The government's abrogation of feudal privilege and landownership ended the time-honored class structure which gave warriors legal precedence over peasants, artisans, and merchants, and ultimate control of land and its productive wealth. From the 1870s on, farmers had the same legal rights as former samurai; they could bring suit in the same courts, even against ex-warriors, attend the same schools, serve in the same army, and perform equally as many of the same tasks as their education and financial resources allowed.

Farmers also gained the freedom to own and alienate land. Under seigneurial rule, the various feudal lords owned all their domain's agricultural land and collected taxes on it. During the Tokugawa era, a kind of sub-ruling-class landownership evolved in which some well-to-do peasants gained "holdership" of land by foreclosing on defaulted loans to poorer peasants who had borrowed money, using their landholdings as security, or by creating new fields out of wasteland. However, in legal theory always, and in practice occasionally, peasants were forbidden to own this land. Thus, although the rich peasant/landholder rented his land to the poor peasant/tenant, he did so only with the lord's indulgence. This kind of unstable situation, in which the rulers could arbitrarily appropriate a peasant's landed wealth, made rational economic planning by farm households difficult. The new government changed all of this. It abolished seigneurial control of land, recognized the customary peasant holder as the rightful owner, gave him the authority to sell his land (and to buy more), and thus established the basis for the modern landlord system under which both landlords and tenants were normally local farmers. This reform not only recognized legally the village's different levels of landownership, which as Ronald Dore points out, encouraged innovation, but also gave the "new" owner, who now need not fear unreasonable confiscation of his land, a greater stake in expanding his yields and income. Although technological innovation to increase production had taken place under the Tokugawa, it became a way of life, almost a religion, in the Meiji era, and this was partly because farmers now had greater security of landownership.

Having given peasants clear title to what had formerly been the lord's land, to exploit its productive wealth the new national leaders created a taxation system. The Meiji regime had heavy initial obligations: the capitalizing of factories, the importation of technology, the payment of stipends and bond interest to ex-samurai, the modernizing of the military, the suppression of rebellion, and the creation of schools, but only one sure source of revenue, agricultural land. In the 1870s, when the new mode of taxation was established, about 80 percent of Japan's work force farmed. It is no wonder then that, in 1878-1882, 77 percent of Japan's tax revenues came from direct taxes on the agricultural sector.

Under feudal rule, taxes on agricultural production often had been capriciously and inefficiently assessed and collected. Peasants faced periodic fluctuations in their taxes. The lord's need for revenues could lead to arbitrary increases in the tax burden; his and his officials' haphazardness could lead to assessments and rates increasing more slowly than production. In the 1860s, taxes varied greatly from domain to domain; they were as high as 40 percent of yields in some fiefs, as low as 15 percent of yields in others.

Officials of the new regime, committed as they were to a program of modernization, decided that a rational, orderly tax system was necessary and set out to create one. In 1873, the government began to calculate the value of all of the agricultural land in Japan and set an annual tax of 4 percent of the assessment — 3 percent for national and 1 percent for local taxes — to be paid in currency. The Meiji government, which had muddled along, depending on the preexisting feudal arrangement for the first five or six years of its existence, found that by the late 1870s it had created the basis for a steady source of income.

One of the clichés of the historical literature on modern Japan is that the Meiji leaders industrialized and modernized their nation at the expense of the peasantry. The new land tax, according to this view, was a harsh burden for rural Japanese to bear, and their prosperity was sacrificed to pay the costs of modern weapons, machines, and institutions. One cannot deny that farmers paid most of the nation's taxes until the mid-1890s — this was natural enough since farmers were most of the Japanese people — but the available evidence does not indicate that the tax burden on Japanese farmers was as high as in the pre-1868 feudal era or that they were unfairly exploited (i.e., more harshly than other segments of the population).

To begin with, Kozo Yamamura has shown in his study of the Meiji land tax that this reform, which brought fairly uniform taxes ranging from 24.06 percent of yields in Nagano to 28.97 percent of yields in Yamanashi and Yamaguchi, led to tax reductions of 10 percent or more from feudal levels in 14 of 39 prefectures, but increases of 10 percent or more in only 6. Second, Sidney Crawcour estimates that the value of late Tokugawa feudal revenues, computed in yen on the basis of 1878-1880 rice prices, was 103 million yen per year. Kazushi Ohkawa and Miyohei Shinohara calculate that the Meiji government's annual national and local tax revenues in 1878-1880, both agricultural and non-agricultural combined, were 71.4 million yen. These figures indicate a decrease in the annual tax burden of 30.7 percent under the new regime from Tokugawa times. When we subtract the 25 percent land tax reduction of 1877, we still find that the Meiji government even in the mid-1870s had lowered agricultural taxes by 5-6 percent at the very least.

Third, even if we were to accept Ouchi Tsutomu's view that the Meiji peasants shouldered on the average the same tax burdens as they had under the old regime, relief was on its way. In January 1877, even before the Meiji tax system was in operation everywhere, officials lowered the national and local tax rates from 3 percent and 1 percent to 2.5 percent and 0.5 percent of the assessed value of farm land. Ouchi, who emphasizes the oppressiveness of a modern tax system which was to him as heavy as the feudal one, overlooks what seems a logical conclusion to draw from this step. It represented a reduction of 25 percent both from the 4 percent Meiji and from the feudal tax. Fourth, agricultural taxes as a percentage of the farm household's agricultural income continued to fall steadily throughout the 1877 to World War II era. In 1883-1887, farmers paid in direct taxes on agriculture 20.2 percent of their value of production; by the turn of the century they paid only 11.2 percent, and by 1933-1937, only 7.1 percent.

Finally, the percentage of total government tax revenues paid in direct taxes by the agricultural sector fell much more rapidly than did the percentage of the work force that farmed. In 1878-1882, 77.4 percent of the nation's workers were farmers, and they provided 77.1 percent of its tax revenues; by the turn of the century, 67.2 percent of the work force paid 41.6 percent of the taxes; and by World War I, 58.7 percent paid only 25.3 percent of the taxes. Within only a few years of the establishment of the new tax system, farmers paid less, not more, than their share of taxes.

But the significance of the government's new method of assessing and collecting taxes was not only that it gradually eased the tax burden on rural Japanese. Because landowners paid their taxes in money, not in produce as in the feudal era, the inauguration of the tax system led to a more rapid intrusion of commerce into the countryside. Landowning farmers were compelled to market some of their crops to pay taxes to a single, central government's national tax system. This led to the integration of local markets, to the gradual establishment of interregional crop prices, and to the allocation of resources nationwide, which in turn allowed farmers to gauge their returns more accurately and thus encouraged them to invest time and money in new cultivating and managerial techniques. Although, as we shall see, the rapid expansion of commercial farming under the impetus of the new tax plan threatened some farmers' livelihoods in the short run, on balance it benefited farmers more than it hurt them because it provided the opportunity for the safe and orderly accumulation of profits.

The government, having established the framework within which farmers could enlarge their profits and capital if they could increase their crop yields, set up organs to help tillers improve their cultivating techniques and thus increase these yields. As we shall see in detail in Chapter Three, which treats the development of sericultural technology in Yamanashi Prefecture in the modern era, landlords, owner farmers, prefectural officials, industrial entrepreneurs, and even tenant farmers all joined in this effort. The government established research stations to develop new seed strains and information networks to facilitate the transfer of technical knowledge from more to less advanced regions; in fact, it has been said that a primary cause of increases in agricultural productivity during the Meiji era was the diffusion nationwide of the regional "best practices" during the late Tokugawa years. Well-to-do farmers, with government encouragement, undertook costly and often risky experiments with new crops, seed types, and techniques. Entrepreneurs sold traditional organic fertilizers in larger and larger quantities in the nineteenth century, and then modern industry developed and marketed inorganic, chemical ones in the twentieth. And owner tenant, tenant owner, and tenant farmers, at first under landlord compulsion, and later as they became more literate and independent, of their own accord made efforts to improve techniques, yields, and profits.

Before the end of the Meiji era, virtually all rice growers used new seed varieties, transplanted rice by regular spacing, tested seed rice grains for fertility by floating them in saltwater solution, improved the timing of the rice-growing process to avoid green grains by harvesting early or cracked grains by harvesting late, spread fish and seed meal and soy bean cake fertilizers in increasing amounts, and used improved tools like new plow types and the rotary weeder. In the twentieth century, farmers, again with governmental help and encouragement, used increasingly the products of modern science and industry: seed hybrids developed in the laboratory and superphosphate of lime and ammonium sulphate fertilizers, insecticides, fungicides, light traps for rice stem borers, chloropicrin for fumigation, and power threshers and hullers produced in the factory. These improvements, many simply tinkering with traditional techniques, together with land reclamation, increased double cropping, land and irrigation improvements, and the cultivation of new crops, which the government also encouraged, led to the rapid enlargement of real value of production per farm worker introduced in Table 1-1.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Agricultural Development and Tenancy Disputes in Japan, 1870 â" 1940 by Richard J. Smethurst. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• TABLE OF CONTENTS, pg. vii
• PREFACE, pg. ix
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 1
• CHAPTER 1. Agricultural Growth in Modern Japan, pg. 43
• CHAPTER 2. The Commercialization of Agriculture in Yamanashi, pg. 105
• CHAPTER 3. Sericultural Technology in Yamanashi, 1870-1940, pg. 184
• CHAPTER 4. Landlord-Tenant Relations in Ōkamada Village, pg. 232
• CHAPTER 5. Tenant Disputes in Japan, 1917-1941, pg. 316
• CHAPTER 6. Tenant Disputes in the Kōfu Basin, pg. 358
• CODA, pg. 431
• APPENDIX, pg. 435
• BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 437
• INDEX, pg. 451