The historical basis of the agricultural land reform in Japan: Result of the wartime farmland policy

Noda, K.

The historical basis of the agricultural land reform in Japan: Result of the wartime farmland policy

2005

Noda, K.(Kyoto Univ. (Japan))

The Agricultural Land Reform was the only postwar reform law that the Japanese government wrote before commanded by the GHQ. This is a study on the historical conditions that enabled the Japanese government to write the reform law. The results are summarized as follows. The Landowner-Farmer Establishment Policy and Farm Rent Reform Policy (a reform of rent to be paid by money, not by agricultural products) were the most important agricultural land policies which prepared the basis for the Agricultural Land Reform after World War II. The ideas of these policies date from the Taisho era, though they changed their roles greatly during the wartime period. The Landowner-Farmer Establishment Policy was initially introduced as a measure to deal with tenancy disputes, however it turned into a policy to foster fulltime family landowner-farmers. The scale of this program also expanded gradually, and its third program, which began in 1943, reached approximately the same scale as the postwar First Agricultural Land Reform. The Farm Rent Reform was considered to be a dangerous proposal associated with land nationalization, as it was initially advocated by leaders of tenant disputes, some of whom were socialists. It later was transformed into an effective policy to modernize tenant farming management, due to an increasing demand for food production. By the end of the wartime period, the Government, the Diet and Nogyo-kai (the representative agricultural association in wartime Japan) had already agreed to terminate the rights of the landowners, absent landowners and large scale landowners in particular. When Japan was defeated in the war, the reform's remaining problem was what reforms should be applied to the resident landowners.

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