1st Edition

Farmers and Village Life in Japan

Edited By Yoshiaki Nishida, Ann Waswo Copyright 2003
    312 Pages
    by Routledge

    312 Pages
    by Routledge

    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.

    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?

    Biography

    Ann Waswo is Lecturer in Modern Japanese History at the University of Oxford, a member of the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies and a fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford.
    Professor Nishida Yoshiaki is Emeritus Professor, University of Tokyo and Professor in the Faculty of Economics, Kanazawa University, Japan.

    'This volume provides a useful histoircal survey of Japanese argriculture and farm communities in the twentieth century.' - The Journal of Asian Studies