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Rural Settlements in Japan as an Industrial Country
Social Sciences Researches in the Globalizing World, 2018
Japan is an example of modernization in a non-western country. The process which transformed the country of the peasants growing rice into an industrial giant was started in 1868 by a handful samurai who decided to establish a powerful and modern country. In a time less than fifty years, Japan performed the greatest economic miracle of the world. This country, which lived closed to exterior effects and strictly attached to its traditions for more than three hundred years, was born again from its ashes after the Second World War excitingly and also changed the economical geography of the world considerably. Today Japan is among the most developed countries worldwide, enjoying a place at or near the peak with respect to all indicators associated with welfare or success. Furthermore, it also plays important role in the rapid change and development in the Pacific region. Japan is the primary country worldwide where industrialization and urbanization have adverse effects on the rural population and agricultural land. While urbanization attracts young population from the rural areas to the cities with negative effect on the work labour, the industrial facilities and housing invade the agricultural land. And the conventional difference between the rural population and the industrialized urban population diminished rapidly. Today each Japan farmer has a TV set, refrigerator and washing machine. In fact, there are primarily two factors which change life style in the rural. Firstly, the government supports the farmers and guarantees to purchase the crops at a price higher than minimum ¾ times the world prices. Furthermore, although the government meets almost half of its food need by way of import, it limits import of agricultural products such as wheat, rice and sugar. On the other hand, despite of political pressures on reduction of the rice prices in the cities and import of food materials from Korea, Taiwan or China mainland, the agricultural revenues are under guaranteed by means of support purchases of the rice by the government. And, secondly, the industrial facilities which seek cheap worker and land commercially invade the rural areas and increase the agricultural revenues. In 1980s, about 90% of the Japanese men living in the farmers worked for these facilities on parttime basis, primarily in the assembly plants. Today more than half of the income of the farming families comes from non-agricultural activities. Fields which are mostly cultivated by the women and, on the weekends, by the men and the close family bonds which the statesmen show as the most important thing for preservation of Japanese culture and values are messengers of spatial changes in the villages. Traditionally, a Japanese family had three children: one for sale of the crops (one girl), one for maintenance of the family (the first boy) and the other as reserve (boy). The people living in he villages were relatives to each other by way of marriage and they worked altogether to take care of and maintain irrigation and drainage systems. Maintenance of the proper harmony and order in the villages was considered as a need and task. However, invasion of the rural areas as well as population growth and modern education and training destroy these conventions. As early as the beginning of 1950s, greater part of the Japans living in the rural areas flowed to the cities in order to take advantage of job opportunities provided by the urban life and to have Access to other facilities. This immigration still continues and ratio of the rural population in the total population increases every year.
Journal of Rural Studies, 2018
Rural places are continually experiencing socio-economic change and the conceptual frameworks of re-deagrarianisation and re-de-peasantisation were devised to explain agrarian transformations in a broad sense. Following empirical studies from other geographical contexts, this paper revisits the concepts of re-de-agrarianisation and re-de-peasantisation through the historical, theoretical, and empirical lens of agrarian and rural change in Japan. After detailing the circumstances of post-WWII agricultural reconstruction and current rural conditions, as well as outlining the development of the field of Japanese agrarian studies and a selection of the endogenous theories within to explain transformations, contemporary examples and a case study are used to provide a rich contextual account of Japan’s experiences of re-agrarianisation and re-peasantisation. We find that economic, social, cultural, geopolitical, and biophysical conditions in Japan have shaped the processes of agrarian change and bring into focus particular uniqueness of endogenous responses to de-agrarianisation and neoliberal agricultural trends. In particular, socio-cultural pressure to cooperate and identify with local community and place allows “peasant-like” elements to persist despite the strong push toward entrepreneurial and corporate farming. Understanding these trajectories of the transformation of Japanese agriculture would then challenge and/or validate the applicability of commonly accepted definitions of de-re agrarianisation and de-repeasantisation.
Nation-Empire: Rural Youth Mobilization Japan, Taiwan, and Korea 1895-1945 Sayaka Chatani By the turn of the twentieth century, "rural youth" came to symbolize the spirit of hard work, masculinity, and patriotism. The village youth associations, the seinendan, as well as a number of other youth training programs, carried that ideal and spread it all over the Japanese empire. This dissertation examines how the movement to create "rural youth" unfolded in different parts of the empire and how young farmers responded to this mobilization. By examining three rural areas in Miyagi (northern Japan), Xinzhu (Taiwan), and South Ch'ungch ǒng (Korea), I argue that the social tensions and local dynamics, such as the divisions between urban and rural, the educated and the uneducated, and the young and the old,