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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.
"The Mayor of Aihara brings to life in a concrete and accessible way key developments and processes affecting the Japanese countryside in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that a reader might encounter in general terms in a textbook on modern Japanese history. This work provides an unusually intimate and textured view of Japanese farmers and their changing world over an extended period of time, carefully setting the narrative in the context of larger trends in the social, political, and economic history of modern Japan. The result is a rich harvest of information on multiple dimensions of rural life from the perspective of an elite villager."—Steven J. Ericson, Dartmouth College
This comprehensive work surveys the historical events and developments in Japan's polity, economy, society and culture.
Among the challenges facing Japan in its quest to match the modern states of the Western world, none was more crucial than the development of agriculture. With a state focused more on the emblematic goals of mechanization, urbanization, and a modern military, it fell upon local elites in villages across the country to bring rice production into the modern era. Middlemen of Modernity explores these elites and their actions in a region in northeastern Japan, presenting a view of the transformation of Japanese agriculture from the late nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Meiji-era agricultural policy called for village elites to mobilize their wealth and local reputations to introd...
This study of Japan’s transformation by the economic crises of the 1930s focuses on efforts to overcome the effects of the Great Depression in rural areas, particularly the activities of local activists and policymakers in Tokyo. The reactions of inhabitants of rural areas to the depression shed new light on how average Japanese responded to the problems of modernization and how they re-created the countryside.
This book chronicles Japan’s rice farmers who live in mainly rural areas in the west and south of Japan through original interviews conducted in Japanese. It argues that current agricultural policy as well as the tightening relationship between the US and Japan is a death sentence for a traditional lifestyle that is vital to Japan’s notion of national identity. The project covers recent agricultural policies, including the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and its potential consequences on Japan’s food sovereignty and documents the effect of these policies on rice farmers. This volume is ideal for those interested in Japan’s agricultural policies and rural and traditional Japanese lifestyle.