A GEOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF SPECIAL TENANCY SYSTEM IN IWAMI HIGHLAND, SHIMANE PREFECTURE

Abstract

Iwami Highland occupying a north west part of Chugoku province and the face of this highland undulating at 200-400 metres high from the sea level. The face being eroded by many insequent valleys which include many eroded small basins. The bottom of these basins and valleys are cultivated for rice field, which requires good deal of water. Befor 1947, the year of agrarian reform in Japan, there has been distributed a special tenancy sysin this region and that system was one of principal characters in rural communities of Iwami Highland. In this system, a tenant engages only one landlord and rents not only a set of farmland including woodland and grassland but also rents living house, farming implements, domestic animals and seeds etc. So called agricultural capitals. Then he must be subordinated to the landlord to offer his labour services. The tenant lands are combined into a set of farm which is concentrated with premise. This farmland arrangement type had appeared in Middle Age history of Japan as"Myoden", a self-sustenance agricultural system. The special tenancy"Kabu-kosaku", spreads at the end. of Tokugawa Shogunate, then this old type of agricultural life is not a remnant of the Middle Age, but a new product of landlord system in latter days. The author guessed that this one set farmland system in tenancy must be affected by land form itself, because the scale of the set fixed to the scale of those insequent valleys on the Highland. Then he sets the land form and historical processes of farm land against to these factors of other regions which have no such special tenancy system. The conclusion of his study is as next: the main reasonable factors are the scale and placement of these insequent relief which have been favourable for the combination of farm lands, and the other factor is the plentiful water supply in valley bottom to irrigate the rice fields of self- supporting peasants who depend on the rice harvest as farm rent. Of course, these conditions are not the functional causality which once occured this tenancy system, but the reasons which keed up that system. to the last.