Abstract
In modern society, the acceptance of migrant workers occurs alongside mass movements of people across the world. The nature of the paths migrant workers take represents the transformation of agriculture, communities, and nations.
However, in Japan, the expansion in size of the average farm together with the acceptance of migrant workers has not been so rapid. From the beginning of the Meiji Restoration, the hiring of foreign people, except for some professional jobs, was strictly prohibited. The one exception applied to people from the areas that Japan occupied at that time. Although the numbers were small, they were important. Previous studies have made clear that there was an increase in the number of agricultural workers in 1920s. It needs to be clarified how each farm household employed its migrant workers.
For this purpose, I have conducted a case-study from the data of the farm household survey（農家経済調査簿）in inter-war Japan. This study focuses, in particular, on the nature of the labor involved, workers’ages, their wages, and their working hours, and Japanese farm management.
In this paper, we show a large firm in Nara Prefecture that hired some agricultural workers as indentured servants（in Japanese, Nenko【年雇】）. In spite of the name‘indentured servants’, in practice, these people worked as day laborers. The Korean workers lived as more modern subjects than did traditional Japanese indentured servants in Japan’s rural villages.
This is not a complete survey of Korean agricultural workers in Japan; it only discusses some kinds of farming households, but it makes it possible for us to think about diversity in agricultural history and to revise the myth of the exclusionary character of the Japanese village and its non-linear modernity.
