抄録
The aim of this paper is to reinterpret the Japanese agriculture based on a reconsideration of the land tenure system and the family system in Japan.
As to the land tenure system, the point is that rice farming which is the most important part of Japanese agriculture has many dividings and segments for irrigation. This character of rice farming has played the important role to define borders of holdings and to divide holdings. The small holdings by peasants as the typical feature of the Japanese land tenure system has historically been brought by this character of rice farming. On the other hand, the family system in Japanese rural area is still characterized as the stem family with three generations. The farm assets such as farmland are generally inherited by only the first son without dividing to other brothers and sisters. This system had developed in connection with ‘Ie’ system which was not a private unit, but a public unit under Tokugawa era. Therefore, to Japanese families, to last the ‘Ie’ was the first priority under the Tokugawa era, and this value has been kept by rural families until nowadays.
However, the combination of the land tenure system characterized as small holdings and the stem family system with three generations generated the hard contradiction in the Japanese agriculture. Namely, each holdings farm households had were too small to support relatively many family members of three generations. This contradiction resulted in two typical features of the Japanese agriculture: extensive pluriactivity of farm households and inferiority of tenant vis-a-vis landowners.
