Abstract
Contemporary “Family Management Agreement” has purposes to establish the personal position in a rural family, especially women’s status, and to modernize farm management. Rules related to job conditions, farming and life planning, succession of management, life agreement and so on need to be observed by all family members, based on consensus among them. Such Family Management Agreement is important for recent agricultural policies in Japan.
In this paper, the following topics are analyzed, based on the case studies in Nakano in Nagano prefecture and Kamoto in Kumamoto prefecture.
1) We examine the effects of Family Management Agreement in terms of establishing personal position and modernizing farm management.
2) We also analyze the mechanism of generating such effects.
Principal findings from these case studies can be summarized as follows.
1) Family Management Agreement accompanies various effects, such as, for example, improvement of job conditions, women’s participation in farm management, enhancement of women’s motivation, and change of consciousness about farm management. Those effects have contributed to improving the personal position and modernizing farm management.
2)One of the most important factors to generate such effects are found out to be the communication within the family during the initial stage of agreement.
