Abstract
This study analyses the historical background of the amendment of the Farmland Consolidation Act in Japan. Just in ten years following the establishment of the act, the principal objective of the act had been changed from the one to advance farmland adjustment projects to the one to drive irrigation and drainage projects. Referring to the fundamental role of agriculture to produce food, the study reveals the following points by considering the technical constraints and resource limitations in the Meiji era. Agricultural technology had not developed sufficiently to bring in mechanization, which would have enabled adjustment projects to amalgamate fragmented farmland and enlarge small-scale farming plots. The inefficient, feudal land-use system could not be modernized due to the seasonal labour intensity of paddy cultivation, to which farm households was only capable of supplying limited numbers of labours. Adjustments to the distorted shape of farmland would increase water usage in paddy fields, but the water resource was not developed sufficiently to enable farmland adjustment projects to modernize the feudal irrigation system, which had been developed under conditions of water scarcity. With these technical constraints and limited resources, agricultural output had to be increased without modernising the feudal production system. The Farmland Consolidation Act then shifted its objective, from farmland adjustment work to irrigation and drainage projects that would not affect the collective actions of an agrarian community.
