Tasks of Japanese Rural Sociology in the Present Age
1975 Volume 25 Issue 4 Pages 69-85,201
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1975 Volume 25 Issue 4 Pages 69-85,201
After the World War II, especially since 1960, as the agricultural policies of Japan's monopolistic capitalism have made the maintenance of Japanese agriculture which is constructed by the extremely small farming difficult, rural society of this country changed so largely as to be called “Collapse of Mura (village community)”.
The Japanese village community has been said to be autonomous and self-sufficient and has had two functions, one of which is to maintain community life itself and the other to complement the local administration in the community. But the disintegration of the village community makes it impossible to perform these functions so that, one the one hand, government tries to reorganize rural people into a new “Community” and expects it to continue functioning as the lowest unit in the net-work of local administration.
On the other hand, the autonomous nature of the village community has to be reconsidered in relation to the present situation of rural disorganization. Some sociologists take that specific social system of the community which is adaptive to but not fully determined by the government policy for the community “autonomy”. But such an “autonomy” should be regarded as a negative one, and especially in the cource of rising of the citizen movement, it must be defined as a positive one, i.e. the autonomy which is established consciously against the agriculture destruction policy of the monopolistic capitalism. How can we find such an autonomy in our rural society ? And what is the tasks of today's rural sociology ?
I want to present three tasks as follows :
(1) To study the present situation and trend of cooperative groups for agricultural production.
(2) To investigate the increasing interrelations of the farmers to the nonfarming people in the community on the basis of enlarging socialization of the community life.
(3) The research field of rural sociology has also to be enlarged in accordance with the development of local solidarity of laborers and farmers to build up their own autonomy. This enlargement of the research field implies the necessity of the interdisciplinary studies of the local community and rural sociologists ought to take part in them.
