Abstract
The Japanese rural community may be divided into the Tohoku-type and the Kinki-type on the basis of the land ownership. In Tohoku-type, “the semi-serfdom landlord system permanently employing serf-like tenants.” The Kinki-type created “the parasitic usurious landlord system based on the semi-serf rent.” We can grasp the fundamental structure of the rural community by the understanding of the inter-determined relation between the types of land ownership and the forms of farming developed on it. The concrete form of the village institution and the farmers' conciousness in rural areas are defined by the material base of the rural community.
This essay analysed the concrete structure of these facts in the Tohuku-typed zone based on research in a rural community in Hiroshima Prefecture (Togochi Town in Yamagata County), close to the Chugoku mountains. By the analysis of the agricultural production relationships of such area, we can clearly indicate the fact that “kinship organization” and “Nago-system” is due to the material basis resulting from a combination of the Tohoku-type of land ownership and the form of farming. Moreover we can observe that after the land reform the landlord system is reemerging through the agency of forest ownership.
Semi-proletarian farmers in these areas are constrained by the semi-feudal agricultural production relationship which is an all-embracing economic relation including agriculture and forestery. They seek supplementary employment in forest work, and are under the intensive contradictions of the capital domination supported by the landlord system. We have observed what lies at the basis of the contemporary crisis in the rural community and have produced materials which enable us to give a judicious evaluation of the late “agricultural land reform”.
