A Trend of Japanese Peasant Farms in Recent Years

Abstract

When classified according to the size of farms, Japanese peasants showed before World War II a tendency that the middle class cultivating 1 to 2 hectares of land were steadily increasing in number, and that those cultivating less acreage and those doing more were both decreasing constantly, while the total number of farms was increasing slightly. Such middle class peasants were, under the level of agricultural technology and the rural living conditions of those days, typical“small peasants”who managed their farms only by family labor and, at the same time, could support ordinary life out of the income from their own farms. The tendency of such peasants to constant increase has been called in general“a tendency to standardization of small peasants”.
After World War II, especially after the 1950's when Japanese economy was back to its normal state, the peasants have shown an entirely different tendency till today. While the total number has been decreasing fairly rapidly, the number of relatively large scale managements has been consistently increasing and that of small or petty ones decreasing. Moreover, the diverging point of both groups, or the scale of the axis management has become larger. It is 2.5ha. during these ten years, and larger managements are increasing in number, while smaller ones decreasing. The rate of increase becomes higher as the scale becomes larger.
There are various opinions among scholars as to the implication of such resolution of farm managements into two groups. Some think this indicates the development of capitalism in Japanese agriculture, where the capitalistic managements are growing in the upper group, whereas most peasants in the lower group becoming wage laborers. However, it is obvious on analysis that most managements of the upper group are those of“small peasants”who depend only upon family labor. On the other hand, peasants of the lower group have always side jobs, and depend mainly on the offfarm income.
This change has been brought about by the two facts: first, the scale managed by family labor is greatly enlarged compared with prewar level as a result of higher labor productivity realized by agricultural mechanization, and secondly, peasants must enlarge the scale of management to support their family budgets only with farm income, because the level of consumption has risen markedly. In this sense, the tendency might properly be called“standardization of large-sized small peasants”, and yet it is the tendency to“standardization of small peasants”only in a different form.
This large-sized small peasants, whose proportion is very small among the total, supply nearly 70% of the whole agricultural products brought to market today. The central theme of agricultural policy must be to develop these managements steadily and smoothly.