The Development of Agriculture in Chiba Prefecture during the latter Meiji and Taisho Period

Abstract

Chiba prefecture has the 10th largest acreage of arable land and it is said to be average agriculture district. Agricultural disticts in Chiba are composed of these three types (I) rice growing district in paddy field, (II) upland field district, (III) sericulture district. The development in those days was more remarkable in (II) and (III) types than in (I) type. The results of this research are as follows. (1) The large size of holding didn't always mean either the largeness of unit of farm management or the richness of farm household. The size of holdings was in inverse proportion to the income per acre determined by productivity of land, strength of land-ownership and the intensity of cultivation. These facts mean that the 'differenciation of peasantry' didn't appear in Chiba prefecture. (It might request some reconsideration upon the former studies of the 'differenciation of peasantry' in Japan.) (2) The agriculture in upland field has been explained to be self-sufficient. However, it had developed as the commercial farming growing wheat, sweet potatoes, soya beans and peanuts, from the latter period of Meiji, through the expansion of domestic and newly discovered foreign markets. It had not brought about capitalist farmers but large scale peasants. This results can be ascribed to the acute fluctuation of prices and the control of big merchants caused by narrowness and remoteness of the markets of those crops, and the existence of land-ownership. (3) The growth of the sericulture industry in the period of the World War I had brought about intensive agriculture, and small scale peasants had remarkably increased in number during the World War I. They had grown able to be independent only by the war boom of the sericulture industry.