Peasantry Movement and the Fall of Landlord Ownersihip

Abstract

One of the deficiencies in the study of the Kosaku Sogi (the Japanese peasantry movement) is that the researchers have never tried to clarify the following question ; Under what social and economic backgrounds did the Kosaku Sogi calm down ? Economic as well as social factors should both have been included as two of the crucial determinants in explaining the deterioration of the Kosaku Sogi. If these very important points were overlooked, the conclusion would be somewhat distorted. The problem could not be depicted clearly either. This kind of deficiency is due to the misleading awareness of problematics by the previous researchers. They have over-emphasised, or mis-emphasised the importance of the question : Why does the Kosaku Sogi occur ? But they seldom inquired into how the relationship between landlords and peasants was changed after the Kosaku Sogi. Neither did they try to explain the deterioration of the Kosaku Sogi. On the contrary, the aim of this paper is to try to find out the answers to the latter questions rather than to the former one. By doing this, we believe, we can get at the real historical significance of the Kosaku Sogi as clarify the relationship between the Kosaku Sogi and its contemporary government policies. In this case, the crucial point is that the limitation of the Kosaku Sogi was influenced by the inherent characteristics of the Capitalism in Japan. That is, firstly, before The Second World War, the autonomy of the peasants from their village communities was still very weak. Accordingly, the relationship between the landlords and the peasants turned out to be indirect and mechanical forms which resulted from the reorganization (co-operation relation) of their relationships. On this basis the deterioration of the Kosaku Sogi became evident. Secondly, the levels of wage-increases demanded by the peasants during the Kosaku Sogi were limited by the level of the agro-daily-workers' wages in the labour markets of the neighbouring villages. The peasantry economy during the Taisho-Showa transitional period developed drastically, and the same time, the Kosaku Sogi lost its own raison d'etre alongside with this economic development. This paper concludes that through the Kosaku Sogi, the previously conflicting relationship between landlords and peasants entered into a new relationship of peace and co-existence by forming a "co-operational system" between them.