Capital Levy and the Dissolution of Landlordism

Abstract

Capital Levy, or the property tax, which was levied as a temporary tax for just one time on individuals for the purpose of securing the state income and of redistributing the wealth among national strata, was started in February 1947. The purpose of this paper is first, to clarify the actual conditions of the taxation of Capital Levy on parasitic landlords. Second, to describe the role of Capital Levy in the process of the dissolution of landlordism or in the extinction of landlord class, in connection with land reform. And, third, to pinpoint the peculiar significance of the state or the public finance in the conversion of class composition from prewar to postwar period. The paper will give concrete instances to bolster the findings of this research. The analysis here is focused on three big landlords; the Ichijima family, a thousand cho landlord in Niigata prefecture, whose management was overwhelmingly based on the vast lands in its possession. The Nezu family, the second biggest landlord in Yamanashi prefecture, which shifted to possession of securities rather than relying on its possession of the lands and stuck fast to the profits in the capital market, while gradually reducing the scale of its lands. And the Shirose family, a thousand cho landlord in Niigata prefecture, which had both the two managerial characteristics mentioned above and, therefore, it can be said that it had a middle character between the former two families. My conclusion is therefore that, all of these families did not succeed in lightening the burden of Capital Levy by means of taking advantage of the rising inflation, and thus could not help falling from their status as men of property. It means that they lost their status as the class of investers or the men living on the interest of their securities because of the Capital Levy. All this occurred while they were losing their status as landowners because of the progress of land reform. The taxation of Capital Levy after the war was therefore instrumental in the dissolution of the mechanism of "the conversion of the rent into the capital". The dissolution of the mechanism as mentioned above together with land reform thus contributed to the destruction of the semifeudalistic landlordism, the structural link which had been indispensable to Japanese Capitalism.