[in Japanese]

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[in Japanese]

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In 1870 Japan, as a backward nation, realized the necessity of modern industialization, and it had been promoted in a comparatively short time, from that time to the Pacific War, chiefly through the emigration of agricultural population. But in comparison with the funds for machinery imported late, proportion of the funds necessaly for labor employment was lower, and besides Japan had no world-wide overseas market. Therefore the accumulation of fund had been rather slow and dull. The progress of industrialization in Japan, therefore, was not so influential as to destroy the household industry and to give some revolution to the family-size agricultural system. Because of the overpopulation, which was naturally resulted from this phenomenon, in family economics of a small scale in Japanese agricultur, industrialization had been carried on by drawing out industrial labor of low wages easily at any time, and also by sending back the unemployed population to it. As a result of the defeat in the Pacific War, agricultural communities of Japan had to receive the repatriated population and are now being toubled with unprecedented overpopulation. Owing to the fact that the industrialization in Japan is making slow progress, emigration from agriculture to industry is nowadays under very inactive condition.

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The causes of the overpopulation lies in farms at present in Japan where the industrialization is slow in its progress and where the agricultural tendency is strong as the majority of the nation are managing the small-sized farming with their family labor. This is because the family labor itself in farm does not recognize its characteristic element of unconsciously overlaboring itself, and therefore the overpopulation in rural districts has strongly revealed its nature of "invisible overpopulation". Such overpopulation focused in rural communities is mainly due to low productivity so that still there will be an overpopulation problem even with the efforts for decreasing the population, unless the products should be increased. Therefore, it is quite natural that the living-standard will be low as far as such overpopulation is found in rural districts. The agricultural population of farming labor that keeps the lower living standard than the average may be called the overpopulation. Therefore, as far as overpopulation rural communities does not notice surplus, there will be no other way than to examine it through the data with some measure or scale reliable enough to be objective. However, this is not an easy problem at present. At this point, it may be said that the overpopulation which we are able to recognize with our common sense has challenged to us to be more scientific in solving this problem.

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