Aging of the rice farming population and a decrease in the number of persons engaged in rice farming are serious issues in Japan. This has contributed to a succession problem in rice farms, and is a pressing societal concern. In particular, succession of large-scale rice farms is a particular problem because a failure to succeed large-scale rice farms can lead to large-scale abandonment of cultivated land, with a considerable impact on local communities.
On the other hand, it is thought that recruiting an employee to be the successor by changing the farm into a corporate entity will help to alleviate this issue, as well as extend the range for selecting a corporate successor. However, there is no guarantee that an employee will smoothly succeed as head of the corporation if appropriate management actions for succession are not taken. In Japanese rice farming, there are very few cases where an employee who is not from the founding family becomes the head of the corporation. In current succession studies of Japanese rice farming, the situation where an employee not from the founding family smoothly succeeds to lead the company has not been adequately clarified.
Therefore, this study aims to clarify the process of succession in a rice farming company by an employee who is not from the founding family. In this study, I use a case study method to analyze ROKUSEI Ltd., which is based in Hakusan City in Ishikawa Prefecture. This is a large-scale rice farming company that has a yearly sales turnover of around 600 million yen, and manages a total rice farming area of 113 hectares. This company was taken over in 2007 by three employees who were not founding family members. Furthermore, the successors of this company were elected on the basis of management ability. Therefore, by analyzing the succession process, we will be able to obtain a valuable insight about the expertise required of an employee for leading a rice-farming company.
In this case study, I analyzed five key points about this company. First, I comprehensively clarified the succession process of this company over the course of 18 years, and then divided the succession process into the following six stages:
Stage 1: Planning the future image of the company
Stage 2: Planning the means of succession
Stage 3: Organizing the employees’ recruitment
Stage 4: The selection and training of employees
Stage 5: The selection and training of successors
Stage 6: Transfer of the decision-making role and company ownership to the successors
Second, I clarified the management actions required in order to expedite the company founder’s succession process. Third, I clarified this company’s three successors’ profiles by means of personal interviews, wherein it was learned that a common denominator was their shared value of a sense of work fulfillment. Fourth, I considered the reasons why they had been chosen to succeed the company. Fifth, I studied the company’s future business plan and uncovered a remarkable aspect.
In future studies, I will further investigate the success or failure of such succession from a management perspective, as well as this company’s management performance.

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This paper examines the efficiency and welfare impacts of landholdings in rural Vietnam, including a consideration of regional differences between the North and South Vietnam. We use panel data from field surveys that were carried out from 1997 to 2007 in Ninh Binh province, which is located in the Red River Delta, and An Giang province, which is located in the Mekong Delta.
We found that there are salient differences in terms of landholdings between the surveyed areas. The land distribution is more equitable and farm size has been declining over time more sin the North. In addition, in the North, the change of landholdings is driven by non-market factors such as inheritance and expropriation by the government. On the other hand, high inequality in landholdings and rising landlessness that is accelerated through market transactions are outstanding features in the South. The land distribution also seems to be polarized, with a limited amount of middle size class of land ownership.
Next, we carried out a micro-econometric analysis to clarify whether the agricultural land in the surveyed areas are allocated efficiently or not. Estimation results show that the land distribution is mainly concentrated around a group of farmers that have achieved the highest land productivity. Thus the distribution of landholdings in both surveyed areas can be interpreted to be efficient, although the agrarian structures are quite different between the two surveyed areas.
Finally, we investigated the welfare impacts of these landholdings on sample households. In the North, since the change of landholdings have been affected less by the structure of agricultural production than by social or cultural factors like inheritance and governmental expropriation, the downsizing of farm size is inevitable. The small land endowment is contributing to a decline in agricultural income and also is leading to a diversification to non-agricultural income sources, even when farmers can realize high land productivity. This implies that an efficient land allocation doesn’t necessarily mean that agricultural activity will have a crucial role as a livelihood strategy in the North.
Conversely, in the South, our results show that middle-class households who mainly accomplish high productivity and are gradually accumulating land through the land market earn more agricultural income than other farm size classes. Households who sell their land, however, might consist of two types. One types supplies their land voluntarily to be engaged in non-agricultural activities, while the other is forced to sell land to cope with the exogenous shocks on household income. Therefore, the rise of marginal and/or landless farmers produced by market transactions appears to have a mixed implication for welfare impacts in the South.

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