This paper is a review of the book “Toyohara-Mura”, that is a case study in the history of one village in Yamagata Prefecture over two hundred years from the latter half of the 18th century.
　　　An ordinary peasant（a formal member of a feudal village）, archetypally existed with a status that was guaranteed in a set with a fixed holding of agricultural land. In the case of Toyohara-mura（village）,93％ of the land in its territory was owned and cultivated by the villagers themselves by early in the Meiji era （1877）. This suggests that the feudal system of status was still existent in this village at that time.
　　　When they became deeply embroiled in the commodity economy after the Meiji Restoration, the peasants began to buy and sell their land freely. The improvement of agricultural technology increased the yield of rice per hectare, promoted the consolidation of the arable land on scattered plots, and raised the prices of rent. As a result, merchants bought a lot of land, and conversely many owner-farmers were reduced to being tenant farmers （The percentage of tenant land in this village increased to 59％ in 1923.）
　　　The many tenancy troubles that happened in the 1920's lowered the prices of rent. Then several examples of large-scale farming by tenants appeared. In a sense the agricultural land reforms after World War II that distributed the tenant lands to those cultivators were the culmination of this process.
　　　But these agricultural land reforms made the mobility of agricultural land worse. The farmers couldn't lease as much land as they wished. So from the 1960s onwards they starting building various agricultural production organizations as a means to realize large-size farming.
　　　The authors of this book presented a general view of the history in Toyohara-village influenced by two disputes: one about the character of communities and the other about the analysis of agricultural production costs. The former dispute led the authors to the view that the rural community was underpinned by cooperation among the villagers as they resisted pressure from the surrounding areas. And the latter dispute led the authors to the view that the economic nature of the rural community consisted of a clash over the distribution of profits between rent and wages.

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