The aim of this paper is to focus on the development policies of the Manchurian government, which was under Japanese control, regarding Japanese immigration. Japanese immigration into Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s has been examined only from the viewpoint of Japanese domestic matters and nobody has as yet looked at it from the perspective of agricultural policy and agricultural production in Manchuria. The development policies of the Manchurian government had frequently changed because to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the clashes between Japan and the Soviet Union along the Manchurian-Soviet border. After the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe in 1939, efforts to achieve food self-sufficiency within the yen block were put into effect and the agricultural administration in Manchuria was enlarged. Agricultural production in Manchuria, however, faced serious problems, such as diminishing fertility and labor shortages. Policymakers had to try and innovate farming system to overcome these structural problems. It was at that very time that a ray of hope emerged for agricultural policymakers in Manchuria. Farming technology in Hokkaido was beginning to offer potential solutions to the problems being faced by Japanese settlers in Manchuria.

Using the time-series data on irrigation investments in the Philippines compiled for the last half-century since independence, the determinants of government's decision to invest in irrigation infrastructure are examined. Granger regression gives a strong support for the hypothesis that changes in the world rice price and the level of rice self-sufficiency induce the government to invest in irrigation infrastructure. In the sense that the decision to invest in irrigation infrastructure depends on the world rice price or the relative profitability of the investment that the world rice price determines, the decision making by the government in the allocation of public funds is said to be rational. Since independence, the goal of agricultural policy in the Philippines has been to supply sufficient amount of rice to urban consumers at reasonably low and stable prices, while saving foreign exchange as much as possible, in order to avoid urban unrest due to food shortage and to promote industrialization by maintaining low rice price and thereby low wage rates. It is observed that the consideration for food security and agricultural protection has been emerging as important policy concerns, as the vulnerability of the rice sector has swollen in the post-Green Revolution era since the mid-1980. The need to attain these policy goals has been behind the government rationality in investing in irrigation infrastructure. However, our study shows that this short-run rationality of the government does not insure the longrun efficiency in the resource allocation. Indeed, the irrigation sector in the Philippines has been underinvested in the last decade and half, and this shortrun rationality without long-run perspective in the allocation of public funds to irrigation infrastructure seems to be preparing food crisis in near future.

I would like to write a brief review concerning my five books related to an analysis of rice farming in Japan, also introducing main criticisms of my books. They are (1) Economic Structure of Rice Farming (1954), (2) The Development Processes of Japanese Rice Farming (1958), (3) Logics of Rice Farming (1971), (4) Meditation on Paddy Field Farming (1989), and (5) Socioeconomic Studies on South-East Asian Farms and Farmers in Transition (1993). I have always kept in mind two themes in these books. The first is the process of formation of farmer's autonomy or subjectivities, and the second is a clarification of the characteristics of rice farming systems in Japan compared with countries in Asia and Europe. (1) The main content of the first book, Economic Structure of Rice Farming, involves analyses of the differences between river irrigation and pond irrigation, through which, I could make two points clear. One is to show why rice productivity is higher in west Japan than in east Japan. The other is an analysis of characteristics of a rural community through a water utilization system. We found that the tightness of a rural community was stronger in pond irrigation than in river irrigation, and water distribution at transplanting time has been a key custom on which social and technical orders of a rural community depend. (2) The Development Processes of Japanese Rice Farming deals with two issues as follows. The Japanese farmers have successfully experienced land reform since just after WorId War II. But why could Japanese farmers perform such big accomplishments without troubles of failure in a short time? I think it was because by that time they had matured to the extent that they could accept land reform. I showed many figures to prove this. This is the first issue. The second issue is the farmers' resistance to rice pricing policies that aimed to keep the price level stable through a regulation of production. For this purpose the government asked farmers to increase rice production sometimes and to reduce it at others. But farmers did not readily follow the government's advice. (3) A third problem is the considerations related to the technical and practical systems of rice farming, especially the relation between farm mechanization and intensive farm management. Many people had thought Japanese intensive farming itself was the result of small farming and that small farming was also a result of the backwardness of socioeconomic development. But in Asia, especially in Japan, intensive farming should be a quite reasonable and rational system compared with farming in Europe. In countries there, which have high temperature and high humidity, farming needs very careful management. But sometimes mechanization and intensive management are opposed to each other. This is the most important issue : How can Japanese farming coordinate between farm mechanization and intensification? (4) The fourth problem is seeking common characteristics of Japanese rice farming in Asian rice farming. My book,entitled Socioeconomic Studies on South-East Asian Farms and Farmers in Transition, showed four important key words : (1) the same and different basic characteristics between Japan and Asia ; (2) agronomical improvement and engineering improvement ; (3) low level stability of production, fair distribution of harvest, and shared poverty ; (4) farmers under the strong administration of central government. The final aim of this book is to look for the axis of coordinates of Japanese rice farming in the Asian monsoon areas.