Since the beginning of the Wartime-Regime the Nomin-Dojo, founded in 1934 for the purpose of training leaders among farmers, took a new position as the primary organization in the campaign to increasing the food supply.
Although in January 1946 it was renamed Kaitaku-Zosan-Shuren-Nojo (a training farm for clearing land and increasing food production), soon in January 1949 it was renovated again as Keiei-Denshu-Nojo (an extension farm for agricultural management). When the Natural Resources Section of GHQ/SCAP questioned officials of the Ministry of Agriculture in May 1949 on the reason why agricultural education was free from control by the Ministry of Education, they insisted that Keiei Denshu Nojo surely would result in strong activities in agricultural agencies. It is the new character that this institute received in the Post-War Era.
When Nogyo-Daigakkou (An Agricultural College) was founded as a renewed organization in 1981, the revised new act defined it as equal to a junior college. That is to say, 47 years had passed before this training and educational institute for farmers was integrated into the Ministry of Education. In these points we could recognize a continuity from the Pre- to the Postwar Era. We regard it as unique, especially compared with the development of agricultural high schools.

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It is important in policy-making to increase the intensive use of farmland by efficient farmers in order to attain an efficient production structure in Japanese rice production. Activating paddy field rental transactions along with the paddy field consolidation project is useful for this objective. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of the paddy field consolidation project on rental transactions. The stochastic choice model under technical differences between farmers and the farmers' individual survey data were used for estimating the supply and demand response functions in the paddy-field rental market and solving both rent and the rental agreement level as endogenous variables, and then various simulations were carried out in view of project effects. Empirical results show the following facts and policy implications. Firstly, the project improved qualityand value of paddy-fields while raising rent and increasing the number of agreement farmers for renting. Therefore, the project brought about a reallocation of farmland resources between inefficient farmers and efficient farmers. Second, there were regional differences in project effects with regards to rent and the rental agreement level between farmers. Third, the depreciation of rice price and the rise of wages decreased effects of the project in both rent and the rental agreement level. From these results, it is concluded that stimulating the demand-side incentive of renting by the project is important to improve the intensive use of farmland by efficient farmers, and it is also important to restrict the negative impacts of supply side farmers who want to cultivate their farms by themselves after the project.

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To burden the farmers with heavy taxes and tasks appears a typical problem in rural areas in China. The farmers have had to bear heavy and many kinds of burdens because of the long-term economic development strategies which have given priority to industry and city life over agriculture and rural life. The problem of the farmers' burden has become severe not only because of the over-taxation, but also because of the obvious unfairness of their burden, compared to the burden of urban population. Unfairness also exists among different regions and among different farming families. The undemocratic decision-making system in which the farmer's own opinions are not taken into consideration entails the reality of the burden the farmers are forced to bear. The real problem of the situation lies in the undemocratic social system in which the farmers suffer from the system of discriminatory burden and from the system of taxation according to the size of the contracted land, the number of family members, and how many people are working within the family, not according to the income of the family.
The finance in rural regions has to be completely self-reliant. In agricultural regions, the finance can only rely on farmers as a result of undeveloped industrial and commercial enterprises and the fiscal reform of the tax-division system. The expenses of the rural economic development, the administrative operation, and the local public enterprises, such as compulsory education, etc., have to be totally paid by farmers. The rural finance which is inflexible due to the lack of democracy is getting severer all the time with the increase of rural educational expenses and the expansion of administrative work and public enterprises. Thus, there is little possibility of reducing the farmers' burden under such a rural fiscal structure.
In order to solve these problems of the farmers' burden, it is absolutely necessary to minimize the difference in living standard between city and the countryside and between regions. Then a democratic decision-making system and a fair burden-sharing system need to be considered. Such a rural administrative and fiscal reform and farmers' self-government are necessary for farmers.

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A marked feature of some studies that have been made on cooperative democracy over the past few decades is that they pointed out how important it is to organize the movement calling for the restoration of democracy when the top management carried on the decision-making in cooperative business independent of the democratic control. They did not consider the question in relation to other factors, for instance, the problem intrinsic in democracy, an aspect of co-partners' choice and the aim in democracy. My purpose in this paper is to show the uniqueness of the understanding of democracy by Prof. Seiichi Tobata through presenting a comprehensive vision of his analysis. The main results are as follows:
(1) Considering cooperative democracy as liberty given priority over equality, he arrived at the conclusion that it was necessary to prevent the abuse of top management's liberty. Furthermore,he emphasized repeatedly that cooperatism (which was the Japanese thought on the eve of World War II that cooperatives would prevaile throughout the country) would never be brought to realization because of the conflict between liberty and equality.
(2) If a co-partner makes a choice of liberty having priority over equality, it follows that his cooperative theory shows one type of cooperative democracy. This understanding gives meaning to the traditional studies: first, we not only aim at the actualization of democracy, but understand the negative side of democracy that there is a possibility of co-partners' liberty conflicting with each other; second, we can think about the goal of a cooperative in terms of the values among which co-partners choose; and third, democracy is regarded as a field in which some values are chosen, because we cannot determine a priori what kind of values should take priority.

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