This paper aims to clarify characteristics of urban formation in pre-war Japan through discussion of the activities of landowners implementing land readjustment projects in the 1930s. This paper examines Tachibana Village, a rural district adjacent to the City of Amagasaki in Kawabe District of Hyogo Prefecture. In accordance with a plan to create a new station on the Tokaido Line, resident landowners sought to form a land readjustment association. In the land readjustment area, a small number of landowners owning 2 hectares or more of land owned about 40% of the land in the entire district; of these landowners, those residing in the village pushed for association formation. Large-scale landowners residing in the village gathered letters of consent to land readjustment from each community, employed an engineer, and drafted a design for the project. They eliminated the problem of disagreements by paying compensation to peasants cultivating land in the land readjustment area. Hyogo Prefecture approved the project plan, and the Tachibana Land Readjustment Association was established in November 1933. Using the rise in land prices due to the development of rural land into housing, the Association sold the land provided by its members and used the revenue to create Tachibana Station and lay roads and water lines. Construction proceeded as planned, and as a result the number of residents in the district rose sharply. Large-scale landowners residing in the village prepared housing sites by reclaiming rice fields on land they owned and earned rental income by leasing it. There were, however, instances where landowners subdivided the land when leasing it. Some of the landowners who resided outside the village did not reclaim the rice fields on the land they owned. In such cases, the rice fields remained until the post-war period, when peasants cultivating rice fields demanded an end to concentrated land ownership. Thus, a chaotic urban area was formed in the adjustment area; unlike the ordered tracts in the draft design, dense housing construction proceeded on the one hand while on the other hand rice fields were scattered throughout the area, with some even located in front of the station. The project by the Association that the landowners had pushed for did contribute to urban improvement in that roads and water lines were laid, but the project had depended on the landowners, so there was no way to place restrictions on private land use by the large-scale landowners.
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