This paper alanezes the functioning of an "administrative village" from roughly the 1910s through the 1930s. Previous studies have spelled out the stages by which hamlets were functinally integrated into administrative villages and the process by which model villages were formed. These studies advanced the hypothesis that administrative villages can be classified into three types: model villages, cooperative villages, and villages that were hard to administer. This study examines the third type. It is based on a critical application of Takeshi Ishida and Takemaro Mori's theories concerning the rural regeneration movement and seeks to apply the fruits of research on rural sociology to the area of research on administrative villages. It is a case study of Seinaiji Village in Nagano Prefecture. First, it examines the management of the hamlet and the administrative village. Seinaiji was a case of weak village integration and manifest confrontation among the hamlets, because of the hamlets' preservation of their respective common forest lands. Nevertheless, it is also an example of hamlet's resolving their problems through consensus decision-making among themselves based on an established set of rules, rather than by relying on landlord intervention from above. In other words, though Seinaiji would generally be classified as "difficult to administer" at the administrative-village level, at the hamlet level, it was a "democratic" society. Second, this paper examines the rural policy enforcement process in the village. All common forests were in principal brought into administrative-village possession during the Taisho period in accordance with central and prefectural government policy, but in reality they remained hamlet lands. THe hamlets used them to combat poverty during the great depression of the 1930s. This had limited effect, however, and the forests were utterly devastated in the process. The prefectural government accordingly intervened in the administration of Seinaiji and imposed the "rural regeneration movement" on the village. Many villagers ultimately became emigrants to Manchuria as a result of this policy.

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Tokyo's night-soil recycling networks, which originated in the early modern period, collapsed in the latter half of the 1910s due to urbanization and the increased availability of alternative fertilizers. The city was therefore forced to provide human waste disposal as a municipal service. Previous studies have focused on the developement of the City of Tokyo 's municipal night-soil service as a backward policy that created a breeding ground for infectious diseases because it depended on existing private sector businesses to distribute the human waste to farm villages. However, these studies have not addressed the relationship between municipal policy and the nearby farm villages. This paper analyzes the changes in night-soil distribution networks from the 1910s to the 1920s and the City's policy in the 1930s, and examines how the city stimulated potential demand for human waste in suburban farm villages and reformed the night-soil distribution networks. In a bid to improve the night-soil disposal system, which had foundered in the late 1910s and 1920s, the City of Tokyo in 1931 surveyed demand for human waste in farm villages in Tokyo, Saitama, Chiba, Ibaraki and Kanagawa prefectures. The surveys showed that the village areas nearest Tokyo City were developing into residential districts, allowing farmers to buy human waste there, resulting in decreased demand for the inner city's human waste. Hence, the municipal government concluded that it would be hard to supply Tokyo's human waste to those areas. Meanwhile, the Showa Depression had caused a steep fall in the market price of agricultural products. It became essential for farmers to reduce their fertilizer costs, but farmers in remote village did not have ready access to cheap human waste and were forced to depend on merchants and high-price fertilizer. Their agricultural associations therefore recommended the use of Tokyo's human waste as equivalent to the fertilizer produced on the farms themselves. The City of Tokyo responded to demand in these areas by expanding its night-soil distriution networks there. On January 1, 1934, the city made the management of human waste a municipal service in its inner city districts and promoted the building of human waste tanks around the city. Then, in 1936, it extended its municipal service to its newly incorporated wards (the old county area) and expanded the night-soil networks. Tokyo City decided to subsidize the expense of transportation and building human waste tanks and to transport human waste to remoter areas such as Saitama and Chiba where the agricultural associations' demand for human waste was greater. This expansion of the night-soil distribution network not only stemmed the decline of night-soil disposal in the city but also enabled farmers in neighboring prefectures to buy human waste cheaply, cut their fertilizer expenses, and produce vegetables at low cost.

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