This paper offers a comprehensive analysis of the two main pillars of rural relief policy during the Great Depression : the rural revitalization movement and public employment. The rural revitalization movement was intended to encourage middle‒class farmers to overcome economic difficulties through “self‒help.” However, this movement caused serious side effects in the local labor market because it urged those farmers to reduce their use of hired labor, who came from the poorer strata. The shrinking of the local labor market then had to be covered by public work for poor farmers, the second pillar of rural relief policy. The two rural relief policies therefore were complementary and represented a certain policy coherence. This paper examines the case of Kamisato Village in the Shimoina District of Nagano Prefecture and whether this complementary relationship was successful in helping the rural farmers who suffered from the economic damage of the Great Depression. Its findings are as follows. (1)Kamisato village’s forest and its abundant wood resources played an important role in the village’s overcoming the Great Depression, by providing villagers with the chance to earn wage income. (2) However, the potential existed even in Kamisato for, rising confrontation between those hamlets whose residents used the village forest for daily life and those whose residents had little experience working in the forest. (3) The public work for poor farmers financed by the central government complemented the jobs created in the village forest and helped ease the confrontation between the hamlets in Kamisato village. At the same time, though middle‒class farmers were expected to recover through the “self‒help” means advocated by the rural revitalization movement, they also pursued a “strategy of using household labor to its utmost” and were therefore eager to engage in the public work intended for poor farmers. As a result, the integrity of the rural relief policies was partially impaired by the middle‒class farmers’ own self‒help efforts, which were accordingly one of the crucial factors constraining the effectiveness of rural relief policies during the Great Depression.

The Kamiina region of Nagano prefecture is famous for having developed two local agricultural systems : the Miyada and the Iijima. The Miyada system involved 1) contracting operations that shared machines and that were run by “collective operations organizations,” although the contracting organizations in recent years have been integrated into village‒scale legal entities ; (2)land use planning arranged on a village scale, and 3) a rent system in which fees were not dependent on the type of crop involved. The Iijima system, by contrast, refers to a system in which contracting organizations are based on former administrative jurisdictions that were of a larger scale than individual communities.

This article aims first to identify the “Kinki‒type hilly‒ and mountainous farming area” in order to integrate the conventional classifications of agricultural region types as either “Tohoku‒type” or “Kinki‒type” with the features described as near‒urban, flatland farming‒village, or mountainous. The second aim of the article is to clarify the trajectories of these organized management entities at the sites under examination. The analysis of both questions is based on the methodological premise that a region’s particular agricultural structure and its development are basically determined by rural labour market conditions. The authors also take the effects of topographical elements into account.

The findings are as follows. At the sites under examination, actors in crop production tend to converge with the organized cooperative management entities, but they are divided into two types : “nucleus” and “satellite”. The “nucleus”‒type entities, as leaders in local agricultural productivity, are managed in part the young‒ and middle‒aged members who enjoy relatively good working conditions equivalent to those of non‒agricultural industries in the same area, but also by workers who do simple tasks and whose working conditions are more precarious. This structure enables the entity to generate sufficient income for its members.

The “satellite”‒type entity, by contrast, has as its mission the maintenance of agricultural lands including those whose condition is disadvantaged relative to the district. It is hard for it to provide adequate working conditions for its members. For this reason, this type of entity tends to be run by elderly members who are dedicated to contributing to their localities, and who, as retirees from non‒agricultural work, already receive good pensions.