It is well-known that Yanagita Kunio was much concerned about agricultural policy. In this article, I should like to examine the historical significance of the textbook "Agricultural Policy". It was published in 1910, and used at his lecture. After the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese Government established a policy calld Chiho Kairyo Undo (Local Reform Movement). It was a policy to strengethen the town-and-village finance by consolidating public property and small shrines. Farmers' lives were greatly influenced by that movement, because it resulted in the centralization of the local economy and local ethics. But Yanagita Kunio, who had travelled throghout Japan and had seen the farmers' lives closely, criticized this policy and presented an alternative plan. From his observations, he discovered that there were many "local small markets" in the Edo era, and farmers sold and bought their products at that market. But after the Meiji Restoration, as the government began to enforce a centralizing transport policy, many "local small markets" were destroyed. Instead, commodities produced in big cities began to sold all over Japan. This meant that Japan's market structure had come to be unipolar centralized. In other words, local towns and villages lost their market independence. So, Yanagita's alternative plan was a regionalistic one. It meant the revival of "the local small markets". For that purpose, farmers should sell their products in the neighborhood. He expected it to be a cooperative movement. The ideal cooperative association should be operated for its neighbors. To attain this purpose, farmers should realize their own ethics. He thought that farmers had the spirit of self-help and cooperatism which was native to Japan in the past, but now, they have lost it. The conclusion of my article is that Yanagita's alternative policy was an inner criticism of goverment policy. Government took a centralizing policy, and Yanagita intended a regionalistic approach.

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Capital Levy, or the property tax, which was levied as a temporary tax for just one time on individuals for the purpose of securing the state income and of redistributing the wealth among national strata, was started in February 1947. The purpose of this paper is first, to clarify the actual conditions of the taxation of Capital Levy on parasitic landlords. Second, to describe the role of Capital Levy in the process of the dissolution of landlordism or in the extinction of landlord class, in connection with land reform. And, third, to pinpoint the peculiar significance of the state or the public finance in the conversion of class composition from prewar to postwar period. The paper will give concrete instances to bolster the findings of this research. The analysis here is focused on three big landlords; the Ichijima family, a thousand cho landlord in Niigata prefecture, whose management was overwhelmingly based on the vast lands in its possession. The Nezu family, the second biggest landlord in Yamanashi prefecture, which shifted to possession of securities rather than relying on its possession of the lands and stuck fast to the profits in the capital market, while gradually reducing the scale of its lands. And the Shirose family, a thousand cho landlord in Niigata prefecture, which had both the two managerial characteristics mentioned above and, therefore, it can be said that it had a middle character between the former two families. My conclusion is therefore that, all of these families did not succeed in lightening the burden of Capital Levy by means of taking advantage of the rising inflation, and thus could not help falling from their status as men of property. It means that they lost their status as the class of investers or the men living on the interest of their securities because of the Capital Levy. All this occurred while they were losing their status as landowners because of the progress of land reform. The taxation of Capital Levy after the war was therefore instrumental in the dissolution of the mechanism of "the conversion of the rent into the capital". The dissolution of the mechanism as mentioned above together with land reform thus contributed to the destruction of the semifeudalistic landlordism, the structural link which had been indispensable to Japanese Capitalism.

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