Agricultural landholding in Japan: Fifty years after land reform

Abstract

Laws about agricultural landholding are an important locus of regulation in industrial societies. States fostering industrial production and consumption must allow growth to subsume and transform farmland, yet must move carefully against prior agrarian forms which serve the state's own needs for legitimation and stability. How specific national regimes of accumulation have sustained both economic growth and social assent on the same ground is a key question facing geographers. This study examines changes in the Japanese state's rules governing farmland over the past five decades. The postwar industrial growth regime won much of its cooperation from the countryside in the agrarian land reform and won its decades of political stability through an electoral system favoring millions of small-scale farmers. The state has had to conserve farmland in the hands of this important electorate while engineering expansion of the non-farm economy and farm scale enlargement on the same land. These contradictory imperatives have necessitated a continuous reregulation of farmland. Ever-widening legal and economic possiblities for Japan's farmland owners have gradually eroded their earlier homogeneity in social circumstances and land interests. The disorganization of landowners' interests has contributed to the disorganization of the political regime itself in the 1990s.