Non-Agricultural Land Use by Farmers in Sôka City

Abstract

Sôka City is situated on the alluvial plain of the northern suburbs of Tokyo and will known for its large paddy farming areas. In the 1960s, remarkable urbanization, that is development of residential quarter or utilization of farm-land as kinder-garten or school, has been accelerated there and about 30 per cent of farmland was modified to the non-agricultural uses during these ten years. A great number of farmers disposed of their land or altered them as houses to lnt or apartment houses. Thus utilization of farmland has been turned in quite urban way.In this paper non-agricultural land use by farmers is studied.1) It was about ten years ago that keeping of house to lnt or apartment house among farmers had started, and now approximately one third of farmhouseholds are proprietors of such sort of houses. Keeping of house to lnt or apartment house among farmers was fostered by influx of the surplus population from Tokyo as well as by the drifting tendency of farmers' managment to the side job, which drove them to make up their income deficiency caused by curtailment of the paddy field area. Farmers of extremely small scale, cultivating limited field such as 1.0-1.5ha., are going to mainly rely on earning from the house to lnt or apartment house, instead of planning intensive cultivation of farmland in order to increase their agricural income.2) Pollution of irrigation at surrounding paddy fields has been bringing about as a nuissance through each farmers' uncontrolled development of the residential quarter. Modification of farm-land from agricultural use to urban use is supposed to be resulting in dissolution of the system of owner farmers who had acquired their own farms at the Farmland Reform after the World War II. Nowadays, they are marked as rather land owner than agricultural producers. Needless to say that there are still kept intensive market gardening in the suburbs of city, but very rare. Generally speaking, farmers are in defarming tendency.However different in their scale it may be, such a phenomenon is going on not only on the outskirt of a big city but also in every local cities in Japan. So it may be concluded that these owner farmers, initiated and developed at the Formland Reform, are now under disorganization all over Japan.In this report the suburbs of Tokyo is treated as an example.