The Village Community and the Political Citizenship of Farmers

Abstract

Generally speaking, after the Land Reform, the traditional structure of our village community has been disintegrated gradually owing to giving up the landlord system and to the development of agricultural productivity. As a result of this transition, the community structure as dominating mechanism by landlord lost its raison d'etre and the preponderance of the high status family in the community ceased to be a basis to justify personal and substantial control over lower status families. Thus, the political structure moves from the personal domination based on landownership, which has intensified with the “communalism” kept by the Dozoku relationship, to the impersonal domination exercised by the governmental bureaucracy. So, in this article, we intendt o clarify the political structure of the contemporary village community and the political subjecthood of farmers in the direction of the change above mentioned. Firstly, with the development of Japanese capitalism, on the one hand, the more commercialized agriculture needs to be pursued intensively with much capital, on the other a non-agricultural market is opened up to agricultural people, so class differentiation becomes more complicated. By and large, the middle stratum of farmers has increased since the Land Reform, but now the middle decreases, the lower increases relatively, and the higher is increasing very slightly. In accordance with these transitions of class differentiation, the community structure, in which still remained the traditionally communal ways of life including the communal mode of production, may have diverse implications for each class. For the higher, who have the value-orientation to enlarge the farming scale, the traditional structure of the Buraku community is not always desirable, and communal control may be an obstacle to their economically rational orientation. For the lower however, who depend upon the income from the side-jobs of one or more of the family members for support, the village community does not always compensate their poor living. Therefore, the village community is losing the significant role for the higher as well as the lower. Rather, to exaggerat slightly, the Buraku remains still only as the complements of agricultural production for those of the middle class who can not make a living depending only upon agricultural income. Such being the case, the significance of the village community is different for each class but it is difficult to diminish the old and closed communal character remaining in contemporary villages so long as we cannot dissolve the petty farming system itself. Secondly, in addition to changes in class differentiation there are also other causes to diminish the traditional character of the village community. The one is enlargement of the communal boundary and functions through the governmental administration ; the other is emergence of many functional groups organized with farmer's own interests which go over the conventional boundary of the village community and may destroy the traditional system of it. In either case, the bureaucratization of the community control may be prompted rapidly with diminishing the traditional community structure. However, it seems to me that growing capitalistic domination with bureaucratic control by the central government cannot dissolve fundamentally the petty farming system. And, in spite of the rational orientation to get over the traditional community structure, the higher class inclines to resolve the problems it confronts in accordance with the capitalistic system which yields the contradiction by itself.