ABSTRACT
By the inter-war period, the faster growth of both the productivity of its workers resulting in the relative decline of farm household incomes and a growing problem for policy-makers concerned to ensure both a stable food supply and a peaceful countryside. By this time Japan was facing the agricultural adjustment problem that had already beset much of northern Europe by the late nineteenth century. The difficulties and conflicts generated by adjustment made the 'rural problem' a key and contentious political issue and became embedded within the rise of Japanese-style fascism and imperialism. Thus, as Young argues, the Manchurian emigration campaign was significant, less for its actual impact on colonial or mainland agriculture, than for what it reveals of the approach that underlay agricultural and colonial policy. The small-scale farm of around one hectare was entrenched as the basis of the village community and the guarantor of the supply of Japanese-style rice the central and symbolic food of modernising, urbanising Japan.
