ABSTRACT
Most studies of land issues in twentieth-century Japan have taken a legal or institutional approach to the subject. In contrast, this chapter focuses on the customs and norms regarding land ownership among farmers and rural communities, both before and after the postwar land reform. In my view, such a focus provides an essential basis for developing policies to deal with the crisis facing Japanese agriculture today. That crisis has both exogenous and endogenous origins: on the one hand, the liberalization of trade in agricultural commodities, including rice, and on the other, the rapid aging of the agricultural labor force. While the former has narrowed the options available to those Japanese farmers who wish to remain in business, the latter is steadily rendering the exploitation of such agricultural resources as land impossible in many parts of the country. Efforts to promote the structural reform of agriculture – in particular, land-extensive farming and more efficient management of local agricultural resources – have yielded few positive results to date. Those who speak of the threatened collapse of agriculture in Japan have considerable basis for their concern.
