ABSTRACT
It has often been supposed that Japan’s villages, home to about half the population in the 1930s, hold some of the keys to understanding the events that led to war against China and the Anglo-American powers. Some writers have argued that high tenancy rates and oppression by landlords produced a potent discontent which led to support for militarist solutions; some that landlord dominance and a collectivist ethic at least discouraged opposition to militarism; some that the army’s institutional links with the countryside were so strong that farmers almost automatically obeyed the military.1
