ABSTRACT
‘Culturally deprived’ and ‘politically inexperienced.’ That was how the authors of the Ministry of Agriculture report cited earlier by Iwamoto described Japanese farmers in 1949, and it is more than likely that their assessment was shared by most officials within that ministry, and within the Japanese bureaucracy as a whole. This would become one source of the negative evaluation of farmers in western scholarship thereafter. Another would be the wartime propaganda of the Japanese state, which had stressed the countryside as the locus of those cardinal virtues of loyalty and self-sacrifice that defined Japan's national essence, and young men of rural birth as the nation's best soldiers. Also contributing would be a few scholarly works by Japanese authors that had been translated into English and works by a handful of western authors (most of them using the secondary literature in Japanese as their sources), which emphasized the ‘feudal’ character of prewar village life (Smith 2001: 355) and the harsh exploitation – by landlords and/or by capitalism – of those who actually tilled the soil. Other voices spoke for rural Japan and its residents, and by and large what they said was accepted as accurate. A rather different assessment emerges when farmers are allowed to speak for themselves, and when the logic of their actions at any time is explored.
