ABSTRACT
In this chapter I will discuss the many changes that occurred in Japanese villages and in the lives and livelihoods of Japanese farmers during the twentieth century, basing my assessment primarily on a diary kept by a farmer in the Nishi-Kanbara district of Niigata Prefecture. The diary's writer, Nishiyama Kōichi, was born in August 1908 and died in December 1995 at the age of 87. His entries start in October 1925 when he was 17 and continue on an almost daily basis until the early 1990s, a span of some 65 years. At the beginning of this period, his family were pure tenant farmers, cultivating slightly more than two chō (one chō = 2.45 acres) of rented land in the hamlet of Koshin in the village of Sakaiwa. The hamlet was located between the Shinano and Nishikawa rivers, only about two miles from Niigata City on the Japan Sea, and the five tracts of marshland within its borders were held as common land to which all farmers residing in the hamlet had rights of access.
