ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the contours of agriculture's role in Japan's development in terms of both overall output growth and the inter-sectoral movement of labour and capital resources. Settled agriculture began to be established in Japan from around the third century BCE and thereafter spread through most of the country, making use of techniques borrowed from China and adapted to the rather different Japanese environment. The chapter looks at the economic and technical environment of Japanese agriculture within which output growth would have to have taken place, before considering the new techniques that made it possible. Japan is not a country endowed with ideal conditions for agriculture, given the severe limitations on land suitable for cultivation. Analysis of agriculture's contribution to overall economic growth and of the relations between the agricultural and industrial sectors at the macro level calls into question some of the basic assumptions on which two-sector development models.
