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47 Chapter 3 Rice Revolutions and Farm Families in To – hoku Why Is Farming Culturally Central and Economically Marginal? William W. Kelly It may strike the reader as odd that in a volume on Japan’s most archetypal rural region this is but the single chapter on agriculture. Where are the farmers and what happened to agriculture? To be sure, the agricultural output of the region remains nationally prominent and economically important: Aomori apples, Yamagata cherries, and other fruits and vegetables; poultry and pork production; and above all the region’s rice brands (Koshihikari, Haenuki, Hitome-bore, Akita-komachi). But as a proportion of prefectural and regional economy and as a contribution to individual household incomes, even in To – hoku, agriculture falls behind manufacturing, construction, and service industries. Therein lies a crucial feature of contemporary To – hoku: it remains agrarian in its imagery and identity but not in its political economy. Rice paddies and farm villages remain crucial to regional cultural style, but as elsewhere in Japan, the routines of farming no longer calibrate household and community social relations and economies. Farmers are few in number and agriculture is profitable for only a small number of them. How this has come to pass over the twentieth century is the subject of this chapter. Twentieth-century Japan was distinctive as the only advanced industrial society whose primary agricultural sector was irrigated rice. To me, there have been three outstanding features of its modern agriculture, and I take their mutual entailments as my starting point. The first is a muchremarked constant, the enduring farm family. Even today, the Japanese agricultural sector, in To – hoku and elsewhere, is characterized largely by small-scale, family-labor farming operations committed primarily to irrigated rice cultivation. The farm population remained stable for the first six decades of this century at about 30 million people in 5.5 million families. By 1975, farm family numbers had dropped below five million, by 1990, they had dipped below four million, and in 2000 they had shrunk to just over three million. Even in 1990, however, 99.7 percent of all Japanese farm enterprises were classified as family farms. And the average cultivation acreage per farm family remained at roughly one hectare for much of the century. The tenacity of the farm family is bemoaned by some and celebrated by others, but it cannot be disputed (although I will later argue that it can be misunderstood for what it is and is not). A second feature of modern Japanese agriculture is a much less appreciated cyclical dynamic: the enormous strides in both equity and efficiency that have been concentrated in two indigenous Green Revolutions. That is, major Japanese farm regions have experienced two Rice Revolutions in the past hundred years; two periods of radical organizational reform and technological innovation. The earlier of these was around the turn of the century, roughly from 1895 to 1920; the more recent was in the years, 1965 to 1980. I do not mean to imply that in other times there was no change; government policies and local practices have never been stable for long. It is more precise, then, to speak of gradual development punctuated by two intense periods of accelerated change, but it is important to emphasize the condensed event-chains of those brief periods and the enormous transformations they wrought on the Japanese countrysides. A third feature of Japanese agriculture has been the growing preponderance of part-time operations. Official statistics divide farming households into three categories: “full-time farmers,” “Class I part time households” (whose farm income exceeds its non-farm income) and “Class II part time households” (whose non-farm income predominates). Since 1950, the total number of farm families has declined only moderately. The real shift has been from full-time farming to part-time farming. In the early 1950s, full-time operations were in the majority; Class I part-timers became the numerical plurality in the 1960s and 1970s, and Class II part-timers became the statistical norm in the 1980s and 1990s. In 2000, 81.8 percent of Japanese farm families had only part-time involvement in agriculture. Thus, a hundred years of Japanese farming may be characterized as a constant of family farming, a repetitive cycle of Rice Revolutions, and a linear growth of part-time farming. Each of these three characteristics deserves extended treatment, but here I emphasize how they conditioned one another. 48 William W. Kelly [18.220.81.106] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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