Under the Shadow of Nationalism: Politics and Poetics of Rural Japanese Women

6. The Countryside and the City 2: Agrarianism among Nagano Middling Farmers

137 Chapter 6 The Countryside and the City 2: Agrarianism among Nagano Middling F armers yanagita left thousands of books and articles on his perceptions of rural women and his vision of nation building. Did the middling farmers in Nagano also leave us their writings? In 1990, I visited Ueda Hakubutsukan (Ueda History Museum), located on the compound of Ueda Castle Park. Ueda, which became an administrative city in southern Nagano in 1919, was first developed as a castle town in the sixteenth century. Since then it has served as a commercial center, surrounded by numerous villages, many of which have now been incorporated into the city itself. At the museum, I found piles of old newspapers published in the thirty villages surrounding Ueda during the 1920s and 1930s. Generically called sonpò or jihò, these are newspapers published by a group of local youths, called seinenkai or seinendan, in each village .1 Table 5 lists the titles of these newspapers, most named after their own villages, and the date of first publication.2 By the end of the 1940s, all of these groups of local youths had stopped the publication of their village newspapers, owing to the scarcity of paper and the increasing ideological control by the government during the wartime period.3 In one small column at the bottom of the last page of Urazato sonpò, published in 1922, one finds the following editorial statement: “You may contribute an article on any topic to this village newspaper, not only on local politics and economy but on your inner thoughts. The deadline is the fifteenth of every month. Please keep and file all the newspapers delivered to you, as such a file will constitute the 138 Countryside and City 2 TABLE 5 JIHÒ OR SONPÒ IN UEDA AND ITS VICINITY Title of Jihò Date of Initial or Sonpò Publication Ebòshi no hana (later called Motohara) 1919 Shiojiri 1919 Aoki 1921 Urazato 1921 Kangawa 1923 Nishi Shioda 1923 Takeishi 1923 Toyotomi 1923 Izumida 1924 Kamishina 1924 Kanò 1924 Muroga 1924 Naka Shioda 1924 Nishiuchi 1924 Osa-mura 1924 Shiokawa 1924 Yazu 1924 Fujiyama 1925 Higashi Shioda 1925 Kawabe 1925 Wada 1925 Yoda-mura 1925 Agata-mura 1926 Bessho 1926 Shigeno 1927 Tonoshiro 1927 Daimon 1928 Maruko 1928 Nagase 1928 Nagakubo 1929 Source: Kanò Masanao has published a similar table (see Kanò 1973, 98–99). I created this table independently, using information provided by the Ueda History Museum. Countryside and City 2 139 important history of our village.”4 It is in these village newspapers published between 1919 and 1940 that I attempted to explore middling farmers’ perceptions of rural women in their task of nation building.5 I will call their discourse “agrarianism,” using its broadest definition : agrarianism reproduces “society’s (not merely farmers’) ambivalent relation to industrialization, urbanization and centralization ” (Vlastos 1994, 2–3). Indeed, agrarianism was advocated by socially and ideologically diverse groups. Although my focus here is on the agrarianism promoted by Nagano middling farmers, their discourse is not uniform and it changes over time between 1919 and 1940. I reject the classification of agrarianism into “traditional” and “popular” varieties (see, for example, Havens 1974; Waswo 1988, 589). According to this classification, traditional agrarianism prevailed in the early Meiji period in northeastern Japan, where large-scale landowners were concentrated. These landowners, together with the state’s bureaucrats, promoted it with the goal of commercializing agriculture and gaining higher profits. Popular agrarianism prevailed in the 1920s and 1930s in southwestern Japan, where small-scale self-cultivating farmers were concentrated. These middling farmers advanced popular agrarianism to improve their economic, political, and social status, which had been eroded with the development of industrial capitalism. In contrast with traditional agrarianism, popular agrarianism implies the absence of state involvement in rural affairs. The agrarianism I will present here, even though it was advocated by middling farmers in the 1920s and 1930s, was by no means “popular .” The state was heavily involved in promoting it. The deterioration of rural conditions invited the state to penetrate further into the countryside, a process that had already begun in the late nineteenth century with the state reform of land taxation and local administration . It tightened its grip on the countryside by issuing a series of laws in order to increase agricultural output at the turn of the century . The state also assaulted vestiges of village autonomy by encouraging farmers to participate in a...