Rural Economic Development in Japan: From the Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War (review)

Despite the vast body of research on the Japanese countryside, few English-language scholars have been bold enough to attempt a comprehensive history of rural Japan in the modern era. Penelope Francks has written an excellent book with a reach that extends far beyond its economic focus, offering an outstanding synthesis of the Japanese- and English-language scholarship on the Japanese countryside in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The variety and complexity of the issues Francks tackles is awe inspiring. In the space of a relatively compact work of 300 pages, she tackles issues both broad and contentious—village class structure, the nature and meaning of rural protest, the relationship between industrialization and agricultural development—and technical, even abstruse: her discussion, for example, of the impact of electric motors on rural households in the 1920s (p. 204). In each case, Francks marshals the key scholarship in Japanese and English, and offers a lucid summary of its implications. As a reference work on the many strands of scholarship on rural Japan—political, social, and cultural as well as economic—this book is invaluable.

Francks approaches her task of analyzing economic development in ru-ral Japan from a variety of perspectives, each of which she sustains through sections in each of the book's three chronological segments (the nineteenth century to 1890; 1890 to 1920; and 1920 to the outbreak of the Pacific War). On one hand, she traces "core" economic trends such as agricultural growth, employment, supply and demand, and the changing terms of trade between the urban and rural economies. Recognizing, however, that the house-hold and its economic activities are inseparable in the family-farm sector, Francks also paints in the changes to the village family: its size and structure, the activities of its members, and its diverse responses to the challenges of industrialization. On balance, Francks dwells more on micro- than on macroeconomic trends, which is altogether appropriate in a world of small, family-based enterprise. A third strand is village society: its changing structure, the rise and decline of landlords as forces for change, and the organization of villagers for protest and resistance. And a fourth is the role of the state, where Francks portrays a gradual transition from a largely exploitative relationship, in which the state depended on rural producers for food and taxes, to a more supportive one, which culminated in price support for farmers and ideological support for an agrarianist "rural dream" (chapter 10).

Uniting these strands is Francks's case for rethinking the role of the rural sector in Japan's economic development. Francks argues—persuasively for the most part—that the rural sector in Japan followed a very different path from what she calls the "standard model" of Western industrialization, in which rural residents were increasingly marginalized by the growth of urban industry, until those who remained became merely "passive provi[ders] of agricultural resources" (p. 19) to the industrial sector. Although rural Japan undoubtedly experienced strains arising from industrialization—for example, the increasing income gap of the 1920s and 1930s, leading to the phenomenon of the "dual structure" economy so beloved by contemporary Ja-panese analysts—the rural sector bounced back much more strongly than it is usually given credit for.

At the heart of this resilience were two trends. One was the adaptation of longstanding patterns of "pluriactivity"—the diversification of farm household incomes through a combination of agricultural and nonagricultural enterprise—to the changing threats and opportunities caused by industrial growth. The other was the increasing centrality of the middle-size farm family, with owned and rented holdings of one to two hectares. These families ultimately proved more adaptable than either wealthy landlords—who were forced into a corner by rising labor costs and declining bargaining power against their tenants—or marginal and landless villagers who were forced into the ranks of the industrial proletariat.

None of these...