Community and State in the Japanese Farm Village: Farm Tenancy Conciliation (1924-1938) (review)

Each attempt by the modern Japanese state to reform, revitalize, or otherwise repair rural communities seems to have left in its wake a paper trail of epic proportions. Beginning with the Local Improvement Campaign early in the twentieth century and on through the postwar land reforms, the Ministry of Agriculture and its bureaucrats have filled many a library shelf with daunting collections of memoranda, draft proposals, case studies, and participant accounts. Scholars pursuing questions about the state's goals in crafting its policies in the countryside or efforts by farmers and their families to improve their circumstances have in recent years followed many of these paper trails and used them to help draw nicely nuanced maps of rural life.

There are some gaps, and Dimitri Vanoverbeke's book, a revised version of his 1996 doctoral dissertation, seeks to fill a particularly noticeable one. Although documents associated with the crafting of the 1924 Farm Tenancy Conciliation Law (Kosaku Chōtei Hō) and the activities of the tenancy officers charged with implementing it take up their share of library shelf space, secondary scholarship focusing on this particular facet of policy is not abundant in Japanese and even thinner on the ground in English. As Vanoverbeke notes, one reason so much effort has gone into exploring the mechanisms and ideologies behind the rapid rise in the number of conflicts between tenants and landlords and relatively little attention has been paid to conciliation and the tenancy officers is that, as it turns out, conciliation did not do a very good job of preventing disputes. The state recorded 1,532 tenancy disputes in 1924, the first year the Farm Tenancy Conciliation Law was in effect, 2,206 the next year, and 2,751 the year after that. In 1936 the number of tenancy disputes reached 6,804, an all-time high. If the question was how to prevent tenancy from causing social unrest and local conflict, Vanoverbeke implies, there were better answers than conciliation.

That said, this book offers a detailed narrative of why and how conciliation and the tenancy officers responsible for trying to make conciliation work emerged in the early 1920s as the state's primary response to the tenancy problem. Vanoverbeke locates this discussion partly within a description of the conflict between "traditional" and "modern" legal systems and practices, and partly within an analysis of shifting patterns of political and economic power in the countryside. In doing so he acknowledges familiar scholarship in both areas—John Haley and Frank Upham's work on conciliation and litigation inform Vanoverbeke's approach to the intersection of culture, tradition, and the law, for example, while Ann Waswo and Nishida Yoshiaki help shape his description of the tensions transforming rural Japan in the early twentieth century.¹ The book ought to speak to questions raised by Sheldon Garon and others about the development of social policies and moral suasion—the similarities between the processes and goals Vanoverbeke describes and those Garon analyzed are significant.² That it does not is a symptom of a somewhat too narrowly defined analytical framework.

The first half of the book describes what Vanoverbeke calls "The Growth and Collapse of the Farmer Community, 1600–1917" and provides the context and background for his analysis of policies directed at tenancy in the 1920s. There is much that is useful here. The author offers a solid overview of how Tokugawa-era farming communities dealt with questions of access to and ownership of land within a "traditional" legal framework and how the 1898 Meiji Civil Code recast those questions within a more modern structure. Vanoverbeke is quick to point out that much of the received wisdom about the cultural and "traditional" underpinnings of Japan's supposed rejection of litigation in favor of other forms of social mediation has little basis in fact and more often than not reflects a choice by contemporary policymakers to steer...