From the beginning of the twentieth century through the 1930s, rural life was stable in one regard. The relative proportion of landlords, owner-cultivators, and tenants barely changed. This contrasted sharply to the previous decades, during which tenant farmers had increased dramatically in numbers. If anything, conditions in the early twentieth century had improved somewhat for tenant farmers compared to the 1870s or 1880s. More tenants than before found that after setting aside a share of their produce for personal consumption and for rent, they had a modest surplus that they could sell on the market. Military statistics indicate that the height of average con- scripts—primarily rural youths—rose as much as three centimeters (more than an inch) from the mid-1890s through 1905. This is a clear if crude indicator of improved standards of living and diets for the majority of the population.
Even so, by the 1920s the Japanese countryside was a troubled place. After several decades of increased total output, the overall productivity of Japanese farmers stopped growing. The gains from a series of relatively inexpensive improvements in tools and cultivation techniques had run their course in the more advanced central and western
regions. These advances were slow to spread further north. As growth leveled off, social and political tensions began to increase. An immense gulf continued to distin
guish the lives and lifestyles of the rural upper crust from others in the countryside.
As a result, those in the middle and lower ends of the hierarchy protested more vigorously than before.
The wealthiest landlords—roughly 2 to 3 percent of all rural households—did no farming themselves.6 They lived easily on rents collected from numerous tenant fam
ilies who farmed their fields. They dwelt in large, comfortably furnished homes with many servants. In the decades since the Meiji restoration, such landlords had some
times led the way toward improvements in agricultural practice that increased output and benefited tenants as well as themselves.7 They continued in the vanguard in areas such as bringing electricity to their villages. The wives in such families often led newly founded organizations for women such as the Ladies’ Patriotic Association, created in 1901. They would mobilize fellow villages to send “care packages” to Japanese troops overseas. They gathered with each other for tea and complained about their servants. They arranged marriages for their sons and daughters with children of similar backgrounds nearby. Their husbands, in addition to renting out their fields, invested in moneylending or small-scale manufacturing. They might spend their leisure time in traditional fashion, partying with geisha at hotspring inns. Or they might engage in newer pursuits such as politics, running for local or national office, or supporting the campaigns of fellow landlords. These men and women lived comfort
able lives marked by ambition, confidence, and a belief that they were the local pillars of an emerging nation and an empire of consequence in the larger world.8
For the rest of those in the countryside, economic life ranged from modestly affluent to difficult to desperate. In good times, some tenant farmers could market a considerable surplus of their produce and use the profit to improve living standards.
But they remained vulnerable to rent increases and fluctuating commodity prices. More fortunate farmers might own their fields, but their holdings were small. They were often just two or three bad harvests away from having to mortgage fields for cash to pay land taxes. After that, if conditions still did not improve, they faced foreclosure, loss of their land, and the more dependent life of a tenant farmer.
Such a life is dramatically evoked in a novel written in 1910 by Nagatsuka Takashi called The Soil. It tells the story of “poor farmers [who] spent long hours in their fields doing all they could to raise enough food. Then after the harvest, they had to part with most of what they had produced. Their crops were theirs only for as long as they stood rooted in the soil.”9 These tenant farmers lived in dark tiny homes with dirt floors in the kitchen and wooden boards but no tatami mats in the rest of the house. Their dwellings were drafty and bitter cold in winter. They subsisted on mo
notonous diets of barley gruel and pickles, with occasional treats of rice and some fresh vegetables. They depended on the benevolence of their betters to survive hard times.
This dependence was the most important source of resentment and conflict in rural Japan in the early twentieth century. Farmers lived in a world of great hierarchy.
As social historian Ann Waswo explains:
[T]enants were expected to step aside if they encountered anyone of superior status on a village road or footpath. They were at the beck and call of their landlords, to
Members of a tenant farmer family on the way to their fields in the 1920s. To diversify risk, farmers often rented small plots from several landlords, which could be quite far from each other and an arduous walk from their homes.
Courtesy of Akira Konishi.
perform chores in the landlords’ fields or in the landlords homes, even if this meant delaying vital chores of their own. If they were given a meal at the end of their day’s labor, they received it gratefully and consumed it in a dark corner of the landlord’s kitchen.10
At such moments, a seething fury often lurked close below the surface. Consider the case of Kamimura Hideji, born in 1915. His memory of the humiliating interaction between the landlord and his father remained powerful when he was interviewed about his childhood at the age of seventy-five. In December each year in the 1920s, his father would take a day off from work in the fields to bring the rent rice to the landlord. His son sometimes joined him. Handing the rice over, Kamimura’s father would bow low and thank the landlord. Kamimura remembered watching this cere
mony and “thinking as a child ‘what in the world is going on? Why thank the landlord?
He should thank us!’ ”11
Such an inegalitarian system was sustained, however, by more than simple co
ercion. Hierarchies of status and power were buffered by customary gestures of be
nevolence. Landlords would customarily contribute the funds for festival celebrations.
They were expected to reduce rents when times were particularly bad and to pay doc- tor’s bills when a tenant farmer fell ill. It was in awareness that he offered such care
that the landlord of Kamimura’s father might have expected a thank-you together with the rent. The inequality of village life was also buffered by the presence of a sub
stantial middling group of owner-cultivators. At the upper reaches, such families had a few extra fields to rent out to tenants. At the lower levels, a small-scale landowner would need to rent an additional plot or two from a landlord. Such farmers occupied a gradation of statuses. They played an important role in bridging the gap between the minorities of extremely rich landlords and extremely poor, landless tenants.
Even so, antagonism was not always contained. In the 1910s and 1920s, the paternalistic commitment of landlords to look after their dependent social and eco
nomic inferiors in the local community seems to have weakened. More landlords chose to live in the provincial capitals or in major cities, sites of greater cultural as well as economic or political opportunities. They delegated management of their lands to an estate overseer who might treat tenants in an impersonal fashion. Even wealthy farmers who stayed in the village often sent their children to provincial towns or major cities for middle school and higher education. Compared to resident elites, the absentee landlords provided fewer customary forms of benevolence to poorer villagers, and this became a source of social tension. In the late 1920s, leftist writer Kobayashi Takiji memorably described absentee landlords as “a strange breed of fish—like mermen.
The upper part is a landlord, but the lower part is a capitalist, and the lower part is rapidly taking over the torso.”12
From around the time of World War I, tenant farmers began joining together to demand that landlords reduce their rents. They used the effective tactic of divide and conquer. To minimize dependence on any single person, most tenant farmers rented fields from several landlords (just as most landlords rented to several tenants). A group of well-organized tenants could threaten to withhold all labor from the fields of just one landlord at harvest time. That landlord would face a total loss although each tenant faced only a partial one. Most landlords faced with such tactics settled by offering either a one-year or a permanent reduction in rent. Between 1923 and 1931, anywhere from fifteen hundred to twenty-seven hundred such tenant-landlord disputes took place each year. The most common demand, found in 70 percent of these disputes, was for lower rent. Participation varied from a handful of households in a single village to several hundred tenant households spread out over numerous villages. Tenants won at least some of their demands in three-fourths of all disputes.13
Many of these disputes were led by a new organization in rural Japan, the tenant farmer union. At their peak in the mid-1920s, such unions enrolled as many as one- tenth of all tenant farming families. Some local unions joined together into regional or national federations. The largest of these was the Japan Farmers Union, founded in 1922. These unions and their members lacked any legal recognition or protection.
Village leaders exerted considerable social pressure and implied or explicit threats against joining. In such a context, to unionize 10 percent of tenant households in just a few years was an impressive achievement.
By the late 1920s, however, landlords began to counterorganize effectively. By pooling resources to hire lawyers and coordinate their responses through unions of their own, they had some success in fending off tenant demands. But in addition, a number of the wealthiest landlords in particular decided that managing a farm was simply too much trouble. Throughout the 1920s and increasingly toward the end of
the decade, noncultivating landlords sold off fields and decreased their holdings. They turned instead to the stock market and industrial investments, which promised stronger returns with less onerous personal involvement.
The social upheaval in the countryside of the 1910s and 1920s did not stem primarily from the economic backwardness of abject poverty or traditional hierarchy.
It was fundamentally the product of a more modern rural society. Landlord-tenant disputes in the 1920s were roughly twice as common in the more commercialized regions of central and western Japan than in the less productive and less commer
cialized northeast. Dispute leaders were not the poorest tenants, but those with some prospect to gain from producing cash crops for the market. Disputes were more com
mon where modern, city-dwelling absentee landlords were more numerous. Such dis
putes are evidence of a gradual shift in the social relations of rural Japan away from personal forms of interdependence toward a more impersonal economic hierarchy.
Agrarian protesters were calling in part for better terms of access to the capitalist economy. At the same time, this modern world offered not only greater opportunities than in the past but also greater dangers and fewer customary social supports. Farmers facing this situation wanted the continued respect and support of their superiors to
gether with a measure of personal control and security. Conservative observers viewed this changing landscape of rural society as one disturbing sign of social disintegration in the modern era.