Agrarian Revolution in Japan

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SINCE the end of the Second World War, "agrarian reform," or "land to the landless," has been a trenchant slogan in Asia. Variously understood and interpreted, it has come to epitomize much of the problem and promise of Asia. The Communists have made their successful bid for power by claiming that they--and only they--were the reformers. But postwar free Asia did not neglect the land issue. Not all of the Asian countries placed the peasant, as Nehru put it, "in the center of the piece," but a movement to improve the peasant's lot is under way in many Asian countries.

That movement had its inception neither in Communist Russia nor in Communist China. The general pattern was set and the stimulus was given by arch-conservative Japan before the Chinese Communists promoted their brand of agrarianism. In late 1946, Japan promulgated, and within three years implemented, a program which indeed gave the land to the landless. A decade later it stands as a great landmark in the history of Japan. The unprecedented renaissance of present-day rural Japan demonstrates that only free people and widely distributed private ownership of land can make the best use of the productive forces of the village. By the same token, it demonstrates that the land problem can be dealt with resolutely, without the Communist gospel and free of the tragic upheavals unleashed by the Soviet and Chinese agrarian revolutions.

II

Japanese society before the reform was not nearly so monolithic as painted by the legend-makers of Japan. The village with its over-exploited, insecure, rack-rented tenantry was the chink in its armor. The landlords had the money, the leisure, the culture and the power which they did not share with others. The Japanese farmers, on the other hand, were allegedly the bearers of the nation's traditional verities, serving the interests of a feudal and industrial Japan with equal self-denial. The realities were much grimmer than the sentimentalization of the farmer deep in the muck of the rice fields. The majority of the tenants and part-tenants, comprising 70 percent of the farm families and cultivating more than half of the land, had little stake in that society. They met the exactions of their many masters with the produce from fragments of overworked land not large enough or rich enough to support their families...