This passage argues that while Japan’s postwar land reform may have helped prevent a communist revolution, in the long run it led to the disappearance of landlords, the decline of regional culture, and the entrenchment of land-related problems.
It also points out that Japan’s reform did not distribute land entirely for free, as tenant farmers purchased it at very low prices, and contrasts this with China’s confiscation of land in order to highlight the significance of that difference.
It is an important section that examines both the achievements and the costs of postwar reform through a comparison between Japan and China.

2019-05-28
However, Japan’s land reform did not release land free of charge. Tenant farmers bought the land for some amount of money, though at a price that was almost nothing. That this was a good thing can be understood by looking at China today.

The book below is not only required reading for all Japanese citizens, but also a book that people throughout the world should read.
It is filled with facts that those who merely subscribed to the Asahi Shimbun and watched NHK never knew, facts they were never told.
It is one of the finest books in postwar Japan.
Mr. Watanabe Shoichi was from Yamagata Prefecture, the prefecture next to Miyagi, which is my birthplace.
The people of Yamagata must continue to take pride before Japan and the world in the fact that they are from the same homeland as a man who was one of the greatest intellectuals in postwar Japan and one of Japan’s true treasures.
The people of Iwate should forever take pride in having produced Shohei Ohtani, Yusei Kikuchi, and Kenji Miyazawa.
But they must forever be ashamed of having produced Ichiro Ozawa.
Miyagi Prefecture should forever be proud that it has properly inherited the tradition of First Higher School, the University of Tokyo, Second Higher School, and Tohoku University, as well as the splendid rule of Date Masamune, that rare great ruler, and that it has created Sendai, the city of learning, the city of trees.
Just the other day, I heard two businessmen talking in the restroom of Takashimaya in Kyoto.
“…Sendai was the best.”
“…After retirement, I am even thinking of living there.”
And it must also forever be proud of having given birth to The Turntable of Civilization.
The reform that created today’s land problem.
As for postwar Japan’s land reform, it may have had the merit of pleasing tenant farmers by abolishing landlords and, in a sense, making a communist revolution more difficult.
But viewed over the long term, its negative side in creating tenant farmers as beneficiaries of defeat was large.
Since the Meiji era, Japan rapidly laid railways even deep into the mountains.
Since this was an age without heavy machinery such as bulldozers, laying railways must have been even more difficult than building roads.
In such an age, why was Japan able to lay railways so quickly to every corner of the country?
Before the war, once an agreement had been reached with a large landlord, acquiring land was easy.
Among landlords there were many who had no intention of profiting, saying that it was for the good of the nation.
That is why land did not become a major problem.
After the war, however, whatever one tries to do becomes a problem of land.
Moreover, even so-called landlords were originally small peasants.
And there are not many who can truly say that the land has belonged to them for generations.
Reforms do not advance when land problems are involved because obstinacy pays.
This is one manifestation of the harmful effects of abolishing landlords through land reform.
More important still is that regional culture was extinguished.
When I was invited to give lectures in provincial cities, I often asked, “Who is the biggest taxpayer in this city?” and in most small and medium-sized cities, it was a doctor.
In other words, there are no truly wealthy people.
In the old days, in the countryside there was usually a mansion in every village and every town, and although its power of communication was inferior to that of the center, culture was created around it.
Now, almost all of that has disappeared.
And the gap has become so large that one now speaks of “Tokyo and the provinces.”
This too is the natural result of land reform.
It enriched former tenant farmers.
Even though in the countryside land lies vacant and荒れ果てた because it is not allowed to be cultivated, Japan says foolish things such as that its food self-sufficiency rate is low.
When I land at Tsuruoka Airport in my home district and travel to Tsuruoka City, there is a great deal of land overgrown with weeds.
Apparently it cannot be cultivated because of the rice production reduction policy.
But if there were large landlords, they would not leave it in such a condition.
Mr. Kato Koichi of the Liberal Democratic Party was the Diet member for that constituency, and he once put it well by saying, “Around here, they are small landlords and large and small tenant farmers.”
In other words, there are no large landlords, and the small landlords do not cultivate the land themselves but leave it to tenant companies.
One does not know what the agricultural land reform was for.
However, Japan’s land reform did not distribute land free of charge.
Tenant farmers bought the land for some amount of money, though at a price that was almost free.
That this was a good thing can be understood by looking at China today.
China seized the land, killed the landlords, and turned it into state-owned land.
And now it has become a problem that peasants are being driven off the land.
Because it is not private property, the state and local regimes have the right to drive them off.
There had been hopes that even at the recent National People’s Congress the issue of land ownership might arise, but it was not taken up.
It could not possibly be.
As many as six million landlords have already been killed.
Then the question becomes: to whom would the land be returned?
Even if one searched for the descendants of the landlords, there would be no knowing whether they were truly descendants.
If the land issue remains unresolved, then considering that successive Chinese dynasties were destroyed by peasant uprisings, the Chinese Communist dynasty too may collapse for the same reason.
Had China, like Japan, adopted the form of selling land to the peasants, no matter how cheaply, at the very least this problem could have been avoided.
In Japan’s land reform, the farmers around the major cities that later developed were the ones who profited.
A banker I know says, “Japan’s truly wealthy people are those who owned rice fields on the outskirts of the major cities.”
Even in places like Nerima Ward in Tokyo, there were stories of entire families going to Europe on chartered planes.
That is something even major figures in the business world can hardly do.
Near my own house too, there are the homes of the presidents of a certain major trading company and of a certain international giant corporation, but they are not such very large houses.
And beside them there may stand farmhouses, not engaged in farming, that are many times larger.
Those who supported Japan’s industry, people who by rights ought to be very wealthy, do not even measure up to the former tenant farmers around Tokyo.
This is something we need to know.

To be continued.