Written on 2019-05-28.
This passage argues that Japan’s postwar land reform, while possibly helping to prevent communist revolution, also destroyed the landlord class, weakened local culture, entrenched land disputes, devastated rural communities, and created abnormal wealth for former tenant farmers around major cities.
By contrasting Japan’s system with China’s, it sharply examines the lasting costs of postwar reform.

2019-05-28

The book below is not only essential reading for every Japanese citizen, but also for people all over the world.
It is filled with facts that those who merely subscribed to Asahi Shimbun and watched NHK never knew at all… facts they were never told.
It is one of the greatest books in postwar Japan.
Watanabe Shoichi was from Yamagata Prefecture, the prefecture next to my native Miyagi Prefecture.
The people of Yamagata must continue to take pride before Japan and the world in the fact that they share their home region with a man who was the greatest intellectual of postwar Japan and one of Japan’s genuine treasures.
The people of Iwate should forever take pride in having produced Shohei Ohtani, Yusei Kikuchi, and Kenji Miyazawa.
But they should forever be ashamed of having produced Ichiro Ozawa.
Miyagi Prefecture should forever take pride in having properly inherited the tradition of First High School (the University of Tokyo) and Second High School (Tohoku University), as well as the splendid rule of Date Masamune, that rare great lord, and in having built Sendai, the academic city, the city of trees.
Just the other day, I heard two salarymen talking in the restroom of Takashimaya in Kyoto… “Sendai was the best… I’m even thinking of living there after retirement…”
And it must also forever take pride in 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 perhaps be credited with having pleased tenant farmers by abolishing landlords and, in one sense, with having made communist revolution more difficult.
But in the long run, its negative side was great, in that it created tenant farmers as profiteers of defeat.
Since the Meiji era, Japan rapidly laid railways even deep into the mountains.
This was an age with no heavy machinery such as bulldozers, so laying railway tracks must have been even harder than building roads.
In such an age, why was Japan able to lay railways so quickly into every corner of the country?
Before the war, once agreement was reached with a major landlord, obtaining land was easy.
Among landlords were many who, because it was for the nation, had no intention of making a profit.
That is why land did not become a major problem.
After the war, however, no matter what one tries to do, land becomes an issue.
Moreover, even those called landlords were originally small peasants.
And there are not many who can truly say that the land has belonged to their family for generations.
Reforms do not advance when land issues are involved because obstinacy pays.
This is one manifestation of the harm caused by abolishing landlords through land reform.
Still more important is that local culture was extinguished.
When I was invited to lecture in regional cities, I often asked, “Who is the top taxpayer in this city?”
And in most small and medium-sized cities, it was a doctor.
In other words, there were no truly wealthy people.
In the old days, in the countryside, in villages and towns alike, there was usually at least one grand estate, and though its power of dissemination was inferior to that of the center, culture was formed around it.
Now that has almost entirely disappeared.
And the gap has become so large that people speak of “Tokyo and the provinces.”
This too is a natural result of land reform.

It Fattened Former Tenant Farmers

Because cultivation is not allowed, in the countryside land lies vacant and overgrown, and yet Japan says the foolish thing that its food self-sufficiency rate is low.
When I land at Tsuruoka Airport in my home region and travel to Tsuruoka City, I see many overgrown plots of land.
Apparently they cannot be cultivated because of the acreage reduction policy.
But if there were large landlords, they would not leave things in such a state.
Kato Koichi of the Liberal Democratic Party was the representative from that electoral district, and he cleverly said, “Around here, they are small landlords and large and small tenant farmers.”
That means there are no big landlords, and the small landlords do not cultivate the land themselves but leave it to tenant companies.
One has to wonder what the agricultural land reform was for.
Still, Japan’s land reform did not release land free of charge; tenant farmers bought the land for at least some amount of money, even if it was nearly free.
Why that was a good thing can be seen by looking at China today.
China confiscated 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 national and local governments have the right to drive them off.
There had been hopes that the issue of land ownership would come up even at the recent National People’s Congress, 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 should the land be returned?
Even if one searched for the descendants of the landlords, there would be no way of knowing whether they were truly the descendants.
If the land problem remains unresolved, then considering that successive dynasties in China were destroyed by peasant uprisings, the Chinese Communist Party dynasty may also collapse because of this.
If, as in Japan, the land had at least been sold to the farmers, no matter how cheaply, then this problem could at least have been avoided.
In Japan’s land reform, the ones who later benefited were the farmers around the major cities that went on to develop.
A banker I know says, “Japan’s real rich people are those who owned rice fields around the big cities.”
Even in places like Nerima Ward in Tokyo, there were stories of entire families flying by charter plane to Europe for pleasure.
Even major figures in the business world can rarely do such a thing.
Near my own house there are homes belonging to the presidents of a major trading company and a major international corporation, but their houses are not especially large.
And beside them there may be a farmhouse, no longer engaged in farming, that is many times larger.
Those who supported Japanese industry, and who by rights ought to have been extremely wealthy, do not even come close to former tenant farmers around Tokyo.
This is something we need to know.

To be continued.