Dividing harvests: Household and property in contemporary rural Japan.
Item
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Title
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Dividing harvests: Household and property in contemporary rural Japan.
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Identifier
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AAI9431362
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identifier
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9431362
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Creator
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Hara, Richard Takashi.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Gerald Sider
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Anthropology, Cultural
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Abstract
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This dissertation is an anthropological study of part-time farming households in northern Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Based on fieldwork in a rural hamlet, it asks how and why small-scale, family farms still predominate despite efforts on the part of the national government to rationalize the agrarian economy in ways that press for larger enterprises. To a great extent the answers lie in the common response of these individual households to the expanding wage employment opportunities outside of farming and to various state programs, such as land consolidation, that have subsidized local rural development.;The incorporation of these households into a wider political economic context is, however, also mediated by the nature and history of relations between households at the local level. This is particularly underscored for the farming households in this area of Japan by the recent reemergence of informal land use agreements whereby a household "borrows" the use of another household's land in return for a small share of the rice harvested. This dissertation explores the potentially conflictful and divisive consequences these practices have both within households and between households. Through land lending and borrowing, rights to the use of land and household property are defined according to custom and history, shaping the nature of relations between men and women, between successors and non-successors within the household, as well as between landlord and tenant in the community, in ways that are not amenable to state control.;The unique place of cultural traditions in the Japanese economy generally has been a matter of debate for a number of years between Japan and her trading partners. This study contributes a concrete example of how cultural meaning intersects with economic logic, and to the anthropology of Japan more specifically, an analysis of how notions of property underlie the broader social underpinnings of the Japanese family/household, or ie. It also provides a case study of another category of middle farming households which problematizes scenarios of rural differentiation that tend to focus on the polarization of landlord and tenant classes. By examining the centrality of issues of inequality--and by arguing that their mediation can never be wholly successful--this dissertation thus contributes to the theoretical literature on peasant and post-peasant societies across different cultures.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
