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Farm and Nation in Modern Japan Farm and Nation in Modern Japan Agrarian Nationalism, 1870-1940 THOMAS R. H. HAVENS PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 1974 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press Princeton and London ALL RIGHTS RESERVED LCC: 73-16774 ISBN: 0-691-03IOI-O Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data will be found on the last printed page of this book Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation This book has been composed in Linotype Janson Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press Princeton, New Jersey Preface Yoi mura Good villages Yoi hito Good people Yoi rekishi Good history Ito Chubei, frontispiece executed May 1962 for Toyosatosonshi (History of Toyosato Village), Shigaken, Toyosatomura, 1963 ALMOST anyone who has lived in Japan or read its recent history eventually develops ideas about what makes that nation distinctive. Some persons regard her twentieth- century experience as a minor variation of a pattern common to all industrializing peoples. Others insist that indigenous cultural traditions have strongly affected Japan's recent past, making comparisons with other societies risky. This book discusses what one aspect of Japanese civilization, village agriculture, has meant to some of her leading thinkers during the past century, and how farming related to perceptions of history and national uniqueness in Japan from the Meiji restoration of 1868 to World War II. The modified Hepburn system used in the 1954 edition of Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary has served as the authority for romanizing Japanese terms throughout this book. Macrons have been used to indicate long vowels in all words save the most familiar proper nouns. The Wade- Giles system has been followed for Chinese terms and the McCune-Reischauer system for Korean ones. Japanese names are given in the customary Japanese manner, with the fam ily name preceding the personal one, except for cases of Western language publications in which Japanese authors or editors have chosen to place their personal names first. All dates have been converted to the Gregorian calendar. ν PREFACE I am grateful to the editors of the Japan Christian Quar terly for permission to reprint in Chapter II portions of my article, "Religion and Agriculture in Nineteenth-century Japan: Ninomiya Sontoku and the Hotoku Movement," Japan Christian Quarterly, xxxvin, 2, Spring 1972, 98-105, and to the editors of Monumenta Nipponica for permission to reprint in Chapter XII a compressed version of my article, "Kat6 Kanji (1884-1965) and the Spirit of Agriculture in Modern Japan," Monumenta Nipponica, xxv, 3-4, Autumn 1970, 249-266. Funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Leopold Schepp Foundation, and Connecticut College supported various stages of the research for this study, and a Fulbright research fellowship aided the final phase of pre paring the manuscript. I am grateful to each of these sources for generous assistance. I am indebted to the directors and staffs of the following libraries for help with the materials used in this study: Na tional Diet Library, Tokyo; Harvard-Yenching Library; Gest Oriental Library, Princeton University; East Asiatic Library, University of California, Berkeley, especially Fiji Yutani; Connecticut College Library, especially Helen Aitner; Waseda University Library; and the collection of the Shakai Kagaku Kenkyujo (Institute of Social Sciences), Waseda University, especially Katsumura Shigeru. I am particularly grateful to Kawahara Hiroshi for friendly counsel about my research and generous hospitality during 1972-197 3 when I was a visiting fellow at Waseda University. I am also indebted to these colleagues in Japan for help with my research: Denda Isao, Hashikawa Bunz5, Kazue Kyoichi, Matsuzawa Tetsunari, Okubo Toshiaki, Takizawa Makoto, Tsukuba Hisaharu, and Tsunazawa Mitsuaki. For general advice about my work, I am grateful to Delmer M. Brown, Ronald P. Dore, Marius B. Jansen, Katherine M. Maxim, Fred G. Notehelfer, Kenneth B. PyIe, Irwin Scheiner, Kent C. Smith, Valdo H. Viglielmo, and vi PREFACE Ann Waswo. I am especially indebted to Penelope Brown, for stimulating comments on the text, particularly on Jap anese nationalism; to Miles Fletcher, for helpful suggestions about the latter half of the book; to Christopher E. Lewis, for invaluable comments about Meiji and Taisho local history; and to Carol Gluck and my wife Betsy F. Havens for thorough readings of the entire manuscript. Rhea La- vigne, Joan McLaughlin, Katherine Snyder, and Leslie Tervo kindly assisted with materials. R. Miriam Brokaw, Joanna Hitchcock, and the staff of Princeton University Press provided their customary expert editorial care. I alone bear responsibility for errors of fact, translation, or inter pretation. July 1973 vii Contents Preface v Tables xi I. Agrarian Thought and Japanese Modernization 3 II. Early Modern Farm Ideology and the Growth of Japanese Agriculture, 1870-1895 15 III. Bureaucratic Agrarianism in the 1890s 56 IV. Small Farms and State Policy, 1900-1914 86 V. Popular Agrarianism in the Early Twentieth Century 111 VI. Farm Thought and State Policy, 1918-1937 133 VII. Gondo SeikyS: The Inconspicuous Life of a Popular Nationalist 163 VIII. Gond5 Seikyo's Ideal Self-Ruling Society 190 IX. Gondo Seikyo and the Depression Crisis 212 X. Tachibana Kozaburo's Farm Communalism 233 XI. Tachibana Kozaburo's Patriotic Reform 254 XII. Kato Kanji and Agricultural Expansionism 275 XIII. Agrarianism and Modern Japan 295 Works Gted 323 Index 347 ix