Rural Economic Development in Japan: From the Nineteenth Century to the Pacific War

This important book outlines the development of the rural economy in Japan from pre-industrial times up to the Pacific War. It demonstrates that agriculture was by no means the only economic activity taking place in Japan's rural areas; that Japanese rural households can best be understood not as passive victims of outside forces, sometimes engaging in individual and community resistance; that rural households responded positively and imaginatively to the issues of agricultural adjustment, becoming "modernized", but not in ways that substituted technology for labor or that achieved economies of scale; and that this agrarian transition, which was quite different from agrarian transitions in many other countries, laid the foundations for the shape of the rural economy during the high economic growth period and during the second half of the twentieth century.

Penelope Francks is Honorary Lecturer in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, where she taught on the Japanese and other East Asian economies for many years.