Typological Consideration of Japanese Agricultural Structural Reform

Once, OGURA Takekazu, who is one of the key persons behind the Agricultural Basic Law, made the following reflection. "I was caught by the theory of Western Europe and couldn't think over the reality of Japanese agriculture profoundly. It was necessary to conduct a study on the character of Japanese agriculture and the rural community, and to plan the structural reform based on it." The theme of this paper is to consider the type of structural reform based on the reflection of OGURA. The main reason why the agricultural structural reform hasn't proceeded well in Japan is that agricultural administration disregarded the power of rural society. In a traditional Japanese rural community, i. e., each plot of arable land was a separate territory, and its property rights belonged to the family of each peasant. In such a rural community with this tradition, it is necessary for agricultural administration to declare it would insure that farmers could defend their farmland property rights in the first place, and after that, to devise a way to to separate use right from the ownership of the arable land to execute the structural reform. After the mutual agreement of the landowners' group in the rural community is completed, it is necessary to entrust the farm management to a reliable person or group who has managerial skills. However, there is a great deal of room for the invention of these methods in each region. Therefore, the types might be diversified and a long term is also required. In the above-mentioned points, Japanese type agricultural structural reform will be greatly different from the image that WTO holds. It is necessary for agricultural administration to declare these clearly inside and outside Japan.