INTERWAR JAPANESE AGRICULTURE - REVISIONIST VIEWS ON THE IMPACT OF THE COLONIAL RICE POLICY AND THE LABOR-SURPLUS HYPOTHESIS

During the interwar period, rates of growth in Japanese agriculture fell to half of what they were before the war. Most explanations for this decline center on the consequences for agriculture of the Colonial Rice Policy and the exhaustion by the end of Meiji of a backlog in land-saving rice technology inherited from Tokugawa. This paper provides an alternative perspective: Not only has the role of a decline in technological progress been exaggerated, but also independently of the decision of the Japanese government to invest in the dissemination of Japanese rice technology to the colonies, imports would have substantially increased and rates of growth in domestic agriculture fallen. Underlying this behavior are three largely neglected factors in the literature on prewar Japanese agriculture: increasing labor constraints in the Japanese economy, limited input substitution possibilities for coping with them, and Japan′s integration with the rest of the rapidly expanding Monsoon Asia market prior to WW I. Our analysis suggests that it is largely in the context of developments in the nonagricultural sector and in terms of Japan′s shifting comparative advantage vis-à-vis the rest of Monsoon Asia that trends in agriculture during the interwar period can best be explained. Moreover, if there is a technological dimension to the faltering growth, it has to do with the slow pace of labor-saving and not land-saving innovations, as widely believed. Finally, the Colonial Rice Policy, by erecting a tariff barrier against cheaper rice from outside the Empire, actually slowed the movement of labor out of agriculture and into the nonagricultural sector. © 1993 Academic Press. All rights reserved.