Japan’s Changing Regional World of Welfare: Agricultural Reform, Hamlet-based Collective Farming, and the Local Renegotiation of Social Risks

This article analyzes agricultural reform as an element of broader shifts in the Japanese welfare regime. In postwar Japan, agricultural support and protection served as a “functional equivalent” to welfare provision in rural and semi-rural areas. However, an ongoing agricultural reform process has put pressure on aging smallholders and on JA, the powerful organization of agricultural cooperatives. This article investigates how these local actors have responded to an increasingly hostile socio-economic and political environment. To address this question, the article focuses on hamlet-based collective farming, which is a form of agricultural production that can reproduce the welfare character of the postwar support and protection regime on the local level. Based on field research in several rural and semi-rural communities, the article argues that the functions and the local proliferation of hamlet-based farming are shaped by village institutions: hamlet-level norms and rules governing land use and agricultural cooperation, as well as social ties between hamlets, local co-ops, and local governments. While the integration of village institutions into local cooperative and administrative structures can support a systematic local proliferation of collective farming, municipal and cooperative mergers have rendered such comprehensive local responses more complicated. More generally, the article proposes to investigate local acts of recombining community ties and norms with changing macro policies as a promising analytical angle to understand the ongoing renegotiation of East Asian welfare regimes.

变迁中的日本地区性社会保障世界：农业改革、以村庄为基础的集体耕作，以及地方性的社会风险再磋商

关键词：日本；农业改革；社会保障；乡村社会组织；集体耕作；社会风险。

本文将农业改革作为日本社会保障体系更广泛的变迁中的一个要素进行分析。战后的日本对农业的支持和保护起到了“同等功能性“地为乡村以及半乡村地区提供社会保障的作用。然而，一场正在进行中的农业改革进程对于老龄化的小土地所有者以及强大的农业合作社组织——农业协同组合（JA）——带来了很大压力。本文考察了地方行动者——正趋老龄化的兼职农夫以及农业协同组合的地方分支——是如何应对日渐敌意的社会经济和政治环境的。为解答这个问题，本论文聚焦于以村庄为基础的集体耕种——这是一种农业生产形式，可以再造战后地方层面的支持保护体制所具有的社会保障特征。 根据对几个乡村以及半乡村地区社区的实地调查，本论文提出，村庄为基础的耕作在地方的勃兴，其功能是由村庄制度所塑造的，包括：治理土地使用以及农业合作的村庄层次的规范和规则，以及村庄、地方合作社以及地方政府之间的社会纽带。 尽管将村庄制度与本地合作性和行政机构进行整合可以支持集体耕作制度在本地系统化的扩张，与城市及合作社的合并却使得这种综合性地方应对措施更为复杂化了。在更普遍的意义上，本文提出考察将社区纽带和规范与变迁中的宏观政策进行重新合并的地方行动，作为一个理解进行中的东亚社会保障体系的再磋商的令人看好的分析角度。

Translated from English by Li Guo