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Forthcoming

BETTING ON THE FARM: Institutional Change in Japanese Agriculture | By Patricia L. Maclachlan and Kay Shimizu

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2022. xvii, 235 pp. (Tables, graphs.) US$60.00, cloth. ISBN 9781501762123.


Japanese farmers, long known for their low productivity and dependence on subsidies and trade protection, have lately been in the news for their entrepreneurial spirit. One farm in Mie (Mokumoku Tezukuri Farm) not only processes the high-quality pigs it raises into hams and sausages but also grows mushrooms and berries and produces tofu and beer—selling all of these items directly to end-use customers through a string of retail outlets and farm-to-table restaurants it operates itself, on site and as far away as Tokyo (75).

Patricia Maclachlan and Kay Shimizu take readers on a tour of farms across Japan to determine whether Mokumoku Farm is an outlier or the new normal in a farm economy buffeted by trade liberalization, falling rice prices, and aging farmers without successors. The late Abe Shinzo devoted extraordinary attention to the farming sector during his seven-year prime ministership, easing regulations that had made it difficult for farms to expand and escape from the stultifying co-operative structure known as “JA.” The sector served as the showcase for the “third arrow” of Abenomics, ostensibly demonstrating the government’s commitment to expose sheltered sectors to market forces in order to push them toward higher productivity. The authors take us to farms in Kumamoto, Nagano, and Niigata to see whether these policy changes are delivering on this promise.

The short answer is no. Farmers are under extraordinary pressure. The average age of farmers is 68, and just 24.4 percent of farmers have identified successors (53–55). Per-capita consumption of rice has fallen by half since 1962, pushing down prices for this staple commodity (142).  Farms have grown a little in size, but the median size remains 2 hectares, or about 5 acres (65). Most continue to grow generic koshihikari rice by relying on JA for inputs of fertilizer, seed, and equipment and dump their annual production into JA’s distribution system, which does a poor job of using innovative marketing techniques to maximize the price farmers get for the fruit of their labour.

Nevertheless, the confluence of pressures is encouraging a few innovative farmers to strike out in new directions. We meet a farmer in Kashima, south of Kumamoto City, who convinced 388 of his neighbours to participate in an incorporated firm called S. Mega Farms that organized all of their efforts into three large blocks of rotating crops (122). Its size has enabled the collaborative to insist on low input prices from its local JA co-op, giving it a seat at the table when prices are negotiated and helping it boost the incomes of all of these farmers above the norm for the region.

In Niigata, the JA co-op Uonuma Minami itself led the rice-farming community to improve its production processes so that it could take full advantage of its geography to grow consistent, award-winning rice that it proceeded to brand and sell directly to supermarket chains at a significant premium over rice grown elsewhere in the region (151). Maclachlan and Shimizu pair these cases of innovation with others where farmers struggled to work with less nimble JA co-ops and were not able to earn higher incomes.

The detailed case studies help show how specific regulatory changes pushed and enabled farmers to innovate; how demographic and economic forces are driving many to try new things; and yet how the success of a few seems to depend on timing and the presence of specific individuals who had the energy and vision to lead a group of local farmers in new directions.

We also learn that while individual farmers are struggling to adapt under difficult conditions, a few large corporations like the Aeon and Lawson have been driving change from above by taking advantage of regulatory changes that make the leasing of farmland easier. The chains have begun partnering with farmers to produce large volumes of high-quality vegetables, cutting out the JA middlemen to deliver and process farm products so that they can be sold as ready-made meals and packaged for sale in their stores (76–77).

The book includes chapters that could be assigned in courses on postwar Japanese politics or history, tracing the arc from the decades of the 1955 System (when the Liberal Democratic Party gave so much aid and price support to farmers that they became a middle-class mainstay of the party—chapter 2) to the period after Koizumi Jun’ichiro led the party (when the LDP has attempted to reduce its dependence on organized voting blocks like farmers and pay more attention to the needs of the median voter—chapter 3).  It also includes one chapter (4) that uses quantitative methods to test hypotheses about why some co-ops have done a better job of increasing farm incomes than others.

What I liked best about the book, however, was the effort the authors made to get to know farmers on the front lines of a changing political economy. Unlike some other books about Japanese agriculture policy which limit their focus to policy struggles in Tokyo (e.g., Aurelia George Mulgan, Japan’s Interventionist State: The Role of the MAFF, Routledge, 2005), this study begins and ends with a focus on what is happening on the farm, giving readers a sense of exactly why farmers struggle to adapt and why so few of the next generation are “betting on the farm.”


Leonard Schoppa

University of Virginia, Charlottesville


Last Revised: February 1, 2023
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