Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. xiv, 268 pp. (Tables, graphs, figures.) US$70.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4875-0854-8.
Rural Japan can be a mysterious place for the uninitiated. The tsunami of social, economic, and institutional upheaval brought by the postwar period can feel inconsequential in a countryside of furusato that seems eternal and unchanged. Agriculture too seems to move along by the seasonal rhythms of planting and harvest, unphased by warning calls for reform even as farmers age and land is abandoned. Hanno Jentzsch reveals that such a bucolic image of rural Japan is far from the truth. In Harvesting State Support, we learn that underneath this timeless façade, village actors and local agricultural institutions are incredibly dynamic in responding and adapting to state-led efforts to reform agriculture. Jentzsch has deftly captured these dynamics, in all their diverse and multifaceted forms, to show how local agricultural regimes assert agency to navigate and reinterpret top-down policy and pressure in a way that supports and maintains local agricultural and socio-cultural interests. For anyone looking to understand the complex and interwoven history of Japan’s agricultural support and protection regime and how farming communities today are responding to the neoliberal shift in agriculture, look no further. Underlying the careful and detailed case descriptions is a robust discussion of institutional theory and institutional change through a local lens that is a welcomed contribution to the literature on political and social institutional change.
The book consists of five parts. Part 1 introduces the core arguments of the book, that the “dual picture of change and stability” in Japan’s support and protection regime is interpreted and responded to by local institutions and actors in distinctly local ways. This tension between national-level reforms and local reinterpretation and adaptation runs throughout the book. Local agricultural regimes aiming to conserve or maintain social and institutional stability are in a continual process of renegotiation with reform pressures imposed from above and are also, in many cases, able to take advantage of policy schemes and subsidies to harvest state support. Of particular note, Jentzsch asks us to focus on how informal institutions, such as social ties, norms, and practices, play a critical role in these processes of adaptation, not just as passive background noise, but as important factors in allowing formal institutions to seize agency and better cope with the shifting political and economic landscape. As we come to learn, informal institutions do not always “emerge as flexible resources” to support local adjustments to changing regulations, but are quite context-specific and can be limited when socio-spatial boundaries shift. We see these differences in response through the stories of local agricultural regimes and in particular the successful case of Hikawa Town in Shimane Prefecture. Hikawa’s Kosha system has become a model for its ability to consolidate farmland in the hands of “bearer farms” but do so in a way that dampens the market-liberal push from above and respects village institutions and normative social ties.
Part 2 masterfully presents the postwar history and evolution of Japan’s agricultural support and protection regime. Jentzsch does a fantastic job of leading the reader through the forest of postwar agrarian and rural change by explaining the intricacies of how land reform, food control and rice pricing, electoral rules, and demographic trends interacted in establishing the predominant agricultural regime and the “iron triangle” (Liberal Democratic Party, the Nokyo Cooperatives, and the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries). This period of heavy-handed state control then shifted to become more ambiguous with the move toward a neoliberal view of agriculture marked by the New Agricultural Basic Law and the deregulation of farmland.
This shift toward an ambiguous support and protection regime is met with a variety of local responses, the focus of part 3, carefully sampled to include cases that show “organized” and “disorganized” local agricultural regimes. Beyond the Hikawa case, which is presented in great detail, we are introduced to other cases based in Nagano, Yamanashi, Oita, and Shiga Prefectures that demonstrate a range of different cropping systems, topographies, and levels of informal and formal institutional qualities. Jentzsch presents the history of each case in developing their local agricultural institutions and helps the reader make sense of local variety through comparisons and short, case-specific sections. Where the book really shines is in the careful analysis of how village hamlets respond in dynamic ways to policy and subsidy shifts. The hamlet is the core building block of Japanese agriculture and rural society, the result of generations of cooperation and social organization that recognizes farmland as a “collective resource” regardless of how municipal boundaries are redrawn or farmland is redistributed. As Jentszch shows us, the strength of the social ties, norms, and practices that weave a hamlet together play an enormous role in whether or not the local agricultural regime can successfully adapt to top-down pressures.
In part 4, readers are introduced in great detail to the flexibility (or inflexibility) of hamlet and village institutions at work. We learn that farmland is a serious social process, with each plot of land carefully considered and doled out to ensure fairness, avoid conflict, respect local norms, and maintain village cohesion. For example, in well-organized hamlets, the same institutions and local players who were influential in the postwar agricultural order are the ones who are in charge of the farmland banks, which allows for the cooperative logic of the village to remain viable under the veneer of state-driven neoliberal reform. Entrepreneurial and corporate farming and hamlet-based collective farming are also reinterpreted locally in diverse ways, with some new agricultural businesses walking a fine line between profit making and maintaining village cohesion and others openly prioritizing local farming community support. Jentzsch argues that the biggest threat to the successful continuation of harvesting state support is the diffusion of local social ties by shifting socio-spatial boundaries, as local branches of the Nokyo are consolidated at higher spatial levels and more rural municipalities are amalgamated. The book ends by concisely summarizing the main arguments in favour of focusing on the local institutional lens in agricultural reform processes and other dynamic fields where local institutional agency is being asserted.
Using agricultural reform processes in Japan as an example, Jentzsch argues that informal institutions are dynamic, evolving resources that need to be taken seriously if we are to understand how and why local communities persist and adapt to macro-level pressure. Harvesting State Support gives an intricate presentation of rural Japan through the local lens of agricultural informal institutions. The level of detail infused in each sentence does make them long and might make for slower reading, but it is worth the journey.
Steven R. McGreevy
University of Twente, Enschede