Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2021. xi, 261 pp. (Maps, tables.) US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824886257.
This thoroughly researched book focuses on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century transformations in farming practices in a handful of rural communities in Miyagi Prefecture north of Sendai. It does so in order to explore the roles an array of “middlemen” played in bringing those changes about, and the implications of their interventions for our understanding of that era in Japan’s history. The first five of the book’s six chapters cover key developments during the Meiji era, while the last chapter traces the legacies of some of those changes over the decades that followed and into the Occupation. Craig provides a wealth of detail in his descriptions of the tactics local elites turned to in pursuit of goals like the consolidation of small plots of farmland into larger units (which were more amenable to livestock-assisted plowing), improvements in the quality of the rice harvest, and so on. He situates the actions of these middlemen within the context of ongoing efforts by officials in the Home Ministry and the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce to put local know-how and self-interest to work for the state.
One of Craig’s more compelling arguments is that the government’s choice not to become directly involved in efforts to boost agricultural production, but to instead rely on different village and district-level elites to pursue that and related goals, was directly responsible for the latter’s creation of an economic and social structure that strongly favoured their interests at the expense of everyone else’s. Farmers were harvesting more rice by the end of the Meiji era than they had at its outset, but Craig points out that the same elites who had made those gains possible were also responsible for the “consolidation of power in the hands of landlords, the impoverishment and marginalization of tenant farmers, and the cementing of a deep economic inequality in farming villages” (220). While no one familiar with the history of rural Japan will be surprised by that characterization of the conditions many farmers found themselves in, Craig has contributed a great deal to our understanding of how, exactly, those conditions came to be and who helped most to bring them about.
Much of the evidence that Craig draws on is specific to the Senboku region and to the activities of a handful of local notables there, which means that it isn’t a given that the developments he documents are necessarily reflective of what was happening elsewhere in Japan. Indeed, there are so many contingencies associated with how changes were brought about in Miyagi that it wouldn’t make sense to expect things to unfold similarly anywhere else. Craig addresses this tension between local evidence and historical narratives on a national level by drawing our attention to what bureaucrats in Tokyo were saying (and doing) about agriculture and its prospects in the Meiji era, and showing that the problems that concerned them most about the Japanese countryside overall were also the ones that loomed largest in Miyagi. The 1902 implementation of new regulations requiring all farmers to plant rice seedlings in beds of a certain size and arrangement or face being forced by the police to dig up and replant them all is one example of a policy that seemed tailor-made to serve the interests of Senboku landlords, but clearly had application elsewhere as well. State support for the expansion of agricultural associations at the local and national level had similar qualities, as did the Home Ministry’s launch of the Local Improvement Campaign. Craig shows how each new initiative altered the local status quo, at first by empowering land-rich middlemen to exploit poorer farmers, and only later by trying to introduce less-destabilizing approaches to rural reform.
The author’s examination of middlemen and agriculture makes almost no mention of either class as a category of analysis or capitalism as a factor in rural Japan’s transformation. Craig instead attributes the quests for profit and prosperity that he documents in the countryside and the tensions that accompanied them to “the national pursuit of modernity” in general and to Japan’s aspirations towards “agricultural modernity” in particular (10). Because the book relies as much as it does on “the pursuit of modernity” to explain how and why the countryside changed, it would have been helpful if Craig had unpacked the concept a bit. In the conclusion he suggests that “answers to the questions of what the abstractions of modernization, modernity, and improvement meant in reality” differed depending on one’s social and economic position in Meiji society, but we aren’t privy to what those answers looked like (215).
The level of detail in the book’s narrative is impressive, both when the focus is at the local level in Miyagi and when the author is describing developments elsewhere. Craig is able to follow the exploits of a few of Senboku’s local notables over fairly long periods of time. For one, Kamata Sannosuke, Craig traces the arc of his career from landlord, to would-be founder of a Japanese farming colony in Mexico, to mayor back in Miyagi, and finally as a local hero celebrated for his contributions to his hometown’s present-day prosperity. It is a fascinating story, and along with others like it scattered throughout the book it raises interesting questions about how we know what we know about people like Kamata and his peers. Craig doesn’t tell us much about his sources and the methods he relied on to analyze them; I would have welcomed the opportunity to learn more about both.
Kerry Smith
Brown University, Providence