"Landlord-Tenant Relationship in the Sericulture-Type-Area in 1930’s Japan: A case study of Goka village, Hanishina district, Nagano prefecture" (in Japanese)

Yohei Kojima
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Yohei Kojima: Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo

No CIRJE-J-275, CIRJE J-Series from CIRJE, Faculty of Economics, University of Tokyo

Abstract: There has been a great discussion about landlord-tenant relationships in pre-war Japan from the negative and critical viewpoint. Recently, some studies have claimed that the tenants’ bargaining power was stronger than ever thought, and the landlord system had a positive function on the peasant family. But the problem seems to lie in the fact that little study has been done to actually explore the aggregated data of tenancy contracts using empirical and statistical methods. This paper analyzes the landlord-tenant relationship based on the historical document, "Report on the Farm-rent", made by the Goka village office in 1940, and examines the bargaining power of both landlords and tenant farmers. The conclusions are as follows. First, even though the number of landlords with whom a tenant had contracted was important for enhancing the tenants’ bargaining power, previous studies overlooked the dilemma that the more landlord numbers increased, the more farming inefficiencies also increased due to dispersion of farm land. Second, there were explicit income gaps between landlords and tenant farmers. This finding indicates the possibility that the tenant farmers intentionally chose the better-off landlords expecting patron-client relationships or interlinked transactions. Third, the interlinked transactions between landlords and tenant farmers weakened the latter's bargaining power, and rent reduction due to bad harvest was basically implemented based on the landlords’ circumstances. These facts lead to the conclusion that tenants’ bargaining power and positive function of landlord system should not be overestimated.

Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2016-04
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tky:jseres:2015cj275

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