Ogata-Mura : : Sowing Dissent and Reclaiming Identity in a Japanese Farming Village / / Donald C. Wood.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Berghahn Books Complete eBook-Package 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Wood, Donald C.,
• Place / Publishing House: New York; , Oxford : : Berghahn Books, , [2012]; ©2012
• Year of Publication: 2012
• Language: English
• Series: Asian Anthropologies ; 7
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (262 p.)

Following the Second World War, a massive land reclamation project to boost Japan’s rice production capacity led to the transformation of the shallow lagoon of Hachirogata in Akita Prefecture into a seventeen-thousand-hectare expanse of farmland. In 1964, the village of Ogata-mura was founded on the empoldered land inside the lagoon and nearly six hundred pioneers from across the country were brought to settle there. The village was to be a model of a new breed of highly mechanized, efficient rice agriculture; however, the village’s purpose was jeopardized when the demand for rice fell, and the goal of creating an egalitarian farming community was threatened as individual entrepreneurialism took root and as the settlers became divided into political factions that to this day continue to struggle for control of the village. Based on seventeen years of research, this book explores the process of Ogatamura’s development from the planning stages to the present. An intensive ethnographic study of the relationship between land reclamation, agriculture, and politics in regional Japan, it traces the internal social effects of the village’s economic transformations while addressing the implications of national policy at the municipal and regional levels.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- List of Figures and Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: The Village and the Issues -- 1 Agricultural Policy and Regional Politics in Japan -- 2 Reclamation and the Old Social Order -- 3 The Storm and the Aftermath -- 4 Rice: Alliances, Institutions, Frictions -- 5 Politics and the New Social Order -- 6 What Can We Learn from Ogata-mura? -- Afterword -- Bibliography -- Index