Dividing the Land: Corporate Agricultural Landholding as an Expression of Japanese Conceptions of Parity and Equity

Although historians, both Japanese and non-Japanese, widely conceive of the early modern and modern eras (kinsei, gendai, genzai) as marked by a very close identification between individual farm households and the land they tilled, landholding patterns until recently were often much more complex than this image suggests.'One of the more widespread alternative tenure systems was that which is commonly referred to as warichi, a phrase that can literally be translated as "dividing the land" and which I generally refer to in English as redistribution.Participants in warichi systems from time to time reallocated the fields that a household farmed.No family had a direct connection with any single plot of land included in a redistribution system.While it was widely studied by pre-war Japanese scholars, in the postwar era scholars have neglected study of warichi.2This scholarly neglect is somewhat puzzling because, in several of its manifestations warichi survived well into the twentieth century and in a few instances is practiced even today.3In some versions, land was apportioned by villagers or domain authorities to each family equally4, in others, on the basis of the number of active adult males or women and children of a certain ages, and in still other instances, on a pro rata basis which consistently maintained the landed wealth, expressed as a constant proportion of the village's land use rights, of each participating household.6In this latter instance, the proportion of a village's land use rights held by a given family was the same before and after a given redistribution.Because this was the case, land use rights were often not expressed in terms of putative yield (kokudaka), but rather in such terms as ken, kenmae, myo, etc., which had no direct connection with either land area or value, and which might be translated appropriately as "share".Even where warichi was not employed on paddy and dry field, similar mechanisms have 11-74