Understanding Japanese Rural History in a Comparative Context: from Surplus Labour to the Labour-Intensive Path of Development

The history of rural development in Japan ought to provide a key example within any comparative analysis of agriculture’s role in economic growth and industrialisation. In the 1960s and 1970s it was indeed treated in this way, by means of the dual-economy, ‘surplus labour’ model. Since then, research on Japan however has largely taken place outside any comparative framework. This paper seeks to remedy this by showing how the Japanese case relates to the concepts and models that have emerged, in economic history and development studies, in recent decades. In particular, it outlines the ways in which, by means of technical change in agriculture together with participation in proto-industrialisation and rural manufacturing, farm households devised strategies of income diversification and ‘pluriactivity’ that were to prove not incompatible with modern economic growth. The implications of this form of rural development for the pattern of economic growth in the long term are considerable and the present paper suggests that it provides the rural basis for the so-called ‘labour-intensive path of industrialisation’ of which Japan is now seen as a pioneer in Asia.