It is often asked by modern sociologists: what gaps or institutional inequalities exist between groups, what power structures or political realities influence these gaps, and how, if at all, could we mitigate these gaps. Postwar Japan is without question a focal point of such sociological inquiries, with the postwar rural-urban or city-country divide being thoroughly discussed by many scholars. I intend to direct my inquiry toward answering the sociological question first, as to whether there actually was a significant divide between urban and rural areas, and if so then analyze what processes led to the leveling of the playing field. I intend to illuminate who, if anyone, was left behind by these processes. I will also attempt to examine what …show more content…
There are no better canvases for this than Ronald Dore’s work Shinohata, a Portrait of a Japanese Village and Kuniko Fujita and Richard Child Hill’s collected volume Japanese Cities in the World Economy. In Shinohata, we see an excellent portrayal of a Japanese village from the perspective of Ronald Dore a British sociologist who visited the village in 1955 and again in 1970. The village is of course named Shinohata and in 1955, Dore writes of a town of largely self-sufficient farmers just recently weaning itself off a feudal land-lordship system, “I wanted to find a village in central Japan with several landlords of medium-sized holdings, in an area where forestland played a larger part in the village economy [forestland was exempt from the land reform].” By all indications Shinohata was what one might imagine a rural village to be not many luxuries, no real technological integration, and not terribly easy to reach. Enter the Japanese City in the same period a rapidly growing and urbanizing force to be reckoned with, “the driving force for postwar urbanization was the growth of heavy industry, [but after the 1964 Tokyo Olympics] employment in construction, wholesale and retail sales, services, finance, real estate, and public service has increased relative to manufacturing. The population engaged in primary industry dropped drastically, from …show more content…
Dore writes, “the electric trains of today are a far cry from the battered coached and leaky steam locomotives of twenty years ago.” The expansion of technological advancement as well as infrastructure is striking, with Dore again writing, “Japan’s per capita consumption of cement has recent years been the highest in the world,” saying that for all intents and purposes that Japan was investing in infrastructure. In his 1993 foreword, a line that sticks out to truly juxtapose the Shinohata of 1955 and that of 1993, is Dore’s statement, “not much road-mending to do, now that every little path is paved.” Dore once wrote at length on the trouble he had riding his scooter into town on a punishing country-road, and now there is no paving left to be done. What was once a community based on agriculture, is now essentially integrated into the service and industrial Japanese economic machine at large, there is very little gap to be seen between city and country-town. The later-born sons of landowning used to be “‘excluded” from the group of inheritors, now people most often refer to them as being “exempted,” the focus of the community is no longer agricultural. That does not yet answer the question as to how this change came about, and that requires