Foreign News: IN RURAL JAPAN

The plum blossoms and toads are out a month early in the warmest Japanese winter for years. Nevertheless, Japan’s farmers, like farmers anywhere, worry about the weather—and everything else. Last week TIME Correspondent Sam Welles listened to their troubles in backroad villages less than 100 miles from Tokyo where no American had been seen since V-J day. He cabled:

At the village of Nakago, a bluff old man with a Dewey mustache said: “The food is not good now—but still people do not die off. Will the peace conference let Japanese migrate abroad? As things stand now, there seems nothing to do but go somewhere.”

“Nakago has 2,900 souls,” added the wiry, greying little mayor, “and one-fifth of them would go.”

Outside the house, under red-blossomed camellia trees, old women were cutting dandelions for spring greens—and coarser weeds for nanny goats carefully tethered by the front porch. Nearby were bamboo groves where old plants are grown for fuel and new shoots are cut like asparagus in April and May.

Flush Toilets & Farms. The inch-by-inch family farming here produces among the highest per-acre yields in the world, or Japan would long since have starved. There have been grave postwar shortages: fertilizers and farm supplies. Nitrates are now so scarce that human manure provides half the nitrogen used on farms. If flush toilets were installed throughout Japan, its agriculture would be wrecked overnight.

Despite shortages, the 1948 food production of the home islands was slightly above the 1931-40 annual average. But the population has grown still faster so there was less food for each mouth. Before 1937 Japan grew 80% of its own food. Sugar from Formosa and soybeans from Manchuria made it almost completely self-sufficient within its empire. With only the home islands, it can provide 70% of its prewar level of 2,160 calories a day. The growing population will make it very hard to push self-sufficiency in food above 85%.

The most striking new fact about Japan’s farms is the just-finished land reform. Spurred by the U.S., pushed past Diet reactionaries by SCAP and often attacked as socialistic, it actually las had an individualist, conservative result.

With Careful Exceptions. Before 1945, half of Japan’s farms were tenant-operated and owner-dominated. Now the tenant figure is only 13%. The land has been split up: with a few careful exceptions, nobody can own more than six acres or rent out more than three. Land reform halted Communism’s appeal to Japanese farmers. As landowners they feel that they are small, separate, independent entrepreneurs. They dislike the mere thought of Russian collectives, which many of them saw as Soviet prisoners of war.

Nakago’s five square miles contain eleven hamlets scattered between the stray, stony ridges of fingerlike hills that protrude above its low-lying rice paddies. Nearly half Nakago’s area can be cultivated and its families own an average of almost three acres. The wealthiest villager had 97 acres before land reform; now he has six.

“We farmers live about as well as before the war,” said Kenjo Otsuka, a short, grinning ex-soldier of 31, “and former tenants live better than they did. But the price of what we sell has not kept up with the price of what we buy.” A koku (about five bushels) of rice, which before the war sold for $8, now sells for $14. The bicycle that every farmer needs has risen from $18 to $67.

“Can a farm family make ends meet?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “if it works in household industries during slack times in the farm season.”

So Close to Russia. “We are afraid of another war,” the mayor cut in. “Japan needed Manchuria, but it was not good to get so close to Russia. Now the Russians seem to be coming closer to us. We want peace always and we Japanese will try to change the hearts of our officials so that all Japan will work for peace.”

Other villagers said the same thing—and seemed to mean it. There was certainly a frankness when I asked if Japan were becoming more democratic.

“Hah!” exploded the old man, while the group laughed. “Many feudalistic elements still remain. If the bureaucrats will stop loving their jobs, democracy will come sooner.”

“What do you mean by ‘democracy,’ ” I asked. The question brought a long pause—as it usually does. Then the mayor said hesitantly, “Democracy is the people venturing to express themselves openly.”

It was a better, if less startling, definition than the one from a man who, asked if he had voted, said that he had but his candidate had lost. “What’s the good of democracy,” he asked, “if the man you vote for doesn’t win?”

The mayor’s answer was much more representative of the earnest, if puzzled, search for democracy that is going on nowadays in rural Japan.